Vholume review
A good parkour game is a gauntlet of faith. You follow the flow of a city designed by some invisible hand: paving stones tilted at angles suggestive of a left turn, a warm light inviting you into a distant doorway, some plank of corrugated scrap extended toward an unseen edge. You are chasing a breadcrumb trail, except you don't always know what's crumb and what's dirt. Over and over, you leap without looking. Sometimes that means you die. But, when it's done right, you feel like you are predicting the future mere milliseconds ahead of time.
The best levels of Vholume make me feel like a clairvoyant with springs for legs. The worst feel like a brief test of my faith, nothing more. The protagonist of this wall-running platformer will often wheeze as if they're running out of breath. At the end of one run, I realised I had been holding my own lungs for the two full minutes it took me to hit the dark doorway that marks the finish line. This game is such a rush, it will deprive you of oxygen.
Thirty-one levels, a wall run, and a
