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Slidewinder
This is a Cheery Chimp original.
How To Play Slidewinder
How to play Slidewinder
Swipe to send the snake sliding. It keeps going until something stops it, and it leaves its body behind wherever it goes. Fill every square on the board to pass the level.
Moving
- Swipe anywhere on the board area: up, down, left or right. You don't have to start on the snake.
- The snake slides until it is stopped by the edge of the board, a rock or bush, its own body, or another snake.
- A swipe that can't go anywhere just makes the snake bump. It doesn't count as a move.
- On a computer, the arrow keys work too.
When every square is covered, leaves fall and the level is passed. There is no "you're stuck" message. If you've left a square the snake can never reach, undo or start the level again.
Holes
Holes come in matching pairs, marked by the colour of their dashed rim. A snake that slides into a hole comes out of its partner, still moving the same way, and keeps sliding.
- Each hole can only be used once. After that it acts like a rock.
- If the square just past the exit is already taken, the hole works like a rock instead, and the snake stops in front of it.
Water
Some levels have a corner the snake can't get into. A round tile with a drop on it is a switch. When the snake slides over it, water bursts from the spring with the same coloured ring and fills every empty square it can reach. Water counts as filled.
- Water spreads into every empty square joined to the spring, including ones the snake still needed. Close the pool off with the snake's body first, then cross the switch.
- Water flows through unused holes, and uses them up.
- Only a snake can press a switch. Water that covers one means it will never go off.
Sleeping snakes
A curled-up, faded snake with a floating z is asleep. Slide over the switch marked z in the same colour to wake it. The new snake takes over straight away, and the first one waits, shown dimmed.
- Tap a snake's head to switch to it. Your swipes always move the snake that's in full colour, with the ring around its head.
- On a computer, Tab switches snakes.
- A sleeping snake is in the way, like a rock, until it wakes.
Switches go off when a slide ends, so the snake finishes its move before the water rises or the sleeper wakes.
The buttons
- Grid (top left): back to the list of levels.
- Curved arrow: undo your last move. You can undo all the way back to the start.
- Round arrow: start the level again.
- Arrow (bottom right): the next level. It turns yellow when you've filled the board, but you can skip ahead at any time.
Keyboard shortcuts: Z or Backspace to undo, R to restart.
Levels
There are 75 levels in five chapters, shown by the icons along the top of the level list. Each chapter brings in something new:
- Snake: just the snake and the board.
- Holes: pairs of holes that move the snake across the board.
- Drop: water switches and springs.
- Z: sleeping snakes.
- Leaf: everything at once.
Every level is open from the start, and levels get harder through each chapter. A green tile with a tick is a level you've passed, and the bar under each chapter icon fills as you go. Your progress is saved, and so is the level you're in the middle of, so you can leave and carry on later.
Tips
- Look for squares with only one way in, such as dead ends and squares beside a rock. The snake has to end its run there, or arrive there along the only open line.
- A long slide is not always the best one. Count what a slide leaves behind: a row of one or two squares cut off from the rest is usually a lost level.
- Plan the last few moves first. Where does the snake have to finish?
- Before you cross a water switch, check which empty squares are still joined to the spring. If any of them are squares the snake needs, close them off first.
- A sleeping snake usually has its own patch of the board to fill. Leave that patch to it.
- Holes save long walks, but each one only works once. Ask whether you'll need to come back the other way.
- Contact
Feel free to contact us with any bugs, complaints, or requests.
- Release Date
- October 13, 2026
History
The history of Slidewinder's puzzle
Slidewinder mixes two old ideas: a snake that leaves a trail behind it, and a puzzle where you slide until something stops you. Its goal, to cover every square exactly once, is older still.
One path through everything
In 1857 the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton invented the Icosian game. The board was the twenty corners of a twelve-sided solid laid flat, and the player had to find a route that visited every corner exactly once and came back to the start. Mathematicians still call a route like that a Hamiltonian path.
Filling a Slidewinder board is the same kind of problem. The snake's body is one path, and it has to pass through every open square once and only once. Finding such a path on a large board is hard even for computers, which is why the puzzle stays interesting as the boards grow.
The snake
The snake comes from video games. In 1976 Gremlin Industries released the arcade game Blockade. Two players each steered a marker that left a solid wall behind it, and the first to crash into a wall, either trail or the edge of the screen, gave the other player a point. It started a whole family of games. Atari's Surround brought it home in 1977, and countless versions followed under names like Worm and Nibbler.
The version most people remember arrived on Nokia mobile phones in the late 1990s. Nokia programmer Taneli Armanto wrote Snake for the Nokia 6110, working within a black-and-white screen only 84 by 48 pixels in size. Because it came built into phones, it became one of the most-played games in the world.
Sliding until you stop
The second idea comes from ice. Adventure games have long had frozen floors where the hero can't stop walking: step onto the ice and you slide in a straight line until you hit something. The Ice Path in Pokémon Gold and Silver is one of the best-known examples. These rooms are small puzzles in their own right, because the only way to stop where you want is to have something there to stop you.
Paint the maze
Around 2019 the two ideas met on phones. In games like AMAZE! from Crazy Labs and Roller Splat! from Voodoo, a ball rolls through a maze until it hits a wall and paints every square it rolls over, and the goal is to paint them all. They were simple, quick and very popular, and many similar games followed.
Slidewinder
Slidewinder turns the ball back into a snake. The squares the snake covers stay covered, so its own body becomes a wall that stops later slides. Holes add a shortcut that can only be used once, water fills the corners the snake can't reach, and sleeping snakes share the work.
Every level is made by the game's own level builder. A snake wanders an open board, and wherever one of its slides stops early, a rock or bush is placed so that the slide will stop there in play too. That walk is always a way to fill the board, so every level can be passed. A solver then tries every possible line of play to rate how hard each level is and to throw out any level a lucky flood or shortcut would give away. The 75 levels in the game were picked from thousands made this way and set in order from easy to hard.
Slidewinder is an independent game. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nokia, Atari, Crazy Labs, Voodoo, Nintendo or the makers of any other game mentioned here. All names belong to their respective owners.
Behind the Scenes
Slidewinder: a good idea, given room to grow
Slidewinder started with a game I played. You had a grid and a snake's head. Swipe, and the head slid in that direction until it hit something, leaving body behind it. Fill the grid and you win. The idea was lovely. The game wasn't. It had one level with two snakes in it and little else, and the fruit scattered across the board did nothing at all. It was a bad implementation of a good idea, and I wanted to see what the good idea could do.
Cutting things out first
The first decisions were about what to remove. The original handed out stars for how much of the grid you filled. I dropped them. If the goal is to fill the board, then a board that isn't full isn't finished, and a two-star "almost" just muddies that. In Slidewinder you either fill the level or you don't.
The fruit went too. When the goal is to cover every square, collecting things on some of those squares adds nothing. A fruit is just a square.
I also decided the game shouldn't tell you when you're stuck. There's no submit button and no failure screen. If you've cut off a square the snake can never reach, the board simply sits there until you undo or restart. The only thing the game announces is a win. Working out that you've trapped yourself is part of the puzzle.
Making the snake feel like a snake
The part I cared about most was how the snake moves. In a lot of grid games the body just appears square by square. I wanted the snake to grow from its tail and slither forward to its head, so the whole body seems to flow as the head moves while the tail stays put.
The trick is to measure the pattern on the snake's back from the head rather than from the tail. As the head moves, every scale moves with it, so the body looks like it's pouring forward. It's a small thing, but it's the difference between drawing a line and watching a snake.
Holes were the hard case. A snake that goes into one hole and out of another should look like it travelled through a tunnel, not like it was cut in half. So each hole crossing counts as a short stretch of hidden body. The scales run down into one hole, there's a beat, and they come back up out of the other.
What to do with the squares a snake can't reach
Holes were the first extra mechanic I knew I wanted. They let one part of the board connect to another and make you think about the route instead of just the next swipe.
The bigger question was how to fill a part of the board the snake can't get to. I went through a few ideas, and two of them stuck.
The first is water. Cross a switch and water pours out of a spring, filling every empty square joined to it. The catch is that water doesn't know which squares were meant for it. Cross the switch too early and it floods the squares your snake still needed. I decided not to warn players about that. They'll find out the first time it happens, and after that they'll build a dam with the snake's body before they turn on the tap. It's the most satisfying "oh" moment in the game.
The second is a sleeping snake. Cross its switch and it wakes up and takes over, while the first snake waits, greyed out, until you tap its head to bring it back. With only one snake moving at a time, swiping anywhere on the board still works, even in levels with two snakes.
Levels that build themselves
I wanted a lot of levels without hand-placing every rock. The levels are generated by working backwards from a solution. A snake wanders an open board, and wherever one of its slides stops short, a rock or bush goes just past that point so the slide would stop there in play too. When the walk ends, that walk is a way to fill the board, so every level can be solved.
Any patches the snake never reached become a sleeping snake's territory, a pool for the water, or more rocks. Then a solver plays every possible line through the level. It works out how likely random swipes would be to win, which gives a difficulty, and it throws out levels where a flood or a lucky hole wins in a fraction of the moves.
The result is 75 levels in five chapters. The first chapter is just the snake, and each of the next ones adds something: holes, water, sleeping snakes, and finally all of them together.
What's next
The next step is playing it on real phones and tuning how it feels: how fast the snake slides, how the sounds land, and whether the difficulty climbs at the right pace. If you play it, I'd love to know which level made you undo the most.
