Even better than herding rectangles, you say? It can’t be!
Never has a game’s title lent itself so readily to trite observations about its content. Mike Bithell’s follow-up to blocks-with-feelings breakthrough Thomas Was Alone offers an enormous serving of stuff, and just in case your appetite for sneaking around its neon environs isn’t satiated by the 100 story missions, there’s a level editor, too. Player-generated content is already suitably… voluminous, and particular gems find their way into the hallowed ‘Staff Picks’ collection to save you trawling through the Pac-Man clones.
Quantity isn’t joined at the hip to quality, of course, but in this case the Viking feast of content it offers is all underpinned by well-communicated game logic and a thoughtful toolset. Playing Rob Loxley, a modern day Robin Hood, you’ve hacked into the security database of an oppressive regime to run simulations of heists, aided by gregarious AI Alan. Why? Because those simulations are 1:1 replicas of actual secure facilities around the company, and by broadcasting his progress, Loxley’s effectively streaming a YouTube tutorial on how to rob from the rich, give to the poor, and take the power back – and getting more subscribers too.
Unlike Thomas Was Alone, voiceover takes a back seat to the action in Volume, emerging only every few levels to give the main storyline a little nudge. Each level is a playground for you to test out Loxley’s gadgetry, and make fools of the inhabiting guards, luring them one way then another, distracting them with sounds and visual cues to clear a path through. To beat a mission, you’ll need to collect every gemstone, after which an exit teleporter appears – ostensibly your task never gets more complicated than that. But with the addition of new enemy types – turrets, hounds, knights, booby-traps and the like – and fresh tools and tricks, the solution to that simple problem becomes ever more varied and devilish.
Creator Mike Bithell’s talent for beautifully uncomplicated design and steadily escalating challenge once again come to the fore here, as they did in his previous title. You’re introduced to a new mechanic in one level – say the Oud, a remotely triggered audio distraction device – then you get a couple more missions to explore its possibilities before the formula changes again. You might feel a bit more of a super-sleuth by the time you reach the final 25 chapters of story mode, but you’re never served up reheated ideas from earlier in the game.
When you feel ready to do a Mike Bithell impression of your own, the level creator lies in waiting. It’s simple as hell, (though could have done with a few brief tutorial screens to cover the basics, like the absence of a delete function), and has already been used to excellent effect by the best minds of Volume’s community. And us, though our ‘haphazard room full of hounds’ has yet to find inclusion in Volume’s Staff Picks.
Though Bithell’s been transparent about his game’s Metal Gear Solid influence, it’s endowed with its own, very British, character, and cleanly designed stealth mechanics that never induce wild frustration or suspicions of shonky AI. If you take your sneaking with a side of cyberpunk and subtlety, loosen off that belt buckle and prepare to gorge.