Slither has pretty well captivated everyone at some point now, right? The take on competitive Snake, where players gobble up orbs of light, growing their snake, while causing the untimely deaths of competitors has inspired this ruthless take where narwhals (or is it narwhales?) collide into one another.
Narwhale.io is everything Slither is not — and that’s not a dig at either game.
In Slither, death comes from making contact with the edge of the massive map or touching another snake. In Narwhale, death comes from another narwhale torpedoing at you full speed and SEVERING YOUR BODY WITH ITS HORN.
Slither is polished and stylish. Narwhale is plain.
Slither rewards slow, methodical play to grow your snake. Narwhale demands you slam full speed ahead into other narwhales.
Contact with another snake is a sure death in Slither. In Narwhale, horn-on-horn action sends the adorable creatures bouncing across the entire map, fate to be determined.
Little snakes can make big plays in Slither but suffer from a severe disadvantage. Each and every Narwhale is a threat immediately in the much tinier arena, though leveling up does come with its perks.
In both, you can unlock a set of custom skins, like hotdogs, for using social media to promote the game (does this count?).
Both games serve as fantastic browser-based multiplayer games with few prerequisite skills. It’s easy to jump in and jump out of a game. There’s no loading, no wait time, no tutorial. You want to play? You’re in! Have no clue what you’re doing? Great! Half the other players don’t either.
Narwhale, it’s far less dependent on skill and mastery and more on chaos, in much the same way Mario Kart rewards whatever the heck it wants to with blue shells while Forza demands fine tuning for hours.
Dive in and have some fun!
This updated article is adapted from the GoodGamesWriting archives. The original article was posted on October 4, 2016.