BACKBITE

The Snake you know is a single-player high-score game. This is a duel.

Two snakes on one board, five powers to ruin each other's run, and one rule that changes everything: the one who ate more wins, not the one who survived.

When Snake grew into a multiplayer game, it grew massive: hundreds of snakes on one map, not a duel between two. And of the Snake games on Steam, none has an online mode. Most "Snake for two" games are also two runs side by side: each player on their own board, unable to touch the other. Here there is one board, and the snakes get in each other's way, cut each other off, and collide. That gap is where BACKBITE sits.

Dying isn't always losing

When a snake crashes, the match doesn't end there. If you were ahead on points — or if you were tied — your rival gets 15 seconds to beat your score racing the clock alone. If they fail, you win, even though you died first. No stars and no powers during the chase: the apple, the clock and nothing else.

Five powers

• SWAP — swaps both snakes' positions. At the worst possible moment.
  
• PORTAL — two teleporters on the board for 15 seconds.
  
• SPEED — double speed for 5 seconds.
  
• SLOW — freezes your rival to half speed for 5 seconds.
  
• STEAL — takes a point and a segment from them, and that point becomes yours. A two-point swing, instantly.

Powers come from stars that appear on the board, and which one you get is drawn by a roulette when you pick it up. There's only ever one star at a time: whoever reaches it first takes it.

The golden apple

Every so often a golden apple appears: it's worth 3 points but only grows you by one segment. It lasts a few seconds — a ring shows how much time is left — and then turns back into a normal apple. It's the one that turns a scoreboard around in a single bite, and the one that sends both snakes to the same place at the same time.

Four ways to play

• 2 Players local — two people, one keyboard.
  
• Online — a direct match between both machines with a 5-character room code.
  
• VS Bot — four difficulties. The fourth one is called IMPOSSIBLE and it means it.
  
• 1 Player — you against your own record.

18 snakes to unlock

Each skin opens by doing something concrete: reaching a certain score against a certain difficulty, winning online matches, beating the Impossible bot more than once. Locked ones show as silhouettes from day one, so you always know what's left.

No coins, no crates, no microtransactions. They unlock by playing.

Also

• Gamepad support (Xbox, PlayStation, generic USB): movement, powers, pause and menu navigation. The online room code is typed on the keyboard.
  
• Rebindable controls for both players.
  
• Interface in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
  
• Records kept separately by mode and by difficulty.