The UFO 50 Diaries: Velgress
Exploring the limits of the human psyche, one jump at a time
On paper Velgress sounds absolutely fucking horrible. A platformer where you’re racing against certain death, where every surface is as brittle as your ego and death always sends you right back to the start.
Frayed nerves, shouting expletives, getting caught in a vicious failure cycle, it has all the makings of a game that gets touched once for three minutes then never looked at again.
I can’t stop playing it.
From the very first second you play, it’s incredibly clear that this is an Ojiro Fumoto game. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he’s the developer of Downwell and Poinpy, a brilliant designer of needlepoint precision platformers with extremely moreish gameplay loops.
I have sank almost as much time into Downwell as I have Spelunky, it’s a game that just feels really good to play even as it rushes itself to kick your ass.
It’s hard to pinpoint what these addictive qualities are for a game like this. Unlike Spelunky, Fumoto’s experiences are extremely limited on the procgen front. There aren’t an awful lot of moving parts.
They are games about instinct, about twitch reflexes and reading your environment so quickly that you find yourself acting before you’ve even figured out what you want to do. Success rarely factors into it, but within that small constituency of components lies a remarkable amount of synergy.
Everything enthralling about a Roguelike, now pint size and running at a million miles an hour.
Velgress is very much cut from the same cloth, and it’s approach to these moving parts is simple, smart and extremely sophisticated. The spiked rolling pin of death that creeps up beneath you but only moves when you do, coupled with an environment that courts no such courtesy means that you have this bizarre push-pull where your actions will always be your undoing, but yet your environment determines how you choose.
There’s probably a spot of social commentary in there, right?
Needless to say, as a big Downwell head, I dug this a lot. Losing myself in the maze of clouds, outcrops, magic chests and those classic Mossmouth dickhead bats that always end up ruining your day.
It’s also one of the few games I’ve played where the double jump has been factored into the level geometry in more than one way, meaning that it can be as much a liability as it is a boon. Sometimes it’s better to stick to a few little hops.
One of the things Velgress does to encourage you to keep going even as it strives to crush you every second is that it records how far up you get, a dotted line appears at the highest point to let you know ‘hey, you might not have escaped yet, but you’re getting there!’.
Of course the game also doesn’t tell you how high up you have to go, so this could equally be just a really cruel ploy.
Good game. I enjoyed it way more than I was expecting to.
It's very funny to find out that this game was, in fact, not designed by Ojiro Fumoto
It's just Derek Yu.
Ojiro apparently was not even a part of the project when it was being designed.
The only game that Ojiro was the main designer for is Seaside Drive. He worked on a couple others, such as helping with Mooncat, but Seaside Drive is his.