The game is pretty simple, all told. Your goal is to explore a strange dimension that you and your crew have been sent to, and to find and rescue them. Also along the way are twenty trinkets to collect. The game is divided into levels, though only in a cursory way. There's an overworld to explore, and then from there you can find levels, which share a theme and have a crew member to rescue. Further, the levels are where most of the action is - While there are spikes and trinkets in the overworld, most of them are in the levels. As a nice touch, every screen that's in a level has its own name, typically a descriptor of the screen or a hint as to how to solve it. Or, in some cases, mocking the player for their insolence.
The game is hard. Flat out difficult. For those following along (all none of you), you'd know that I love difficulty in games, as long as it's fair. And VVVVVV's difficulty manages to be the epitome of fair. There are checkpoints everywhere (Some rooms have up to 4), and rarely do you have to repeat a section because you died, though the trinkets (which are optional to collect) throw this off. To put in concrete terms, despite playing the demo and playing two of the levels before buying the game, and thus starting my death count, I died almost 1500 times in just over 3 hours of playing this game. That is a truly impressive amount of deaths. Yet, due to the incredibly short respawn time and commonness of checkpoints, I felt like I had never really lost more than a few seconds of progress. Nothing felt unfair.
While this game is pretty short, clocking in for me at about 3:10:xx with getting all the trinkets, I can say that the game has absolutely no filler. It was three hours packed with "WHOA!" and "... This is AWESOME!" and "Holy shit!" moments, when I got to new sections or finished particularly exhilarating sections. This game has one of the absolute best auto-scroll sections I've ever seen. I normally dislike auto-scroll levels, but this one left me wanting more. It was an adrenaline pump.
Now, to talk more about the trinkets and the difficulty. I'd say about half my deaths came about due to one trinket, that you have to go through 6 screens, then back through, to get. It's pretty devious, actually. The trinket is on the other side of a basic platform, with a single block in the way. To get past it, you have to gravity flip up through 6 rooms, lined and covered with spikey death, hit a disintegrating platform at the top, then gravity flip back down through them. It's referred to as Doing Things the Hard Way (The initial room's title) or as Veni, Vidi, Vici (the name of the first 3 rooms of the challenge, in sequence). When done right, the sequence takes about 10 seconds. Yet, it took me about an hour to complete. And yet? I loved it. It became pure muscle memory and quick reflexes when I finally did it (twice! In a row!) at the end. It was me telling my brain to bugger off, I needed to work at a level that's sub-brain processing to beat it. Which I loved. It might not be for everyone, but, well. Optional. Getting the trinkets really adds to the game, though, as some of the most devious, clever, and fun puzzles are for trinkets.
Lastly, the music. It's all chiptunes. Some people like chiptunes, some people hate em. It takes the right type of chiptune, for me, but I loved the music. I even went off and bought the soundtrack for this game, separately.
Where can you find it? Here, for a demo, link to the demo online, or to purchase it, for $15. Right after playing the demo, my immediate, instinctive response was "... I need to get this". Which, I did, and then played it and ;loved it. Despite the shortness, I feel like what I paid was well worth it. Some people might point out it was $5 per hour to play, I'd point out that it was an amazingly fun hour for each of those $5.
Finally, To steal from another review I read for this game, at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
After playing VVVVVV for a little while, the power of prophecy gripped me. I became aware that during the next year or two, Terry Cavanagh will be approached in a bar by someone unknown to him. Possibly an industry function, possibly in a more general setting – I can’t be sure of the time or place. But this conversation is going to happen:
“Are you Terry Cavanagh?”
“…yeah.”
“As in, VVVVVV Terry Cavanagh?”
“…yeah”.
And then they’ll punch him in the face.
“That’s for Veni, Vidi, Vici, you bastard.”
And Terry will deserve it. As he, in a very real way, totally asked for it.
Except, I think, instead, I'll ask him if he's Terry Cavanagh, the developer of VVVVVV ... And when he says yes? I'll give him a big hug and say, as he's confused and feeling violated of his personal space, I'll say, "That was for Veni Vidi Vici!"
