SNACK WORLD: The Dungeon Crawl

2025-05-23
After 5 years the main thing I remember about Snack World is that there’s a robot named P-GNOCHI-O with a nose that gets longer when he sees or thinks about women’s feet. Dan Schneider would be proud. And really I think it’s best when you leave it at its menagerie of insane characters and pun-filled dumpster humor with chapter titles like “Chapter II: Release the Krapen” (the final boss is a poop-squid). Because heaven forbid you start to analyze its vapid loop of grinding randomly generated dungeons full of stuff to fill up your inventory with. Or all the series of systems layered on top that basically serve as dopaminergic cranks and levers to pull to get more stuff and see numbers go up. I played this right as Covid was beginning and I was happy to turn my brain off and not spend too much time thinking about the plight of the world or the fact that this game was made by the same studio that made one of my favorite games of all time, Dark Cloud 2, and the even more under appreciated gem, Fantasy Life. I was happy to see Level-5 make anything. And I was happy to see those purple guys show up any time I opened a rare chest.

I’m especially happy to write this review just having ordered a Japanese import copy of Fantasy Life i, which is sounding like it might be a return to form for Level-5. C’mon Level-5 go de-ep! <3