True permadeath: You can never play this game again if you let its immortal snail assassin touch your mouse pointer

A snail moving toward a computer in flames — (Image credit: Both Good)

I've seen a few different versions of the "snail assassin" or "immortal snail" or "snail hunting you down" meme over the years, but it looks like it originated from an episode of the Rooster Teeth podcast back in 2014, where the question was basically this:

Would you take $10 million dollars, but an immortal snail would always be slowly crawling toward you no matter where you were, and if it touched you, you'd die?

You could take precautions—moving to a different country would certainly buy you a few years of peace—but it would be tough to enjoy your newfound wealth for long knowing that no matter where you were, death was slowly, slimily, heading your way.

Latest Videos From

Soon you'll be able to live out that scenario on your desktop, including the life or (perma)death stakes. Don't Touch The Snail is a game where a snail slowly, ever-so-slowly, is always moving toward your mouse pointer. If the snail touches your pointer, it's game over… forever.

I'm not sure what sort of strategies you could come up with to evade the desktop snail for long. I suspect an ultrawide monitor would be a major advantage, but even on the biggest screen I imagine it would be tough to leave your mouse pointer motionless for more than a few minutes without panicking.

You can find out how long you'd last against the dreaded immortal snail when Don't Touch The Snail launches later this month on Steam.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.