Titanfall 2’s gauntlet is a singular location. It is technically a small tutorial and obstacle course, one that instructs you on the unique traversal mechanisms of the game. But when Respawn made it they added a twist, a timer and leaderboard, and over the years people have gotten unreasonably good at breaking it. Nothing is quite like Titanfall 2 generally, and the gauntlet specifically, except the beta release of VHOLUME, which is one of many reasons why I must urge you to play it if you haven’t.
Back to the streets that raised me.
The movement in VHOLUME, an moody indie parkour simulator, instantly brings to mind Mirror’s Edge – it is impossible not to, given the game’s sheer influence on the first person parkour subgenre – as well as Counter-Strike surfing. You are in a concrete alley of impossible buildings and walkways suspended miles in the air, and the game instructs you to go forward. If you follow the path organically to the end, you are looped squarely back where you started and, just like Titanfall 2’s gauntlet, the game tells you your time. From here you may continue to challenge the loop again against an online leaderboard. Each run is uploaded to a common database, and you can load the ghost of any other runner into it. The game will also begin to unlock several options, including a fast shortcut to the roofs above, and another area called the “conapts.” There is also a Discord you can join, should you choose to live the life of the runner.
VHOLUME is developed by Nathan Grange, Niels Tiercelin and Léonard Lemaitre. Lemaitre co-created the free exploration adventure game Babbdi and the hyperspeed indie arena shooter STRAFTAT. If you have played neither and own a PC I urge you to play both. Though tonally quite different than this game, DNA from both has found its way into Vholume.
STRAFTAT in particular is a must download – it is a grotesque indie take on Quake III Arena and UT2004. It is a tonal cousin to Cruelty Squad, set entirely to Jungle bangers, and costs you nothing except maybe the reasonable and entirely optional DLC packs. Few games have done as good a job of simulating the spirit of a LAN party of teens in 2004 constantly playing a free demo because none of them can afford to pay retail.
Heaters.
Vholume is not a full game yet, but I have hopes for what it will become. The beta is more a proof of concept, an amalgamation of buildings someplace in the tonal and architectural liminality between Ico and Half Life 2. It is that sand colored, Lebbeus Woods-by-way-of-Source-Engine texture that is both unearthly and instantly familiar if you ever owned a GeForce card. VHOLUME’s Steam page claims it is a “melancholic first-person parkour adventure set in a dystopian brutalist city where bureaucracy turns a simple task into an odyssey.” VHOLUME’s beta is a raw and unfinished space, but the vibes have never been finer. The structures are rough and alien, like City of Lost Children, Blame! or Texnolyzed. An ambient track by 1000eyes coos in the background like a Buddhist prayer machine.
I have been thinking about Titanfall 2 slightly more than usual. Part of this is the avoidable collapse of Highguard, but also because of the tacit way that Titanfall 2 haunts everything anyone involved with it will ever do again. So many parts of that game are precious and singular, and no game moves like it. The r/titanfall subreddit has, over the years, devolved into a self-depricating support forum for people who know the difficulties of getting another game like that, but have to hope in their hearts that they will.
There is a hauntological nature to this obsession that I share, an unknowable counterfactual of what could be if they made another Titanfall instead of doing literally anything else, like a free to play hero shooter. Like Ninja Gaiden 4, I cannot say they would be happy with what they would eventually get, because games exist in a specific context, and getting the juice back and having the game be a hit is less achievable than any of us would like, doubly so when you consider how rough a launch Titanfall 2 itself had.
What is perhaps more reasonable is that someone else might find a sliver of what made that game special, even the tutorial, refine it, and make something wholly new from that. I cannot say as of now that V will succeed, but the soul of the gauntlet lives on in its beta.
