A Puzzle Snack That’s Roughly Twice as Good as you Expect
I need to apologise to Snack and Quack. I wasn’t aware of its game. I assumed it would be yet another sokoban, crate-pushing game, shovelled without care onto the Xbox Store (does Sokoslop work as a word?), but Snack and Quack is more than that. It’s a sokoban AND sliding puzzle game, with a handful of different ideas sprinkled on top, and that’s far more than I expected.
Afil Games are usually a bit devil-may-care about their visual themes, but Snack and Quack is an absolute cracker (quacker). You are a mother-duck, pushing her newly fledged ducklings around a pond so that they can find food. The food in question is bread (a word from my ecologist wife: please do NOT feed ducks bread), and the ducklings adorably push their heads through the bread when they land on them, making a kind of doughy mask. I’m not saying that Snack and Quack is worth buying for these moments alone, but it’s close.
I’m off to Co-op to Buy my Own Mask
Moving the ducklings about the game screen is a case of getting behind them and then nudging them. They slide eternally until a wall stops them, at which point you can get behind them again and push them in a new direction. As mentioned, your aim is to socket them into some bread, but you can also push them out of the bread too, which is necessary for some of the later, more challenging levels.
Snack and Quack likes to give you more than one duckling and sliced-bread at once, which gives you some options. Which duck goes with each bread? There’s no colour-matching going on here: you have the full freedom to complete the present as you wish. A large proportion of the puzzle becomes working out the order of ducks (getting your ducks in a row, quite literally).
What makes Snack and Quack better than the average budget puzzler is the way that mechanics are layered onto this simple premise. The first is reasonably obvious: your ducklings can become walls for your other ducklings. What I mean by this is that you can push a duckling against a wall or into some bread, and then use that stationary duckling to block another duckling from moving. That’s useful when aiming for bread that otherwise seems unreachable. And Snack and Quack loves to make this a solution to a puzzle.
Swimming with the Current
Some level ingredients get stirred in. Water currents will immediately push your ducklings in a new direction, forming a kind of marine conveyor belt. Stone blocks litter the waterways, giving you a path to push through. And plant squares are added, stopping your ducklings inside them, rather than next to them, as other blocks tend to do.
I don’t take these for granted. Budget indie puzzle games don’t always find the room to include additional mechanics like these. They tend to hit on a framework – sliding puzzles mixed with sokoban, for example – and leave it at that. I know it seems like faint praise, but the addition of a few blocks and their effects adds another dimension to Snack and Quack’s puzzles. They’re nothing new, but I am glad that they are there.
I found myself leaning in and paying attention more than I usually do for a sokoban game, say. I’d approach each puzzle in a similar way: there is usually a slice of bread that is more unreachable than the others. So I’d work back from that one. What combination of ducklings, plants, currents and blocks would get at least one of my birds to that bread? From there, I can reverse-engineer a solution for the other slices of bread.
When You Have no More Ducks to Give
It makes for a simple but taxing puzzle. Some of the solutions in Snack and Quack force you to ‘gang up’ on a particular slice of bread, using all of your ducklings to create a wall. It’s only once that wall has been constructed that you have an angle-of-opportunity to reach the bread.
It’s not revolutionary, of course. It’s a formula that was used for Slide Viking, for example, which is another game under the Afil Games umbrella. The puzzle layouts are different, and I don’t remember the plant-squares being present in that game, but ostensibly this is the same category of game. But I enjoyed Slide Viking a fair amount, and that’s no different here.
There are 30 puzzles and 2000G to unlock, and you only need to play 15 or so levels to get the full 2000G. It shouldn’t matter, but I’m willing to bet it does for some. We finished Snack and Quack in just over an hour, which sounds skimpy until you remember that it’s £4.19.
In the context of sub-£5 indie puzzle games on the Xbox, Snack and Quack is near the top. Those ducklings look adorable with their bread masks, and the mash-up of sokoban and sliding puzzles works well. Throw in some extra mechanics, some obstacles that make you think a little more than usual, and you have a surprisingly full package with a 2000G cherry on top.
Snack and Quack will be too basic and thin for more refined puzzle fans, but anyone who has waded through Afil Games’ other titles will be pleasantly surprised with how diverting Snack and Quack is for an hour or two.
Important Links
Get Your Ducks in a Row! Charming Puzzler Snack and Quack is OUT NOW on Xbox, PlayStation & PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/get-your-ducks-in-a-row-charming-puzzler-snack-and-quack-is-out-now-on-xbox-playstation-pc/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/snack-and-quack-xbox-series/9PH91HG9J9H0/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/snack-and-quack-xbox-one/9NB6R13FV09D/0010
Or a PC drop – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/snack-and-quack-windows/9PHWDPF85MCC/0010
