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I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this somewhere already – I may have expressed it to a therapist – but when I was a lad, I had a recurring nightmare about a place called Snake World. It was a fizzing neon labyrinth that was both home to various evil snakes and sort of made of snakes in probably-Freudian ways.
Fortunately, I had a lucid dreaming strategy for escaping from Snake World: relax all my limbs as much as I could, then flail around violently to wake myself up. It doesn’t look like this will be an effective gambit in Digested, a bodycam horror game about being stuck on a barren, thinly forested and possibly irradiated island with a giant snake. Your tactical options seem to consist mostly here of running away.
Of all the things I dread being eaten by, snakes are actually pretty low down the list. The top contenders are probably spiders, like the one in Hunt: Showdown, closely followed by any and all microbes that devour their hosts from the inside, and in third place, Big Bird off Sesame Street. But getting eaten by a snake is definitely a thing to avoid, and the snake in Digested is really rather awful. It’s massive, for starters – a moderately Godzillified anaconda – but also, fast. We get a glimpse of how it behaves in the announcement trailer and screens: coiled around unpleasantly serpentine trees, waiting for you to stroll beneath, or winding through brackish coastal waters that conceal its bulk.
It’s hard to tell from the announcement materials, but the title and Steam blurb suggest that if the snake does catch you, your demise will be… prolonged. “Jump scares end quickly, but a slower, more agonizing fate awaits in getting digested,” the developer comments. Lovely stuff. I wonder how it compares to being pooped out by a space rhino in Natural Selection 2.
Functionally, Digested sounds a bit like Slender: The Eight Pages. To beat the game you have to gather randomly distributed navigation points from around an island map so as to track down an escape pod. You start with just a map and a compass, but there are “power-ups” that will help you “outsmart” your serpentine adversary. I’m guessing here, but developer Karel are surely missing a trick if the snake doesn’t become more aggressive and threatening, the closer you are to finding the pod.
And then there’s the bodycam perspective, which is unhelpful in that it imposes a wobbly fisheye effect that makes it harder to identify objects in the undergrowth, but has tactical utility in that you can flip the camera and use it as a rearview mirror. In the trailer, it looks like the player is trying to do a TikTok with the snake, which I thought was funny till I realised that many serial TikTok users would probably do exactly this, if they were stuck on an island with a massive predator. Social media will be the death of us all.
Digested is slated for release/excretion in 2024. If you find the idea horrendous, the obvious antidote is Konami’s forthcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater reboot, which Sony have claimed is also out this year.