Laura Michet's Blog

Vholume good

The makers Straftat, an incredibly zany and low-stakes 1v1 shooter where you jump one after the other into random arenas, recently released a first person platforming game called Vholume. It's good!! On days when I work at home, I've been playing like 15 minutes of it as soon as I wake up. It has a coffee-like impact on my wakefulness, haha.

Straftat had similar art direction, but Vholume is just super fucking good at achieving the kind of degraded, surreal, monumental brutalist visuals I've seen in BLAME and some derivative works. Unlike BLAME, Vholume's environments trend more in the "surreal but occupied city" direction, full of hidden routes which lead to weird guys who might complain to you about their jobs or explain paperwork approval procedures to you. Most of them are giant, nude, bald men with distorted bodies. It's a vibe!!

If you ever tried, like I did, to get into counterstrike surfing servers and just found the inputs overly difficult and unpleasant, Vholume has a bit of that Source-engine-surfing look to it, but it's much more of a typical high speed platformer. You can wall run and crouch slide and adhere to walls for a little bit of vertical travel, if you need to get juuust high enough to mantle up over a ledge you missed. Your character moves so insanely fast that I've found the hardest levels are the ones that require me to do short jumps or move slowly.

And there's a ton of content in it! I played for about two hours during my first sit-down and was shocked to realize that I'd played about half the levels in the level menu. Then I started discovering tons of hidden levels - you get them by collecting hidden objectives. Most levels also contain multiple routes. So I assume I have many more mornings of Vholume left in here.

I think you should check it out! I love fast paced, first-person platformers, but it's only every once in a while that I actually find one I like. This is one of them!

#games #recommendations