There’s a famous…I guess we’ll call it thought experiment, posited by Rooster Teeth and memed incessantly since that asks: Would you accept $10 million and immortality if, for the rest of eternity, you were chased by a similarly immortal snail that, if it touched you, would kill you instantly?
The original video is mostly a lot of riffing on how much anxiety that snail’s existence would constantly give you, even if you went to other continents or other planets to escape it. It’s all fun and games of course…
…until someone makes a video game out of it.
I played Don’t Touch the Snail a month ago. It’s a desktop overlay game in which a snail, moving at a snail’s pace, crawls across your screen toward your cursor. If it touches your cursor, you die, and the game’s over. Forever. You can never play it again.
Don’t Touch the Snail has leaderboards for the longest time spent without touching the snail, and even has collectibles. Little pixel-shaped coins will pop up on your screen from time to time, and you collect them by running the mouse over them. This currency can then be spent on new cosmetic shells for the snail. I mostly used the hot pink one, but I like the rainbow one a lot too.
There are also 18 total achievements, and I earned five of them. One of them is just for starting the game, easy peasy. There are also achievements for collecting shells, and for surviving a certain amount of time. Of course, there’s also an achievement for dying and losing the game permanently, so if you ever want to 100-percent Don’t Touch the Snail, you eventually have to lose on purpose. Easily the worst achievement in here is entitled “Immortality?” and is earned by surviving one year of total accumulated play time. No thank you.
Don’t Touch the Snail is deceptively easy. It is very simple to avoid the snail if you’re paying attention. It is basic stuff. A game for babies. Of course, the reality is that most of us do not pay attention while we use the computer. We leave the mouse somewhere and forget where it is. We flail our cursor around wildly. We click things absent-mindedly. The snail would crawl atop all my browser windows, so I could still see it while I was working. If I moved my cursor to my second monitor where the game was not running, the snail curled up in its shell and my time paused, but the snail unfolded itself and began crawling again if I moved the cursor back to its monitor. I almost lost multiple times when breezing my cursor across my monitor without thinking. Another time, I almost lost sight of the snail when it crawled onto a background that was the same color as its shell.
Anyway, the reason this article is in past tense is because the dev sent me code a month ago, intending for me to flee the snail for several weeks before composing this piece. I only made it 37 minutes and 19 seconds on the first day before I touched the snail. The game still opens and lets me look at the snail, but my run is over. I can never play Don’t Touch the Snail again.