Snakeybus is Snake on a bus and I love it beyond all words

Snakeybus has one of the most appealing pitches for any game in an age. It's Snake - or Blockade if you're a purist - but you're a bus, and you're driving through Paris, or Miami or wherever, and as you collect passengers and drop them off your bus gets longer and longer.

So it's Snake - or Blockade if you're a purist - but the fiction matters. It really does. There's something about driving a bus around the Louvre and across the Seine and then seeing, in the distance, in a gap between buildings, the passage of your own trailing carriages, that fills Snakeybus with a sense of panicky potential. God, I'm over here, but I'm also over there! I'd better not run into myself.

Around this beautiful core, Snakeybus keeps it simple. You collect passengers by driving over glowing sections of the road, and you drop them off by following the arrow to a column of light in the nearby sky. It's not hard to get so wrapped up in this simple task at first that you completely forget the fact that, as you work, you're also growing longer and longer. Eventually, though, you can ignore all of this no more, because you round a corner and there you are. There is something particularly cruel about running into yourself in a bus.

Beyond all this, Snakeybus has a lovely range of maps. Paris is the instant classic, of course, but I like the Miami one and there's a sort of cylinder farm world that really reminds me of the spaceship from the Rama novels. It's weird enough to look up and see corn growing across the ceiling, but it's even weirder to see your own bus-body racing through it overhead, and in front, and behind you.

Even abstraction works here. I love the endless level, in which your bus just races on and on over jagged ice. But I really, really love the corkscrew: a handful of looping roads orbiting a weird black sphere. Here is the place to meet yourself coming back the other way, as you coil and coil, collecting passengers, dropping them off, and slotting yourself into the spaces between your own trundling carriages. And jumping. Because there's a jump button. Snakeybus is an absolute gem.