VVVVVV Review
Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in January, when VVVVVV was made available on the North American 3DS eShop. We present it today to mark the game’s release on the eShop in Europe. Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV is a game in love with being a game. The sci-fi tale of six space-dwelling scientists (whose names all begin with the letter V) getting displaced in another dimension is silly, but the bare-bones premise is fitting for the 8-bit retro aesthetic. This nostalgic presentation allows Cavanagh to look at common conventions with a deadpan sense of wide-eyed wonder. When it’s discovered that walking to one end of the screen causes you to emerge out the other side it’s explained as “inter-dimensional interference”. The first time a scientist sees a checkpoint he suggests it be brought back to the ship to be analysed. Where Atari games like Asteroids and Centipede seemed embarrassed by their stories, Cavanagh builds one to complement the medium’s preposterous designs. These analytic musings and low-fi visuals brings to mind classic sci-fi yarns like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, from an era when computers were the size of apartments and even the most basic video games were the stuff of dreams. Read more…
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