Snood is a truly bizarre game. Recently, in the past couple years, it was re-released. It is a game I played some in the distant past.
The way the game works is that there is a collection of faces that make up a bulk at the top of the screen. For all I know these faces are the snoods. The grid is triangular so the snoods are in offset rows. The arrangement depends on the level. You can have many different arrangements of snoods.
Snoods are different curious faces of different colors and head shape like square or triangle.
The faces are coming down at you. This is a precursor emotionally to Majora’s Mask. Not really. It is quite a strange game. When the faces fill up the screen and reach the bottom you lose. You win by clearing out all the faces or snoods. The way you do this is you shoot snoods with snood ammo which are snoods at a distance with a gun that has 180 degree range. By shooting at the wall at an angle, you can bounce the snood much like a beam of reflecting light.
When you shoot a snood and it reaches any other snood it sticks. This is the way you can lose aside from the snoods descending all at once by a buildup that occurs at the top over time. There is a danger meter on the side.
When snoods of the same type are altogether, I’m not sure how many, maybe three, they are eliminated and you get points. Any snoods that were hanging on to a group of snoods that were eliminated fall down but they do not harm you. They are also eliminated. This is the way to win.
The game resembles breakout but the strategy is not to chip away at the wall. You quickly realize that the way to play the game is to make a snood stalactite of snoods that you cannot use and to take away the base so that they all fall at once. If you try the chipping away strategy by making matches you begin to cover up the snoods adjacent to the snoods you are trying to match. Once you have the snood you need and you shoot it, you can hit one of these adjacent snoods and get stuck to them and not touch the snood you were aiming for. The gun is accurate but it is a mouse game and although in easy mode the line of sight extends all the way to the snoods and like a laser reflects off the border, my feeling is that aiming is difficult. It is like billiards. You have to shoot a relatively wide object through a small gap in order to have the right snoods touching.
The look of the strategy differs from other arcade games where often you are playing in a balanced way like moving right to left taking out enemies. It is similar to tetris in that the accuracy in how you place pieces really matters. In tetris though you are building up rows by carefully fitting pieces together. When you make a bunch of snoods that are meant to fall, you care less about the placement or what snoods they are, only that you get the right snood later on and you have a clear shot towards the base. If you miss that shot, the game is probably over because by piling on snoods they are much closer to reaching the bottom.
The game in its modern form had a payment model (the last time I played) that was arcade style. You paid for coins, sometimes you won coins too, and then got to play longer. It might have been an arcade game originally but I remember playing it on a Macintosh.