Wirm, the latest title from Aussie studio Sbug Games, is the Dark Souls of worm games. You play as a tiny, happy little worm in a big, wide world who wants nothing more than to explore and satisfy its endless curiosity – and you adventure through bright, storybook-like levels where you must literally chew the scenery to advance.
Wirm review – quick links
Wirm requires your patience and focus
What follows is a surprisingly tense, bum-clenching time as you rely on limited squirming skills (move forward, hold and stick) to inch your way up mountains, across rocks, through clouds and eventually into deep space.
It’s tough, in a way that makes your journey entirely rewarding.
As you begin, Wirm is fairly forgiving. You move forward using mouse controls, clicking to advance or hold your position. You can only move upwards through certain terrains, including dirt, clouds and fruit, so you must position yourself well to ensure you can tackle the challenges ahead.
Eventually those terrains grow much thinner and disparate and so you must advance by other means.
Wirm encourages you to think outside the box and exercise patience with each move. Sometimes, you’ll only have a few rocks to squirm across to get to your next checkpoint. You must take your time, inching and resting, and positioning yourself exactly right, and sometimes also building up speed, in order to fling yourself across gaps.
It takes practice to master the precision the game demands but that’s where its greatest strengths lie. On the surface, Wirm is a cosy and cute little adventure about a worm with big ambitions. But taking cues from silly physics games like Baby Steps and Getting Over It, Wirm requires wrangling.
You must position yourself precisely to ensure you’re swinging or oozing in exactly the right ways. While this does create occasional frustration, particularly when you can’t seem to position yourself well enough to cross a large gap, figuring it all out and watching your tiny worm fly past its latest goalpost is an incredible triumph.
Like the worm, you will need to stick with it.
Cool, cosy vibes buoy the journey of Wirm
With an ebb and flow that is equally cosy, fun, and frustrating, Wirm is a game that is always encouraging. When you stop to catch your breath, you get a tiny, wormy smile that brims with joy. When you’re clutching at the edge of your seat, attempting to cross the next challenge, your worm’s tiny, shocked face prompts you to try harder.
You can even bring your friends along and go squirming together, so you can watch multiple tiny, cutesy worms on their little big adventures.
While only short in length, Wirm makes a big impression. With its bite-sized platformer challenges, it presents a tight, well-designed experience, and one that lovingly evokes childlike wonder in a cosy world. Bring your patience, and Wirm will invite you into a world of elation, as you inch and pinch your way past every obstacle.
Wirm is now available on Steam.
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Dogpile wormed its way inside my head with surprising ease. It’s not only the cute dogs that contributed, but its baked-in sense of moreishness, buoyed by light-touch mechanics, and layers of strategy that encourage you to keep flinging dogs until you hit your bone currency goals. It adapts the elements of a suika / merging game, while introducing new challenges. You begin by placing dogs into an awaiting kennel, each of which can be combined with dogs of the same type, to form a larger dog.
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