Vholume is an exhilarating on-foot racing game that sends players careering across impossible dystopian cityscapes in a headlong rush of wall-runs, death-chancing leaps and split-second improvisation. Now available for £6, the game challenges players to clip together wall-runs and power-slides to bridge seemingly impossible gaps between buildings, forever in search of the next stretch of track, the next turn, the next jump that leads to the level's exit and the worldwide leaderboards.
A game of taste and influence
At first, Vholume seems like a quick rush through some smartly selected references. The urban gymnast moveset comes from Mirror's Edge. Level names use terms like conapt, first coined by Philip K Dick. And the environments themselves are dystopian and surreal, with Half-Life 2's City 17 colliding with the blasted avenues and mute archways of de Chirico. Many games have influences, but Vholume has actual taste.
All the surface stuff fades away when the game is in motion, however. Players hoof it through spectacularly odd environments, moving from one beam of concrete to the next. Once a level is complete, there is a choice: onwards to another gauntlet, or back to the start to slice a few microseconds off a score. Multiplayer allows racing against the ghosts of others.
Accessible yet compelling
This quickly becomes utterly compelling, and at the heart of it all is the realisation that Vholume is surprisingly accommodating to players of all abilities. Powered mainly by trigger squeezes that allow hopping or ducking, the game wants wall-kicks and mantling to connect neatly, leaving players feeling lithe and speedy. It is also happy to let players find height-gaining exploits and kludge a save from falls that really should have killed them.
This is ultimately confidence rather than indulgence. It is the confidence of a game that knows it can let weaker players muddle through because, up in the thin, high-altitude air at the very top of the leaderboard, real beauty is unfolding. As players progress, simple full-ahead courses are interleaved with more complex levels that feel like puzzles, but in truth every level is a range of different potential routes depending on speed, reflexes, and how far fingers on the pad can get ahead of interrupting thoughts.
Later complexity and lasting joy
Vholume does not always get better as it gets busier, however. Jump pads, maze-like special levels and parts of the environment that move by themselves all start to play a role. While the intricate later levels are fascinating, the balance between the fun the designer is having and the fun the player is having is more even in the early stages, which are a twitchy headlong thrill.
One of Vholume's creators made their name with Babbdi and Straftat, two games that look like a product of the demoscene but actually zero in on deeply satisfying mechanics delivered with care. Vholume's world is horrible, but the path through it is paved with joy and exhilaration. It understands that the only thing better than a game that wants to make you think is a game that wants to make sure you never think, even for a millisecond – because if the thinking brain gets itself involved, the whole beautiful thing will fall apart.
