VVVVVV 2010

Is it still worth playing?

A ship's six crew members, each named after a color that starts with V, crash land in an unknown dimension and are scattered, and as Captain Viridian you set out to find them. It is a 2010 PC platformer, later on the 3DS, the Switch and more. There is no jump: standing on a floor or a ceiling, you flip gravity and fall the other way, and that is the only move across more than four hundred rooms, each named by Bennett Foddy. It is drawn like a Commodore 64 game because that is what its author, Terry Cavanagh, grew up with. It is hard and kind, with a checkpoint every few screens and an instant retry, so a thousand deaths cost only seconds, and the exploration is nonlinear. Magnus Pålsson wrote the chiptune score. A level editor came in 2011, and Cavanagh put the source code on GitHub in 2020. The flip is still the one verb, with four hundred rooms built on it.