Snail

Snails are small, neutral creatures, most often found slowly waddling around watery regions.

Appearance
Snails have black, retractable limbs - a tiny head with two white eyes, along with a pair of arms that they use to move around, and a large, colorful shell on their backs.

Utility
Snails can be held and thrown to temporarily stun any dangerous creature. This comes in handy for most medium sized predators, but is especially effective against  Leeches. Chucking Snails into the many Leech-infested pools of the Drainage System can make swimming through them much easier and safer. With a well timed jump, the Snail's pop may also grant a good amount of vertical momentum, allowing the Slugcat to reach high places, though this use is fairly niche.

Abilities & behavior
Snails don't actively flee from or go after most creatures they encounter, often choosing to aimlessly wander around instead. While slow, they can scale background walls, which gives them a fair bit of mobility while traversing rooms.

Popping
Snails are capable of producing a loud pop from within their shells, creating a stunning shockwave, which can easily repel the and any other similarly sized creatures. There are a few conditions under which Snails may pop:
 * When around other creatures - standing near one causes it to shake with increasing intensity, before eventually popping. Snails may also produce a few smaller pops beforehand, which serve as a warning. The exact speed at which a Snail will pop depends on distance, being near instant if touched.
 * Shortly after being thrown.
 * Hitting a surface with enough velocity. This is especially noticeable, and most often the cause of popping, when a Snail is held by the Slugcat.
 * Getting hit with a non-lethal object, such as a piece of.

Variants and attributes
Snails' bodies vary in size. Their shells can take on practically any hue & lightness, giving them some of the highest color variety in the game (the colors are always highly saturated, however, meaning that greyish ones are impossible). Shells have an ~80% chance to feature a gradient, and a ~20% chance to feature one solid color.

Trivia

 * Snails boost certain moves, including backflips, longjumps, and walljumps, when held. This interaction is likely unintended, and simply a quirk of the physics engine.
 * A Snail's pop radius is proportional to its size.
 * Pops are considerably stronger in water - up to 5.5 times if both the Snail and the creature receiving the shock are submerged.
 * Snails can only pop if they're touching a solid surface, background walls, or water. Though unlikely to ever happen in normal gameplay, this means that a Snail may get stuck on top of a creature's corpse, incapable of popping until moved.
 * It is possible to prime a dead Snail by inputting jump while on top of it.