VVVVVV - Just beaten
So my friend Matt gave me this “Indie Game Pack Bundle” from Steam. It was a couple of credit-codes which allowed me to download to my Steam Library several independently crafted games. The first one that caught my eye was a game called, “VVVVVV.” I thought to myself, “This game has a title which is more like a sound than it is like a title for a word. Is it saying, ‘VVVVroooom’ or ‘VVVVVooooracity?” Little did I know I was delving into a strange world filled with teleportation, dangerous spikes, and friendly crew-members which need saving. The game is short, it only took 3 hours to beat it. But it is extremely challenging for the human reflexes. You can probably tell by how I died over 1,300 times.
You start out the game as “Captain Viridian” which is a name that somehow resonated with me as a gamer very well. He has a problem because his ship is damaged and also there’s a disturbance in space-time among other dimensional problems.
The goal of the game is to rescue the 5 other crew member who also have their names start with the letter V. So maybe that’s where the title came from. Perhaps it’s an anacronym for the first letter of all the crew member’s names. Puzzling…
You can’t jump in the game. You can only flip your character’s personal gravitational field by pressing “spacebar” or you can fall off a ledge. So the only buttons you actually use for the game is spacebar, left and right.
Dangerous spikes kill you instantly at you re-appear at the latest checkpoint. There are no RPG elements to the game. And there aren’t really any adventure elements to the game except for the exploring aspect. It is basically a twitch-reflexes training game which teaches people a lot about understanding sine waves. What I mean by this is that sine waves in the game are the only way for you to survive dangerous spikes. It’s as if the creator of the game wanted people to understand sine waves from a more physical and human reflex-level than simply in a math or physics book.
There were several places when I was playing the game when I thought to myself, “Oh, I just need to adjust the beginning of my falling sine wave to start at the apex instead of the trough.” And lo and behold by starting the wave at a different point in the sine wave I was able to transverse the gambit of flying enemy triangles.
The music for this game is excellent. If you like music done in FL Studio which has an 8-bit FM style you will probably love this game. I learned a lot and I definitely feel like I have faster reflexes between my left thumb, 4th right finger and right index finger. This will definitely help me open packaged foods like protein bars in the future.
Here’s a LINK where you can get this game from the official website!
-Tyler