Experience The Gravity of ‘VVVVVV’
Welcome to Indie Spotlight!
Today we explore the depths of space in a simple yet punishing platformer – VVVVVV!
You are Viridian, captain of The Ship! You are traveling through space when suddenly things go very wrong! You order everyone to evacuate and jump through a teleporter to safety – only you’re the only one that pops out the other side. You manage to find an intact comms relay and discover your crew has been scattered all around. So it’s up to you find and bring them back to The Ship!
VVVVVV is minimalistic to a fault. You’ve got the 8-bit graphics and the NES-level music and sound effects – and it works! It takes about ten seconds to learn how to play. You can move and you can jump. You have a menu that shows a map of the world and your current progress. That’s it!
But that’s not really it. Actually, it’s not regular jumping. You’re in space! There’s never regular jumping in space! Whenever you “jump,” you actually flip gravity on yourself, meaning hop once to start falling upwards to the ceiling, hop again to fall back down. The entire game’s puzzles and challenges are built around this.
Now don’t get me wrong. That explanation is as deceiving as it can get. You spend the first few minutes nodding your head along, thinking it’s way too easy. After a specific level made to teach you the ropes, you get absolute freedom to explore in any direction. At the same time, any and every level of difficulty is thrown at you. I’m talking rapid hopping through narrow corridors to dodge aliens and lasers, having to fall through several screens of spikes in a single jump!
Your goal is to find your five crew members scattered across the map. You’ll find and enable teleporters that serve as checkpoints and a means of getting around. You can also collect trinkets, which are usually placed at the end of the most frustrating puzzles.
I have had much enjoyment in the time I’ve put in this game so far. The quirky atmosphere is fun, the music is FANTASTIC and the puzzles are insane. I can see this being an epic speed run game for sure!
VVVVVV is available on virtually every kind of PC (here’s the Steam page), plus PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS.
