Worm Game (Stadia)

On January 18th, 2023, Google Stadia will be shut down for good, and I cannot say that I will miss it much. Cloud streaming is a fine idea for gaming, making video games more accessible usually is a good thing, but the Stadia service required you to purchase games even though you would acquire no local copy for yourself and your ownership would be revoked the moment the service was no longer able to stream the game. As we see with Stadia’s death, this lack of faith in long term availability was well founded, but Google did take a rather unexpected step in refunding all purchases to make up for the service’s death a little over three years after its release. As a bit of a parting gift, they also released a final game for free, but unfortunately it’s a present we can only appreciate for a short time. Worm Game won’t even be playable for a week before it becomes entirely inaccessible since it is still tied to Stadia’s cloud streaming format, but I did get to see it before its quick disappearance and find out what it had to offer.

Worm Game utilizes the fairly familiar Snake game format for its gameplay, the player controlling in this case a worm who will grow in length any time they eat a fruit and their survival gradually grows more difficult as their automatic movement around the play area puts them at risk of a lethal crash with their own body. The concept is a solid fit for the reason Worm Game came to be, this initially a development tool of sorts for testing things like game latency across the cloud streaming service. When you need to take turns rapidly to avoid collisions, the exact moment you press a button to change direction is key to creating a smooth experience, and thankfully it is rather clean to control and easy to pick up and play. There is one interesting change from the typical Snake format that makes Worm Game a bit more unique, that being that your worm isn’t necessarily doomed the moment it collides with something. Your worm actually has a few hearts representing its health, and depending on what you collide with, you might be able to survive. One of the more interesting objects you can survive a crash into is your own body, your head instead bisecting your long form. Your tail pieces will detonate, but you’ll still be able to continue albeit much shorter than before. It’s not exactly a strategic move since many levels are about reaching a certain size threshold and health is often in short supply, but it can prove useful in things like the multiplayer component since you can potentially withstand a crash with your opponents as you compete to survive.

Worm Game offers a very short campaign consisting of six unique levels. The first level, Open Spaces, is a fairly traditional Snake game space. A flat open rectangle with nothing to worry about but the level’s edges in terms of collisions, this level focuses mostly on introducing the game and having your own growing length be the main barrier to success. Some barriers like a level’s border are often instant kills despite the health system, but this early stage shouldn’t be much of a challenge and introduces you to a few things like how eating a certain amount of fruit will spawn coins that go towards a point system, levels having individual scoreboards as well as infinite modes in Arcade where you can try to get the highest score without the level ending. Once you meet a level’s goal, be it reaching a certain length or earning a certain amount of points, a golden fruit will appear and eating it will wrap up the stage, although even within six stages this process is varied up a bit. Walled Garden and Labyrinth both feature wooden blocks you can break through at the cost of a heart, but in Walled Garden it is necessary to reach the fruit while Labyrinth’s maze-like structure can be broken through in a few parts to speed up play.

Laser Box, The Heist, and Gluttony are where the game’s levels start to get a bit more complex. Laser Box introduces lasers appropriately enough, these color-coded death rays used as barriers you’ll need to take down to reach whatever they’re guarding. However, the buttons you need to press to lower a barrier must remain pressed or the lasers reactivate. Since the worm’s body is constantly moving along with it this means eventually you won’t have enough of you to keep that button pressed, so the stage asks you work on becoming long enough you can both press down the buttons and get past the lasers to get the goodies you need to win. The Heist uses a similar idea but is more difficult and requires better movement with less room for error, but Gluttony is unfortunately a bit of a weak capstone for the experience. Focused more on becoming incredibly long than figuring much out, once you realize the level’s gimmick so you can grab the golden fruit behind lasers you’ll realize it will just be a long process of grabbing a ton of fruit and going back and forth to coil up your prodigious body so that you don’t end up accidentally denying yourself space. It’s a fine level to exist as a sort of ultimate challenge but it is also one of six available stages, the game’s content breadth rather limited since the early stages are pretty straightforward and later ones can’t explore the new ideas all that much.

It does still have some of the fundamental appeal of a Snake game though, the challenge of trying to manage your expanding mass while grabbing new fruit the kind of task that grows more challenging the longer it lasts, and there are different difficulty settings so you can make it harder to survive by speeding up your worm or slow things down if you need some help in levels like Gluttony where death is a badly timed turn away. There is a custom level maker where you can construct your own play field but only you are able to play on it unfortunately, and while you can place down things like starting fruit, after you grab them the game randomly picks where new ones appear just like in regular play. There are a few other aspects of basic play like bananas making your worm grow much longer than grabbing a fruit like an apple or orange, but Worm Game is a very simple and small game overall with even things like different colors and designs for your worms available at the start so the only unlockables are the campaign levels.

One nice touch though is all six of the campaign levels are available in the game’s online multiplayer component. Up to four players can compete to try and either be the last worm alive or the worm with the highest score. Some levels like Labyrinth with its simple winding halls certainly aren’t built for this purpose very well but there is at least some variety and trying to grab high value coins or snag clusters of fruit before the other players is an interesting enough twist to the basic play. This would have been a good place for the custom stages to appear as well but it would have required probably a good deal more work than this game initially demanded, its purpose first to be a way of testing the Stadia service and its release as a free public product a parting gift rather than something aiming to impress.

THE VERDICT: Worm Game has a few fine ideas for shaking up the familiar Snake game design, the introduction of health allowing for some stages where you need to take a risk and smash through a crate while also giving you some leniency that works well in the competitive multiplayer so it doesn’t always end with a quick collision. The laser gates are perhaps the better idea in that they necessitate a bit more thought than merely managing the constantly expanding mass of your worm, but the game’s six levels don’t get too long to explore the ideas and thus Worm Game feels more like it tinkers a bit with the eat-and-expand idea rather than helping it grow into something more complex or captivating.

And so, I give Worm Game for Stadia…

An OKAY rating. Entertaining in simple ways thanks to the core idea being that your own success gradually raises the difficulty as there’s more of your body to worry about accidentally ramming into, Worm Game is both not just a standard Snake clone but also didn’t really have the room to evolve into something with a big breakaway idea that would truly define it. The health system crops up at times but the game uses a lot of instant kill barriers too so it’s less a defining feature and more just something relevant to the premise of stages like Walled Garden. The laser grids are more interesting because they throw in a small puzzle element, although only The Heist and Gluttony really get much use out of them because by the time lasers are introduced in level 4 the campaign is almost over. There is something to be said for keeping the game mostly simple since moments like managing your enormous body in Gluttony lose their luster as you need to wind around yourself so much to just keep going, but you’re not going to get an all too unique experience from Worm Game because it not only doesn’t commit to any brand new ideas too strongly, but it wasn’t meant to.

Worm Game helped Stadia come to be and it is a mostly a cute and harmless adaptation of a game formula fit for testing the basics of cloud streaming. It could have been far more basic since it was just a test program essentially, but the worms are cute and come in many forms, there are a few different levels, and the stage builder at least exists even if the fruits of your labors don’t have anyone else to enjoy it after their done. Worm Game is sort of like those levels though, almost a game only the creators of Stadia could play, and soon, it won’t even be a game anyone can play, this unfortunate footnote a necessary notice since Worm Game’s arrival only came about because its associated service is at death’s door. Stadia’s failure will be picked apart for years going forward and many of its flaws are pretty obvious from assuming everyone has capable high speed internet to use it with to demanding the same price for games that could be bought to truly keep elsewhere, but Worm Game’s only major issue is that it will go down with the Stadia ship. It could have been more, but it didn’t settle for just being a functional and simple eat-and-expand game, and maybe with the talent that was locked up in Stadia now free of that project, those creators who wanted to add a few little ideas and color to what could have just been a development tool may eventually share more with us in a way that won’t end up lost to time.