SnekromancY is a clever reinvention of Snake with a survivor-like tower escape style

SnekromancY mixes three rather different genres together into something I haven't seen before with Snake, Vampire Survivors and Tower Escape. Disclosure: a key was provided to our Steam Curator.

Much like the classic game Snake - you control a Snek, which is always on the move. All you need to do is point it in a direction and off you go. The spin here is that you build up your snake with little minions riding on it that auto-fire (or manually fire, your choice) and you get to place more as your Snek grows and levels up from picking up experience gems left by killed human enemies.

When you level up you can boost your existing minions, and sometimes pick a new minion to board the Snek to make you more powerful.

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Your health slowly drains while you move, so the key here is to move quickly through each level. The point is to actually escape, so you have to slither across each map to find the key, eat it and then make it to the exit before you die or get completely overwhelmed by enemies. There's some food spread across each level to eat to gain health, and if your health drops to zero you will lose a part of the Snek.

You have to watch out for those walls too, since a bump can severely drop your health. Don't eat yourself either, that hurts. There's also some traps spread across the levels too like spikes, which will of course hurt your Snek. Avoiding them is not always possible though, especially when you get a surge of enemies flowing in.

When you finish a level you can reorganise your Snek like a train, combine some of the same minions for a power buff, grab some unlocks from your progress during a level and then pick your next location from a map of different nodes that each bring a different encounter. Some nodes are just plain combat encounters where you try to exit to the next node, some give different types of shops, there's treasure rooms with no enemies so you can stock up (but you still have the HP drain while moving), then there's nodes that give you mini-bosses and full boss fights.

At some point I found a room with a weird orb, that sent me into a multi-snake mini-game where you breathe fire and have to grow the longest. Completely random and silly, but a nice little addition - the enemy Snek AI is rubbish though and that was just too easy.

Nice to see more Godot Engine games arrive too, and zero problems with the Linux version played on Fedora KDE 44 with my Steam Controller. It runs beautifully.

Overall it is a very clever blending of genres and fun for a good while, but I did feel like it was just missing a little something to make it more exciting to play through for extended periods. I think the boss battles is where it falls a bit flat because you're just moving and waiting for them to die. Nice to jump in for a run here and there and great to see another new take on survivor-like bullet heavens.