Yet another devilishly complex puzzle game with a simple premise and simple set of controls. Can of Wormholes is kind of a snake + Sokoban hybrid, a Snekoban if you will, where the goal is to get your snake into the hole. Your only controls are to move the head of the snake in one of the 4 directions on the grid, if you move backwards relative to your head, then your tail moves in the direction it’s facing while your head goes back a step.
You play as a can. A can who can navigate through different hub worlds. A can who can throw holes at worms. Thats how you enter a puzzle. You throw a hole at a puzzle entrance, and then it rolls onto the table and takes control of a worm. Then you get to squish that worm in the juicer that makes up the goal of the puzzle in order to collect the juice into a shape. Those shapes are gonna be super important, but I think it’d be best to let you figure out why on your own.
The game slowly introduces mechanics as you go, with each hub world loosely basing itself on a new mechanic and exploring the posibilities with the new mechanic. The simplest one, and the one you encounter first, is pushing other worms around. Some levels have two or more goals, some levels have goals a different size to your player worm, so you’ll have to use other worms on the table to fill in these goals, or find a way to make your worm match the size of the goal.
Thats about as much as I’m going to say regarding the mechanics, since it’s a puzzle game and discovering solutions is the whole point.
Can of Wormholes does include a hint system, but rather than a traditional hint system that points you in a direction or tells you part of the solution, the hint system here is labeled “Gain Insight” and takes you to a simplified version of the level with much fewer options to bog you down, with the intention being that this smaller level uses the same “trick” that the main level is built around. It’s still up to the player to determine exactly what the insight is, and how to apply it to the main level, but it’s useful nontheless.
Content warning for those needing it, this game includes a lot of worms, and while most of the time, it’ll just be more like snakes on a Sokoban grid, there are some cases where there are a lot of worms slithering around on screen. My advice is to minimise using the “Throw Can” button, as when the can has its legs proper, the rest of the worms tend to hide, it’s only when the can requires legs that a lot of worms appear.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295320 £16.75
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