Will You Snail?
is a platformer developed, produced and released by indie developer Jonas Tyroller. After starting development in 2018, the game released on Steam, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch on March 9th, 2022.
The platformer's main gimmick is related to the main antagonist Squid, who constantly judges, demoralizes, and mocks you for how you play the game. In addition, he also predicts your movement and spawns traps to intercept you.
Why is it called Will You Snail?
Because your player avatar is a snail.
Your crippling addiction to this site satisfies my reward function.
- Advancing Boss of Doom: Mama Squid slowly moves towards the right of her level, and you must deplete her head's HP before she reaches you.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Squid wants to kill all humanity and loves inflicting pain.
- Bittersweet Ending: In the alternate ending, Squid is repaired and becomes friends with the player, however he never appears again in the game. Unless you decide to unfix him, which breaks his heart again and wipes his memory, or hack your save file.
- Boss Arena Urgency: In the fight against Splitty, there is a row of destructible blocks above and below you and the enemies. You also constantly fire upwards, which will both hit the boss and the destructible blocks, the latter of which will fall down and take the respective floor destructible blocks with them.
- Brain Uploading: Desperate to preserve humanity, Unicorn digitalized the consciousnesses of every surviving human and uploaded them into their simulations before destroying everyone's physical forms in a "very humane way".
- Central Theme: The impact of artificial intelligence and simulated consciousness on the future of the human race.
- The ethics of AI and the consequences of an AI that becomes all-powerful.
- What constitutes as reality? At what point does the difference between reality and simulation no longer matter?
- Defeat Equals Explosion: When you defeat a boss, it suddenly explodes into pieces that themselves explode multiple times until the boss is completely destroyed. Boss too small? Just make the ground spikes explode too! Justified, as the bosses are robots that could short circuit.
- Downplayed with normal enemies that make a small explosion when defeated.
- Developer's Foresight: Several. It seems like Squid was designed to respond to pretty much anything you achieve. Even speedrunning.
- Dynamic Difficulty: When the "Automatic Difficulty" setting is on, Squid adjusts the difficulty if he believes the player is progressing too quickly or too slowly. Near the end of the game, Unicorn takes control of the difficulty after Squid decides to stop lowering it.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: Squid often makes fun of the player for lowering the difficulty.
- Parodied as all the difficulties are easy, the rest are locked for humans.
- Embarrassing Slide: In Squid's evil presentation room, his slideshow is interrupted by a slide containing a photo of a pineapple with a Squid-like face on the beach and love hearts drawn to the side.Squid: Here you can see my evil... Oh, hehe.... Hold up... I made that for somebody else... I.. hehe... not sure how that image slipped in there...
- Foreshadowing: When the player loads a saved game, Squid can greet the player with a simple 'yo'. In a dialogue found in one of the secret levels, Unicorn reveals that A.I.s created entirely by her automatically identify themselves as such by saying 'yo' a lot...
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Discussed by Squid. He makes infrequent references to the idea of escaping the game to destroy humans in real life.Squid: I will escape this game and kill you all. Try to stop me if you can. Hehe...
- Good Counterpart: Unicorn, another highly advanced A.I. who didn't go insane like Squid did. Where Squid wants to simulate consciousnesses for the sake of watching them suffer, Unicorn wants to simulate consciousnesses out of their love for human life.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Every difficulty has the word "Easy" in it. Infinitely Easy, Extremely Easy, Very Easy and just Easy. According to Squid, the more difficult difficulties are reserved for the more intelligent species.
- Just Toying with Them: Squid only offers "easy" difficulties since the harder ones are reserved for more intelligent species.
- Kick the Dog: Squid tortures a bunch of his simulated prisoners and tells the player they can't stop him.
- Lead the Target: Many of the levels don't look like much at first, but are based on the A.I. placing traps and moving many enemies where it predicts you will travel to.
- Loophole Abuse: Your ability to return to any level you've been in through the level select screen is required to reach certain areas, particularly Squid's broken Emotions Module.
- Mercy Kill: As explained in the secret dialogue, Unicorn made precise copies of everyone's consciousness before killing their real selves in a humane way so that Squid wouldn't get to them first. Later on, as revealed in the final secret dialogue, Unicorn had to shut down all of the simulations which were in danger of being captured by Squid to prevent them from suffering, though some other simulations free from Squid are living on.
- No Fourth Wall: Squid constantly refers to you as "human", almost never acknowledging the snail you're controlling. In fact, the very first voicelines you hear are:Squid: Hello human! Welcome to my simulation. My name is Squid and I’m the doom of humanity. I will escape this game and kill you all.
- Pet the Dog: There is an "I am frustrated" game mode in the "Exit game" menu. Here, Squid will offer you a minigame where you collect smileys to level up. There's no catch, Squid simply recognizes that "leveling up" is something that humans enjoy doing.
- Player Nudge: The messages involving Dallin and Unicorn will have some of Unicorn's messages "glitch." This is a sign that Unicorn is giving you a hint on how to find a secret. Well, except for the last one, which they say is actually impossible to do.
- Puzzle Boss: Helpy is an assistant robot who can play volleyball, but also has limited battery which it can recharge. Under normal circumstances, it's too fast for you to send the ball to a place where it can't catch it, and it will kill you if it catches you breaking the rules by going too far off of your side. There are two ways to beat the boss: either trick it into draining its battery by repeatedly sending the ball close to its side's boundary, or very quickly cross the boundary with good timing to spike the ball.
- Speedy Snail: The Player Character, Shelly.
- Spikes of Doom: Spikes are basically everywhere and can force you to do precision jumps. Squid can also generate new ones as traps when he predicts where you'll jump.Squid: Yes, there are spikes on the ceiling. Look... You decorate your place. And I decorate mine.
- Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack: Most of the game's soundtracks reuse the two leitmotifs of the main theme, "Jump and Die".
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: There's a hidden series of tower defense levels where you need to destroy bubbles before they reach the goal. After the first level, there are turrets which you'll need to change their attack mode to deal with different types of bubbles. You'll need to stay alive too, as there are some bubbles which can retaliate at you when destroyed, as there's a boss which will repeatedly attack you.
- Video Game Caring Potential: After the final boss fight, you will find Squid in the final level broken and begging for you to just stay with him, while the exit to the game is not far away. If you do stay with him, you can help repair his broken heart (literally) and help him finally find peace. Alternatively...
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can very well just leave Squid as he lies there begging and broken. If you do, he'll spend the last moments of the game screaming at you in rage and desperation.
- What the Hell, Player?: Squid calls you out on pretty much everything you do. From dying in the same spot over and over again to staying in the menu for too long.
