vvvvvv
probably my favorite part about cheap bundles of indie games is finding games i really enjoy that i never would have thought to buy on their own. vvvvvv sort of fits that, because i expected it to be so difficult that i’d reach a certain point and not be able to continue. oh, and that point would probably be early in the game. since it was included in the humble indie bundle #3 though, i gave it a shot.
of course, i was wrong about it. while it does get insanely hard in places, you almost always have the option to simply go somewhere else. i also thought the title was meant to represent the simple video game spikes, which are the main hazard of the game. instead there are six characters in the game (one of them is your character) and all of them have a name that starts with the letter v. i’m pretty sure the title comes from that, though maybe the resemblance to spikes was also intentional.
vvvvvv’s story, like its graphics, is simple. sometimes the uninteresting dialog actually gets in the way of playing the game, though most of the game doesn’t have any dialog. the part of the story that i found useful was that your crew got scattered around the map and you have to rescue them and there’s shiny things around that you could collect if you want. any story beyond that isn’t well-written or developed enough to be much beyond something you need to keep pressing the action button to get through.
your movement is limited to left, right, action (reverse gravity), and map / teleport. i don’t think there’s an option to customize controls, but since there are so few of them it doesn’t matter much. when you reach the edge of the screen, you either enter the next screen in that direction or re-enter the same screen from the opposite side. once you find your way back to your ship, the game really opens up. you can explore whatever part of the map you like, which means you can rescue crew members in any order.
vvvvvv is simple and old-school, but a lot of fun to play. the difficulty comes from carefully landing on the narrow non-spiked areas and / or timing your movements just right. most of the difficult sequences have a checkpoint right before you attempt it (and sometimes in the middle for longer sequences) so when you die (and you will) you can try again right away.
the music and sound effects are retro, though with modern sound quality. if you had all the rest of the game without the sound and thought up how you’d want it to sound, it sounds pretty much exactly like that. somehow all the dying on spikes is a little more fun with good music.
vvvvvv is a short game: i spent 3 hours to rescue all the crew members, explore the map, and collect all the shiny things i thought i had a chance at. at $5 it’s a maybe, depending on your opinion of retro games. if you see it for half off or better though i definitely recommend giving it a shot.