Neon Planet: Snake

Crawl across the surface of a spherical planet, swallow prey to grow longer, and trap other snakes to eat them.

■ Why a sphere

A square map has walls, so it always comes down to cornering. A planet has no edge, and what lies past the horizon is physically out of sight. Not knowing who is growing on the other side is the tension itself — which is why the radar is a necessity here, not decoration.

■ How you clear a stage

Survive 10 minutes, and be in 1st place at that moment. Both, not either. Survival alone would make hiding optimal; rank alone would hand you a clear for a 1st place you merely passed through.

■ Five rules, that's all

· You die only when your head touches another body or an obstacle. Bodies pass through each other.
· Head to head, the bigger one lives. Within a 6% size difference, both die.
· Running side by side, if only one of you turns into the other, the one who turned dies.
· Mass goes into length, not thickness. Your body is a wall, so length is the weapon.
· Pellets are a side dish. To grow big you have to win fights and eat other snakes.

■ Dying doesn't end the run

You come back five seconds later at rookie size. What you lose is not time but the body you had grown, and the clock keeps running the whole while. You can also watch an ad to revive at your current size — once per run, and only if you choose to.

■ AI that hunts

They don't just pick up pellets. They cut in front of anyone no bigger than themselves, dash when closing in, and flee when something bigger comes. Twenty snakes are always on the field, and a rookie fills any gap. There is no cap on total spawns, so the planet stays crowded to the end.

■ 40 planets

Difficulty splits across five axes: aggression, hunting range, respawn pace, food, and obstacles. Every planet has its own color and name, and terrain is fixed per stage — go back and you meet the same board.

■ Controls

A floating virtual stick is the default. Wherever you touch becomes the center, so your hand never covers the action. You can switch to touch aiming in settings. Double tap to dash, and keep tapping to keep dashing — dashing burns length and drops food from your tail.

■ A run is 10 minutes, but you don't have to clear 10 minutes of your day

Park a run and come back to it. Save and exit from the pause screen, or just send the app to the background — a phone call, the home button — and the whole run is stored. Resuming starts with a three second countdown.

■ Make the snake yours

A name, 16 colors (8 bright, 8 deep), and 10 patterns. Colors and patterns are yours alone, so even when your body covers the screen you can tell which line is you.

■ Every sound was synthesized from scratch

Not one external audio file. Seven music tracks and ten sound effects are generated in code. The six in-game tracks differ in melody, rhythm, and how they open — not just key and tempo. Which one plays is decided by the stage.

■ Also

· Korean and English
· No sign-up. Play offline, immediately.
· No in-app purchases. Neon Cores are in-game currency only.
· Progress is stored on your device.
· Your best length is recorded per stage.
· The back button goes up one level — it never kills the app from a settings screen.

Free to play, supported by ads.