March 2025’s Monthly Game Club game is VVVVVV by Terry Cavanagh. VVVVVV (pronounced “Vee”) is a puzzle platformer where you flip gravity to progress through the levels. It’s on just about every platform out there.
I just like Terry Cavanagh and this is a great game. Excellent aesthetic, catchy music, good sense of humour, accessible, short runtime, available on a bunch of platforms. It’s the perfect game club game (imo)!
My personal experience: I love this game! I beat it on the 3DS many years ago. I’d love to replay it with y’all. It’s charming and challenging. A lot of fun.
Oh cool! This is a neat game. I haven’t played it in a very, very long time. I can’t actually remember if I finished it or if I let myself get stuck doing things the hard way.
I own this game on everything[1] but today I chose to replay it on my iPhone. Just got all twenty trinkets #kingofgames#touchscreenveteran
Still a great game!
I even paid to unlock the full game on Kongregate back in 2011 lol. It cost 50 “Kreds” ($5), which I must’ve earned filling out sponsored surveys or something. I was ten and Flash games were the coolest, hottest games; I had to have it. ↩︎
I love VVVVVV. I had a 26" wide screen Toshiba CRT that I plugged my computer into to play it on when it came out. I replayed it a few years ago on 3DS and that’s a fun experience too.
That was for real the one room that did not mesh with my brain at all. I cried through it.
This game builds up so much goodwill generally that I didn’t mind some suffering though. It was pretty fun and cute.
A few years back I played a game on Switch called Infini which I now realize was heavily influenced by VVVVVV. During that time, I was going through significant health issues and was slowly trying to rebuild a lot of coordination and cognitive strength that had been depleted. And I feel like that game helped walk me through rebuilding my neurological health a little bit.
the other things of note I wanted to say that haven’t seen anyone say here is that Terry Cavanaugh released the source code to VVVVVV a few years back which is super cool!
I would also like to shout out the recent compilation of Terry’s other games
my favorite of the bunch is definitely Tiny Heist for what it’s worth
Oh hey, awesome! Big fan of this game, it’s one of a handful of games that I will just load up and play through once every year or two. I consider it something of a milestone in my gaming life as I became much more open to and interested in the indie scene around this time.
Terry Cavanagh is a cool and interesting figure in the indie scene, he’s put out a few really popular games over the years in different genres - the standouts being VVVVVV, Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons. He is a good communicator too, with a decent social media presence, reddit AMAs, etc. He maintains a blog that he intermittently updates with info about what he’s working on and for a while was regularly updating a blog called Terry’s Free Game of the Week highlighting cool free games in the indie space to check out.
I was in the process of writing about this stuff too but you beat me to it by mere moments!
VVVVVV was also one of the first games that opened me up to what I would call… a frictionless restart? method of difficulty mitigation. What I mean by that is, when you fail there is essentially no downtime before you are able to get back into the game. In games where you fail quickly and often, that downtime for me is a real fun-killer as you can often spend just as much or even more time waiting for stuff to load or navigating menus before you can play again. Lots of other games successfully employ this technique I would say - Hotline Miami springs to mind, or Super Meat Boy. To me it turns something that on its surface seems punishingly difficult into a much more chilled out experience, very difficult to put down.
I’ve been meaning to replay VVVVVV for years. I still listen to the soundtrack sometimes.
Does anyone happen to have that meme image about the price of the game at release? I thought I had saved it but I can’t find it in my image collection. I think the image I have in mind was on the side of the price being reasonable, comparing it to other things.
