VVVVVV (2010)

Are you one of those gaming fans who feels that games have gotten "too easy" lately? Do you miss dying a ton? Were games more rewarding when it had the potential to make you rage-quit due to its difficulty? If so, you'd probably enjoy the retro-style 2D platformer, VVVVVV - a fun, challenging game complete with a death counter, so you can see exactly how many times you died.

Nothing about the game is particularly complex. It's entirely built on one mechanical premise - what if instead of jumping, we simply flipped gravity? That's right, you can't even jump in the game. You're either touching the ceiling or floor, or you're falling toward one. Yet it's wrong to confuse simplicity with difficulty. The game is filled with challenging levels to navigate through that range from pretty straight forward to fairly elaborate and tricky. By removing any complexity with the controls though - quite literally, you will only hit the left arrow, the right arrow, and space bar - the game always feels within your control. When you die (and you will - a lot), it always feels that there's no one to blame but yourself. There isn't a strange glitch or a poorly designed mechanic, and even the levels - though sometimes having some pretty enraging design elements - never feel overly complicated. It's just...tough.

You begin the game on board a spaceship with six colorful little humanoids. The ship suffers some sort of strange malfunction which sends all the crew members scattered all over another dimension. As Captain Viridian, it is your job to navigate the minefield of spikes and jumps trying to find your crew. Spread throughout are also little orb prizes, as well as computer terminals that fill you in with the story of what exactly happened. (It's actually kind of like the way The Swapper tells most of its back story.) When you find a crew member, you're often near to a teleportation device which warps you back to your ship.

As simple and straight forward as the game is, it's surprisingly not that linear. Yes, when you are inside of a level, it's pretty clear where you're going; there's only one path. However, there's no specific order in which to do the puzzles. You're given a large area to search through in order to even find the next puzzle, so you also have a feeling of exploration as well. However, it can be a negative thing. After about twenty minutes of play, I made my way through the early, relatively easy part of the game and accidentally stumbled upon one of the really difficult sections. It's worth noting that you can always leave and go back to that area later when you get more experience with the game, but it can be a bit overwhelming to find yourself trapped in the middle of one of the trickier levels too early.

It's a good game to test your reflexes on. Got to be quick!

VVVVVV is not really a punishing game, despite it's level of difficulty. To give balance, most screens have a check point so when you die, you respawn right there. Though making it through some sections can be really challenging, it's not trying to make you rage-quit. It's a bit like Thomas Was Alone in the sense that it wants you to succeed; it just doesn't want to hand you the objective. You have to earn it. At times, the level can be so tricky that you have to just call it a day after fifteen minutes. The game is short (I beat it in about two hours and fifteen minutes), but each individual screen can be crossed in anywhere from three seconds to thirty minutes. It's easy to get stuck on one screen for ten minutes, then take a break because you just get so frustrated trying the same thing over and over and over and over again.

Yet it's weirdly addictive. It tests your patience here and there, but overall it always maintains the fun element. A couple of my house mates are online gamers who play things pretty seriously, and you can always hear them shouting in frustration when they fail. It's always filled with a bit of rage. While my loving nickname for this game was "God Damn It!" I never felt that kind of anger playing it. The frustration built on several levels (particularly near the end of the game and a section where you have to survive an onslaught of incoming bricks for a full minute - which I'm pretty sure is impossible to do in one try), but it was always a curse shouted followed by a laugh.

One other time, near the end, I got stuck on a section for what must have been about thirty minutes. (Time flies, by the way. You might find yourself saying, "I'll just try this bit for a few minutes," then realize you've been attempting to get through that part for an hour.)  It was at that point that the frustration started to boil over and I thought, "This is getting dangerously close to not being fun anymore." About thirty seconds after that, the trial and error saw a major breakthrough and fifteen minutes later I had beaten the game. Granted that's primarily on me as a player, but I thought it was the mark of a well designed game intending to be challenging, but not trying to get me to rage-quit.

Apart from its Commodore 64 inspired visuals and rewarding challenges, the soundtrack might just be one of my favorites out there. Like everything else, it is retro-style chiptune. It's so energetic and fun that it helps ease the frustration. The soundtrack alone is probably worth picking up separately. (The game is called VVVVVV because all six crew members have a name that begins with V. The soundtrack is similarly called PPPPPP and features songs that only start with that letter as well. It's a strange sense of humor.)

Generally, I don't subscribe to this ideology of games being "too easy." I acknowledge that this is true; that a lot of games are easier than older games, but I don't buy that as being a bad thing. (Did I review the first Final Fantasy game here? That game was torture and it felt like work to get through it.) VVVVVV mixes linearity of platformer levels with open exploration of the world. It's simplicity makes you as the player feel completely in control. The score is awesome. And it's challenging without being built around making you fail. Even though it wants you to muscle through and succeed, it still feels extremely satisfying to get through the challenges.

And it's only $5 on Steam. You won't necessarily get a ton of time out of it - it took me a little over two hours over about a week  (off of 873 lives) - but I'd definitely say it's easily $5 worth of enjoyment.