VVVVVV is a fun yet challenging experience.
We start our story with the crew of D. S. S. Souleye, who are flying through space, when some kind of interference forces their ship to crash in Dimension VVVVVV, separating all of the crew members. Now it's up to Captain Viridian, whose gender is unknown but will be referred at as "him", to track down the rest of his crew and find a way out of this crazy dimension so that they can get back home. There really isn't much to the story, but it gives enough reason to play through the game.
As I said, this is a platformer. The only difference from other platformers is that good ol' Captain Viridian can't jump. That's right, no jumping in this game. What he can do instead is flip gravity so he can walk on the ceiling or floor. While this is very simple in design, the game is able to throw numerous challenges at you to test your skill with it. On paper, this may seem easy to deal with, but the game is filled with spikes and enemies in order to stop you. What stops this game from becoming frustrating is the fact that it is also littered with checkpoints that so you're not penalized for dead. I think most would give up if these checkpoints weren't everywhere, I know I would.
Now if getting to the end of the game is not enough for you, there are a number of collectibles throughout the game. There are twenty shiny trinkets that can be found and used to unlock tunes from the game in the jukebox. Once you have all of them, you unlock the Secret Lab, which holds the Super Gravitron, a challenge where you keep flipping and have to dodge waves of enemies as long as you can, and trophies you can unlock. These shiny trinkets are a challenge in their own to get. While some can be simple to nab, like the one sitting behind the sad elephant, others will have you enraged, like "Edge Games" or "Doing Things The Hard Way" (aka Veni, Vidi, Vici), almost to the point that you want to give up.
After you beat the different levels in the game, you unlock time trials for each. Here you can test your skills as you try and complete the levels as fast as you can in the least amount of deaths while grabbing any shiny trinkets you can. If you are insanely good and managed to get an "S" rank on four of them, you can unlock no death mode (which I'll go over later in this review). I find these a nice challenge for when you do not want to play the entire game over just to experience their favorite part. You can also reply the intermission levels (levels you have to bet once you rescue a certain number of crew members), but they are not available as time trials. Still the game has enough going on to make it extremely replay-able.
Now, as I briefly mentioned earlier, the game does offer even more to do. One of these is called no death mode. Now, at first you might think this means you cannot die, but that's not true at all. Instead, it is a challenge to beat the entire game without dying once or the game will end. Now like I said at the start, you're bound to die around a thousand times on your first play through alone, that's if you go after some of the shiny trinkets. This challenge is near impossible to beat, but it is there if you think you are up to the challenge. Another cool mode is flip mode, which has the entire game flipped vertically. What is cool about this mode is that it can be used in conjunction with other play modes, like the Time Trails and no death mode, as well as the normal game.
The last thing this game has to offer is a level editor. Here you can make your own five by five (twenty five rooms) level. So now you can make as hard of a level as you want to and torture your friends with it. You can also play levels that other people have made, there are a few of them up that you can just click and play whenever you feel like it.
The graphical design of the game has a huge influence from the 1980s era of gaming, especially the Commodore 64. Even with this retro style of graphics, VVVVVV looks great, in my opinion. If you're a huge fan of retro games, or retro looking games, you'll love the feel that VVVVVV gives off. It makes a great use of colors throughout the game, each room having a different color to it, well when compared to the rooms nearby. Enemies are also very unique as they can be just about anything, from words to a bus to smoke clouds. You really can't get bored with all of the different types of enemies that are scattered throughout the game.
Going hand in hand with the retro style graphics is an amazing chiptune sound track. Magnus Pålsson, composer of VVVVVV, set out to make a sound track that got so engrained in your mind as you played, that you'd start humming along regardless if you were playing or not. To tell you the truth, I think it successes in his mission. While not every track is memorable in this sense, there are some tracks that I find myself humming to this day, namely "Positive Force". Even if they are not all as memorable, they are still well done and fit the mood of the game well.
Overall, VVVVVV is a great indie platformer. Despite the hard challenges you'll face, the game has a fun, retro feel to it that will bring you back for more and more, until you beat it (and then some more after that). The sound track is high on the list for me, it truly is great. For $5 USD (the current price) it's well worth the investment. I highly recommend this game to fans of platformers, indie games, or those who want a borderline sadistic experience.