Vholume demands to be played with your entire body

After an hour in Vholume, my neck aches and my legs are shaking. It's because I've been tensed like a coiled spring for the duration, racing in a first-person parkour time trial where a single mistake might cause me to fall to my death or worse, fail to break my personal best.

"First-person parkour" might bring to mind Mirror's Edge, and sure enough Vholume has the wall-running and bum-slides to go split-toe to split-toe with that cult classic. But Vholume is the work of Léonard Lemaitre (among others), one of the brothers responsible for Jank favourites Babbdi and Straftat. There's no gleaming city of glass here, only the by-now trademark brutalist architecture and water-damaged concrete that makes you feel like you're racing through an empty server of some forgotten Half-Life mod.

Vholume's current free beta contains just two tracks, and it's the basic hub world that has obsessed me for most of the past week. It's a simple circuit under grey skies, with an abyssal drop which threatens to swallow you from below. You will race around it a few times and pretty quickly achieve a time quick enough to grant you a bronze medal, at which point you will realise that the time required for a gold medal is 17 seconds faster, which seems impossible.

It's not, of course. That simple circuit contains several shortcuts to be found, and player movement is nuanced. You can be constantly building extra momentum once you've intuited the impossible physics of those bum-slides and wall-jumps. I didn't so much shave seconds off my time as hack them off in chunks as my understanding of the game increased.

With each lap completed, my actual body wound tighter. You might have caught yourself physically leaning into corners in a racing game before, but Vholume is about long leaps forward, about holding a wall-run as long as possible, about anticipating the next moment of release or contact. After half an hour I was angled forward in my chair, shoulders tight to my ears, legs pushing against the floor as if I might pounce over my desk, willing my avatar to go that little bit further and faster.

When this didn't work and my progress stalled, I hit the leaderboards, from which you can load the ghost of any other player. You can only see how they achieved their time if you can keep up with their ghost, but it's usually enough to catch a glimpse of some route or strategy you hadn't considered. Or you can do as I did and watch the above run by developer and journalist Nat Clayton over and over again until you feel practically sick with envy.

Conapts, the second track, is longer and in some ways more varied than the hub, looping around upon itself in surprising ways and leading you from rooftops through windows and into narrow corridors like a springy Jason Bourne. It's also strangely easier, less frequently deadly, and so I found I cracked its gold medal swiftly and then felt a lot less compulsion to keep refining my time.

I'm desperate for more of Vholume, though. It really does remind me of '90s shooters, just as Babbdi and Straftat did. For a start, there's nothing stopping you from veering off course in Vholume to explore the city beyond the circuit, which spills outward and can be navigated via jump- and boost-pads. There's a tower at the centre of the hub world which can be climbed with a little patience, and doing so feels like breaking beyond the confines of the skybox in cs_assault.

It also makes me think about concjumping, an activity I haven't considered in a decade or more. Quake's rocket jumping was its more popular ancestor, but concjumping was the Team Fortress Classic equivalent, in which players would use concussion grenades to propel themselves from one side of 2Fort to the other or to access previously unreachable heights. The difficulty and skill ceiling of concjumping was much higher than rocket jumping. because concussion grenades had a long countdown and players would need to prime them and chain explosive jumps together with perfect timing to complete other player's purpose-built challenge maps.

Vholume's skill floor is much more approachable and its skill ceiling seemingly much higher still, but playing it takes me back to being 15-years-old on concmap_r, neck tense and legs shaking, hurtling towards some other abyss.