By Filipe Salgado - January 19th, 2010
VVVVVV is a game that made me angry. I mean, really angry. Ten minutes would barely go by when I would see a challenge game maker Terry Cavanagh set up and hate his goddamn guts. But I also couldn’t keep from giddily laughing to myself. The clever bastard always had another twist, another devious bit up his sleeve. It is one thing to be beaten up, but quite another to respect the person for doing it.
VVVVVV has you playing Viridian, the captain of a ship that gets caught up in some weird space anomaly; it’s the way these things often seem to happen in space. His crew is spread out all over this little dimension and it’s up to you to rescue them. The most basic of platformer abilities, jumping, is off limits. Instead, you reverse gravity. Every level can be, and will need to be, viewed two ways to solve it.
Cavanagh doesn’t play with too many other elements apart from the gravity reversal. There are some genre staples (conveyor belts and disappearing platforms; dumb pacing enemies; the ever menacing spike, rarely seen in the singular) but the game is lean, eschewing the Metroidvania’s habit of relying on new abilities to keep the gameplay fresh. Instead, Cavanagh uses clever level design to inject a surprising amount of variety into the game. The gravity flipping is used to its fullest, and no opportunity is wasted or missed. Occasionally, Cavanagh plays with ideas, like a vertically scrolling bit ominously titled “The Tower,” but these stages are built on the solid foundation that up can be down at the press of a button. They serve as temporary pleasant distractions, not game changers.
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