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.