[STEAM] One week with Razer's hand-painted and highly detailed keycap makes it easy to see why the $90 accessory sold out in minutes

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Razer's highly detailed Artisan Keycap sold out pretty quick. Just eight minutes after the brand's

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that the accessory was live and ready to buy, the hand-painted key made in "highly limited" quantities was snatched up by Team Sneki fans across the globe.

Not even its lofty $89.99 / £89.99 asking price could deter it from selling out entirely. You could spend a fraction of the cost and get yourself one of the

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with a whole spread of keys, never mind just one. However, as it's already sold out, it's too late to remind everyone of its hefty MSRP. Instead, I'd much rather use my privilege of being sent a sample by Razer to assure those who have bought one that they're getting exactly what Razer said they would: a "painstakingly painted and assembled by hand" accessory that is full of detail and even prettier than it has any right to be.

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(Image credit: Razer) If you're less a fan of realism and more a fan of cute, chibi aesthetics, you can still grab the Sneki Snek Keycap for

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, so long as you're based in the ***.

Opening up the small cardboard

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box for the first time was a surreal moment. I've seen custom keycaps in the past, so I was well aware of just how tiny they could be. However, the amount of detail on display in the marketing images made my brain assume the finished cap would be a large beast, and not the cute and compact accessory it turned out to be.

That's pretty great, as when it comes to practical keycaps, you ideally don't want something so big that it mammoths over your other keys and makes typing awkward, or even darn-right impossible. Fortunately, Razer's keycap doesn't do either of those things.

With its cross-stem (MX-style) switch compatibility, popping it onto any board I had in my household was a breeze. MX switches are pretty much the standard these days, so it didn't just fit my

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, but pretty much every board I had at my disposal. Even better, getting it all hooked up was just as simple as swapping out any other keycap. All I needed was a key-puller to pull out the original pink Escape key on my Asus board and a pair of sturdy hands to push down the Razer one in its place, and it was good to go.

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(Image credit: Future/Rosalie Newcombe) Once attached to my board, I was pretty impressed with the amount of stunning detail that Razer managed to pack into such a tiny resin form factor. The microscopic slithers of yellow paint for the eyes are exactly where you'd want them to be, with not a touch out of place. Even the snake's little noses have been accounted for and painted, which I didn't suspect.

During Razer's original

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, you can see the shadows that looked airbrushed on to create depth, but they look even better in person. The shadows bend perfectly with the Razer-green snake heads, and there are no harsh lines that look amateurish or like you're looking at a baby's firstWarhammer minature paint job. Despite being made of resin, a tricky material that often cirmounts in swarms of air bubbles, the surface on my sample was immaculate too. The only 'bumps' were the tiny little scales which you can see (and feel) across the backs of each snake.

It looked so impressive right out of the box that I was scared to use it, but the brand insists it's for "everyday typing," and so I put it through its paces with just that. Over the last week, the triple-headed snake replaced my pink Hatsune Miku Escape key and was used to type up multiple articles for GamesRadar+, as well as playing through games like Counter-Strike 2 and Marvel Rivals. I did deliberately attach it to a key that barely gets a lot of use, but at no point did it fall off, break, or render my 'Escape' functionality useless. Good job, snakes!

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(Image credit: Future/Rosalie Newcombe) Yet as stunning, practical, and unique as this Razer accessory oddity is, I don't think I'd be personally comfortable parting with almost $100 for it. But then, I'm not a keycap aficionado, nor do I collect pieces of Razer gaming history, so there's every chance I just don't "get it" and might not be the target audience that this piece of gaming art was intended for.

I much prefer the look of

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which are far cheaper at $19.99 a box and include resin replicas of Hello Kitty and friends. That being said, while the triple-headed snake isn't my style (or within my personal budget), I'm glad that it's exactly as Razer said it would be - a "hand-finished resin masterpiece" that's easy to install, practical, and swarming with slithering amounts of detail. Should you be sitting there waiting like Scott Pilgrim at the door for yours to arrive, you should feel at ease that you only have your bank account to worry about, as its appearance even managed to live up to my venomous expectations.

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Check out our guides to the

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, the

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, and the

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if you're a fan of Team Sneki.

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