The classic mobile game receives a roguelike makeover.
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PC gaming excels at recreating nostalgic experiences, from the fast-paced action of a classic boomer shooter to the retro graphics of a PS1 survival horror homage. However, one sensation that proves challenging to replicate is the thrill of discovering a brand new arcade cabinet for the very first time.
Picture yourself as a child in the 1980s, nervously inserting your very first coin into a game like Donkey Kong, Asteroids, or Missile Command. Your fingers hover above the controls, filled with anticipation and uncertainty, as you have no prior experience to guide you through this unfamiliar machine. Today, gaming is meticulously categorized and defined by established genres and mechanics, making it hard to fathom how exhilarating and bewildering that initial encounter with arcade gaming must have felt.
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At least, that's how I felt until I encountered Wormhole, a virtual arcade simulacrum which has quickly become one of my favourite games of 2024. Developed by Canadian outfit Pocket Moon Games, Wormhole effectively captures that sense of frantic on-the-spot learning of first arcade encounters. More remarkably still, it achieves this while using one of the most familiar games in existence as its basis—Snake.
The core mechanics of Wormhole can be summarized as a modern twist on the classic Snake game. You guide a segmented line of pixels that moves automatically across the screen, gobbling up dots that increase your length as you consume them. The game concludes if your worm collides with its own tail. Wormhole adds a more elaborate theme to this concept—you're now a massive space worm, and the dots you eat represent planets—but the gameplay will feel familiar to anyone who played Snake on a Nokia phone back in the early 2000s.
It's familiar territory, but Wormhole introduces several new elements. The key addition is an energy bar that decreases as your worm travels; if it runs out completely, it's game over. You can replenish this bar by consuming planets, but they spawn and vanish unpredictably, so you might miss one and find yourself out of energy before you can reach another. Luckily, for your insatiable world-consuming worm, the cosmos is scattered with useful wormholes that provide quick shortcuts.
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This space warping element is one of the key ways in how Wormhole resets your comprehension of Snake, as you have to wrap your mind around Portal-style movement in an arcade environment. Moreover, these wormholes also tend to shift around the level, while many levels have more than two wormholes in them, and you have to figure out which of them connect.
On top of this, Wormhole also throws random curveballs into levels with no warning or explanation. An Asteroids-style UFO that hovers around and runs away from you when you get near, what's that about? A giant floating skull—what's his deal? A big line of stars that cause the word "SUPERNOVA" to appear on screen if you collect them all. It sure looks rad, but what does it do?
Just to clarify, Wormhole isn't a complex or enigmatic work of art. You won't spend much time deciphering the different impacts each element has on gameplay. However, the manner in which these elements are presented, along with the rapid pace of Wormhole (with levels usually lasting under thirty seconds), creates that exhilarating sensory overload typical of a fantastic arcade game. It’s akin to mistakenly driving on the wrong side of the highway during your first driving lesson—there's chaos all around as you’re still trying to master the basics of gear shifting.
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Importantly, the innovation of Wormhole extends beyond the initial learning curve. Although it's not overly challenging, the game features a significant skill ceiling, largely due to the unique abilities of your worm. The basic ability allows for a dash that sends your worm racing forward much quicker than usual. This can be enhanced, enabling you to crash through planets directly without the need to consume them first. With this skill, you can send your worm careening around the level at exhilarating speeds, gripping your keyboard as if teetering on the brink of chaos, reminiscent of Paul Atreides riding one of the massive sandworms on Arrakis.
Wormhole conveys that feeling of being one wrong move away from losing another coin from your wallet. Further complementing this is the fact that Wormhole's retro credentials are impeccable. The crunchy, 1-bit pixel graphics. The artificially curved central display designed to resemble a CRT screen. The flattened chiptune soundtrack. The way the game's digitised announcer says "Wormhole" with all the vowels removed. One element that arguably runs counter to this is the swirling spiral backdrop, which probably would have melted any real '80s arcade cabinet with all its moving curves. However, the hypnotic whirling of the spiral lends Wormhole a forbidden feeling, like it's a cabinet somewhere in the dark recesses of the arcade, partially covered by a dust sheet, seemingly unnoticed by anyone except you.
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Wormhole does incorporate some modern elements into its gameplay. The arcade-style points you earn are not completely random; instead, they contribute to unlocking unique abilities for your worm, like Yeehaw, which enables you to launch projectiles at planets from afar. Advancing in levels also reveals a variety of visual themes for the game, including an Apple II green, a vibrant bubblegum pink, and that nostalgic fuzzy tan reminiscent of televisions in Fallout. However, don’t anticipate the same depth in the upgrade system as you would find in titles like Hades or Balatro. In fact, one of my main criticisms of Wormhole is the limited scope of worm abilities, with only three available. I believe there’s significant untapped potential for players to experiment and create a more diverse gameplay experience.
Nonetheless, with 100 levels to chomp through, which gradually add new wrinkles like bumpers you need to avoid, or a barrier that splits the level in two, Wormhole will keep you occupied for a good few hours. It's a smart, accomplished game that, like Balatro or Derek Yu's NES-inspired mixtape UFO 50, takes a familiar archetype and reinvents it to feel new and surprising.
