VVVVVV revolves entirely around one simple, brilliant concept. While jumping in other platformers will see you settle down on a ledge or safely past a bottomless pit, here it'll send you straight to the ceiling and stick you there. The ability to soar up (or down, depending) to the opposing surface opens up a second, rarely explored plane, one in which the design in
VVVVVV exploits wonderfully. And unlike
Terry Cavanagh's other works such as
Judith or
Don't Look Back, which sacrificed elements of gameplay for a specific artistic vision, the controls here are nigh on perfect, where running and those rocket leaps are perfectly under your control.
Which comes as a relief since the game is incredibly tough. Crashing your ship and exploring a strange dimension, you have to navigate a gauntlet of hazardous corridors to reach lost teammates and disconnected teleport pods. The speed of it all, from the buzzing projectiles to your movement, is blazingly fast, and you'll die a few dozen times in each new realm. Thankfully, a restart marker is placed before almost every hazard, allowing you to instantly try again with no consequence. The game also adopts an open-ended
Metroid progression, with markers guiding you to a teleporter, with each one guarded by their own devilishly laid out labyrinth.
While the mechanic is a novel one, the level design takes all the genre's staples and gives them new life, stretching them to some incredible results. The classic screen-scrolling section is made significantly harder you often need to come back on yourself to progress. Outside, a single leap can span entire screens into the unknown, and a co-operative section has you guide a teammate over moving platforms whenever you touch the ground. Throw in conveyor belts, bouncy walls and survival mini-games, and you have an instinctively familiar experience with a countless number of mindbending twists attached.
The beauty of it is that, no matter how crushing a section is, the near-instant respawn will always drive you to try, try, try again. As a result, it's a game that almost everyone will get around to completing. The idea of using old-school difficulty and design simplicity with the modern philosophy of making a game as approachable as possible is genius. And, if the core content was easy enough for some (our run saw us die a staggering 647 times in a matter of hours) there are a host of side trinkets and bonus rooms to discover beyond the main quest's short but brutally sweet playtime.
While it happily adopts the pixel-art aesthetic of many other indie platformers, it directly channels the days of the Commodore 64, with eight-colour screens and a truly stunning soundtrack to accompany it. For £8 you get a truly challenging but incredibly enjoyable platformer, and one that that already stands as one of the year's hidden gems. For the unconvinced, you can always try a flash-based
demo before you buy.
Have you played VVVVVV yet? What do you think of the game? Add a comment to the space below! 
