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Review: Don’t Touch the Snail – Anti-Cozy Idle Game with Permadeath

Posted on February 24, 2026 by Aywren

Disclaimer: The developer provided a free Steam key of this game for me to review. These are my honest thoughts!

Take a long moment to think about this experimental game concept – the permadeath in this game is truly permanent. If you reach the game’s fail state, you can never play the game again. Done is done. One run is all you get.

How does that make you feel? A little uncomfortable? A little intrigued? Do you have questions?

I had many questions when I first wrapped my head around the ideas put forth in Don’t Touch the Snail. And despite the fact that the developer reached out to provide me with this small snail friend, they made it very clear that I, too, only had one chance with the game.

If I touched the snail, that was it, review copy or not. So, you better believe I’ve been careful in the hour plus time I’ve spent with my snail friend.

How Does it Work?

Don’t Touch the Snail is an idle game overlay that places a few small, minimal UI elements on your computer desktop. There’s the snail, of course, which is always moving towards your mouse cursor.

Then there’s a main menu that houses a few small menus such as the leaderboard, which shows how long all players have managed to keep their snail friend alive.

Finally, there’s the rewards screen, where you can use points you’ve accumulated to purchase new skins to change your snail friend’s appearance.

Each minute you spend earns one piece of currency – I’m just going to call these coins. However, small coins sometimes appear randomly on your desktop, which you can click to earn extra currency. I’ve seen one that gives five coins, but I believe there’s also one that goes up to ten coins.

Mindful Gameplay

The basic idea is that the snail on the desktop continues to move towards your mouse cursor at all times. Should it ever touch your cursor, that’s the end of the game. Permanently.

At first, the idea that this game was built with a mechanic that would lock me out of it permanently ignited a sense of unease within me. I had a lot of questions, a lot of things to test. Here’s what I found:

• The snail moves slowly. Very slowly. While it always moves towards the mouse cursor, it never sped up (during the hour I played it) and there was never truly a threat that it would reach the cursor as long as I was paying attention.
• If you have more than one monitor, and you move your mouse cursor to the other screen, the snail goes into a sleep state and the game’s timer stops. The snail wakes up again (with a warning sequence) the moment you move the mouse back to the monitor on which the game is playing.
• You can turn the game off at any time by clicking the close button in the top right of the main menu. So, if you need to go tend to something else, leaving the game is quick and easy.

All this to say, there was never a point when this game put me in a position to fail on purpose. It’s up front about what it intends to be, and makes it clear what the definition of permadeath is.

It’s all about making mindful choices.

Do you have something more important to be doing and you can’t watch the snail friend? Don’t want to risk it? Work on the other monitor and let the snail sleep. Or better yet, close the game.

Want to let it run idle while watching YouTube on the other screen? You can do that, but just keep an eye on your cursor in relation to the snail friend’s location.

That being said, my other question was the cost of this game. Based on the information provided on the game’s website, the cost will be $0.99 when it releases later this year.

The developers consider this a comedy/experimental/meme game. The graphic style echoes this, looking like something drawn with MS Paint (said affectionately). This reinforces the vibe of the game, and I found it to be endearing.

You can also view the game’s leaderboard online at the official website if you’re curious.

All that being said, I’d like to know what your thoughts are now that I’ve laid out the concept of this experimental game for you. It is a pretty cute snail friend, after all. And some of the skins you can earn are also quite fun!  

Still, does the concept of permadeath, in which you can never play the game again, turn you away or make you curious – given that it’s always within your hands whether you win or lose?

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