Vholume shines far more as an atmospheric art piece than as a parkour game.
This game initially came under my radar, as one of the creators of it, Léonard Lemaitre, worked on STRAFTAT, which is a superb arena shooter. Now that it's out, it looks cool, and my Twitter timeline won't stop talking about it, I decided to give it a try.
Vholume is a first-person parkour game about traversing desolate, atmospheric landscapes. Or maybe ignoring all of that and going as fast as possible?
I'm not sure... and I'm not exactly certain the devs know either.
The first level of the game takes place in back alleys of a city that starts and ends in the same spot, sort of looping indefinitely. It reminds me a lot of the Titanfall 2 tutorial. It's a fantastic playground that teaches you the basics of the movement and allows you to immediately learn the intricacies of the slide-jump-wall tech, which is basically the main way to gain speed.
Once a level is over, you are presented with a global leaderboard for it, your own time, and medals which you either already obtained or can obtain depending on the completion speed. This signals to me that this is a speedrun game. A game where you want to complete the level as quickly as possible, retaining as much momentum as you possibly can throughout it. I had a ton of fun replaying the first level, resulting in better and better times.
But from the very next level, something changes. You go through it as you did in the previous one, until you reach.... stairs? Around 15 seconds into the level, you are met with a staircase going up, which completely kills your momentum. You can't really go over them either as it's a very narrow hallway with a low ceiling.
I thought it was a weird decision, but I disregarded it and kept going.
The following levels continue this tradition, with the level design getting weirder and more complex. Most of the levels will become an upwards journey; You will be required to constantly jump to higher vantage points and all the structural elements themselves will be titled upwards. Small patches of debris might block your wallrun and cause frustration instead of simply adding to the storytelling.
While some levels will offer a pleasant respite, simply allowing you to play the fast parkour game, others become just borderline unplayable, like the miserable "vestiges". It's a collection of broken-down columns, that are not only extremely confusing to traverse, but also very ugly and uninspired visually. I don't think I should ever be asking myself "Where do I go now?" in a game like this.
At this point, I have completely given up on the speedrun aspect of the game and decided to submerge myself in the atmosphere of the game, taking it in as a slightly faster walking simulator, and I have enjoyed that part way more.
While the brutalist, raw concrete architecture is slowly getting stale by now, the game does offer variety in its presentation. Dream-like, edge-of-the-world views, monumental industrial fans, rusty scaffolding, and structures long forgotten by everyone aside from the flora and fauna are a lonely, but glad sight.
They certainly nailed the eerie atmosphere, especially in terms of music.
The ambience is pushed to its limit when you hear the reversed synths, sombre keys, and submerged bass, as a funereal guitar reverberates through your head, all while the fog smothers your thoughts.
Vholume is not a bad game, it's actually really good in some aspects, but I feel like the developers were kind of split on what type of game they wanted to make. Or I simply don't understand their vision. While the movement system and post level screen incentivizes going fast, the level design and the atmospheric environments tell a different story.
Regardless of everything I disliked, I still recommend Vholume on the basis of it being cheap and having regional pricing in my country, which is something I will always appreciate deeply.
