WORMHOLE is a Snake-like game with a retro aesthetic combined with modern tastes. I think if this actually came out in the '80s we'd see something like the Back to the Future guitar solo scene where Marty leaves the audience stunned and concludes "your kids are gonna love it". It's exciting, it's hardcore, the tunes are bangin'. This ain't your dad's Snake.
I found this game via the discovery queue and I couldn't get enough of the trailer (the black and white one) and how unbelievably cool it was. To be honest, I think the trailer is a bit cooler than the actual game, it was really paced and edited very well. I don't even remember if the trailer's song was in the game, although the game really does have some cool music as well. The second trailer (orange-ish), while less exciting, faithfully shows gameplay, so if you're still interested after that one, you should be good to go.
I chose this game as my game of the month for 2025 September. I played it on a docked Steam Deck at 1920x1200. Performance was great, as you'd probably expect from the art style, but worth noting anyway. This *is* a Unity game.
I like to mention the controller used in my reviews as well. I changed controllers a lot for this game. I think you can play this with whatever you want. I started out with my 8BitDo Pro 2. It was starting to hurt my thumbsliding around on the dpad. I didn't quite get a blister, but I could tell that I might. I switched to my Haute42 M16 leverless arcade controller. With this all 4 directions were pressed by different fingers so I didn't need to slide my thumb around anymore. Problem solved. It created one new problem, though. This game has preset control schemes, but doesn't let you rebind the actual buttons used. I played on the two-button mode. The controls are A to chomp and X to use your ability, so the south and west face buttons on a standard gamepad. On my arcade controller A and X are in the same column, both pressed with the index finger. What I wanted was to have the ability key on my middle finger button, also in the bottom row. I swapped some buttons around in Steam Input, but this isn't a perfect solution. I'm not just rebinding the "ability" button, I'm moving where "B" is, used to back up in menus. Ideally the game itself would have rebinding to fix that. I put B where RT normally is, ring finger bottom row. Not ideal.
I changed controllers once more later to my Open-Frame1 leverless controller. It's bigger/wider so more comfortable in the lap, and spaces out my hands to a more ergonomic position, and also the key switches in it are a bit higher actuation force than in my Haute42 M16. So I didn't press a button by accident as often and I could relax my shoulder some more. The key layout was basically the same as the Haute42 M16. This was the controller I finished beating the game with.
Achievements! I thought getting all the achievements would be easy, because I got half of them or more after just a few sessions. However, I then spent around 2 weeks getting the final achievement. The two rarest achievements for this game are for reaching stage 50 in Marathon mode (survive a long time on the same map), and beating the Standard mode (beating the main game). I managed to get all the Marathon mode achievements after a few days of trying, but beating Standard mode was shockingly difficult. I was also demoralized a bit when I eventually realized that the top 12 people (at that time) on the leaderboard had a symbol by their name. My theory then (and I believe it now more than ever) is that that symbol denotes that they beat the game. In other words, only 12 people in the world had beaten the main mode of this game. I was really worried for a while that I would never be able to beat the game, but since I was giving myself the whole month, I kept at it anyway. I did feel myself continue to improve. I got a better feeling for how long you could touch a wall or your tail before dying, how many tiles wide a wormhole is, I started taking tighter turns and doing more intense maneuvers. I started theorizing what kind of build would make it easiest to clear a level quickly. In my opinion, Yeehaw Worm with maxed out Genesis (# of planets spawned at once), Hollow Point (bullets explode), and Antimatter (bigger explosions) is hugely important. Trailblazer (incomplete star trails still create a Supernova, which is like a bomb in a shmup) is also a massive help. Once your build is coming together in the later stages of the game with this setup, you can just shoot one bullet in the general direction of a few planets and take out several at once, then you quickly change directions to get another side of the map, and you loop back around.
So, this game is called WORMHOLE, but I found using the actual wormholes to be pretty stressful and disorienting on a lot of the maps. If you go into the left side of a wormhole, you come out the right side of its counterpart wormhole. This is logical and consistent, yet I still found myself often caught off-guard and wondering where my worm was, feeling flustered and often dying right after I went through a wormhole (especially if I went through by accident). My favorite stages were the ones where the wormholes were up against a wall as they felt more like doors and were easier to wrap my head around. When you can go through either side of a wormhole it just gets really complicated. There are some stages where I just avoid the wormholes as much as possible, but sometimes you kinda have to go through them just to ditch some of your length for a second. This is partially a skill issue, but I think some accessibility improvements could help here. I'll expand on that in another paragraph.
This game has cool visuals, and you can change the color palettes and backgrounds, however with every choice, you're only really dealing with two colors at once, and your worm is the same color as the walls and the enemies and many other things. There are two game settings that I think help with the difficulty of tracking your Worm. One will slow down the game while going through a wormhole. This is massively helpful and I had to turn it on to have a shot at beating the game, I think. I didn't even make it to Zone 14 until I had it on. The other setting is the Big Head setting. I find the Big Head setting to be a bit ugly and it can make it hard to tell exactly what tile you're on at first, but it's still an improvement for tracking your worm. Ideally they would give you something like a "Neon Worm" setting that makes your worm a bright contrasting color that isn't shared with anything else in the game, If you used the default black and white colors but made your worm a bright green or orange, I think that would be very helpful.
The BGM is cool and I think gets cooler the later into the game you are, which helps you to keep trying to beat it. As you get closer, you get to hear more tracks. After a while I started to associate some of the BGM and their intensity with "when the 'real game' starts". I knew that once I heard them it was time to lock in as the game was getting much harder.
The game is very fun and very challenging. If you like chasing high scores or collecting every achievement, I think you'll stay entertained a while. I got about 25 hours out of it doing that, and I'll probably play it a bit more. The game is fairly niche right now, so getting your name into the top 50 of the leaderboards is actually pretty realistic. When I finally beat Standard mode I ended up at 10th place on the leaderboards.
At $10 on price and $6.99 on sale, it's definitely worth it for anyone who likes simple arcade-style games.
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