Box Snake

Not the snake you are thinking of. Your line lives on the wall of a square arena: hold and the head crawls forward, release and the tail catches up. Close the loop by bringing the head round onto the tail and the enclosed run becomes a turret that fires inward at the balls bouncing through the middle.

So the whole game is a bet on length. A long line scores far more per hit and takes far longer to retract, and anything that reaches the wall while you are still stretched ends the run. Closer to Qix than to Snake.

From Kenta Cho’s MIT-licensed crisp-game-lib collection.