Volume

Played to platinum on PSN, happy to see the experience is similar on PC

I honestly can't remember which platform I bought this game for first - either way they both ended up as backlog items for a while despite my best intentions. Either way, I've played them both now and am wholly satisfied.

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The main game consists of 100 core levels. The gameplay is stealth, and it plays from an isometric view. The story runs along the lines of a kid being fed up with an oppressive regime; in an old abandoned warehouse he sets up a virtual infiltration, getting an old AI to offer up virtual representations of real-world secure facilities. By 'virtually' infiltrating all these places, and broadcasting it to the internet, he shows others how they can rise up against their rulers.

To be honest, I don't really need an excuse to play a stealth game, if I see what I hope is good gameplay. And I think it is very good.

It's true the initial levels are quick and easy so you're likely to flash through them in blinding speed, but the complexity ramps up well with the incremental addition of new features and tools. Before you know it you may find you have to wait and think it all through.

In the first level you grab some gems to activate the exit pad. Gradually defence units are added in, ranging from regular units with a gun and a vision cone showing what their range is, then there are turrets, units with a full 360 view, snipers, and really fast walls of meat with swords that end you as soon as they are close enough. As meaty as polygons can be at any rate.

Still further variety exists with distracting taps, toilets, and eventually whistling. Vaulting over low obstacles may take a while to be introduced but cupboards and floor grills make for good temporary hideouts, while special tools such as a throwable bugle that can be remote triggered, stun wire, cloak, speedy silent shoes (mute), disguise, and even a running decoy can help through the most challenging of the levels.

The game even has teleport pads, but features like this are cleverly explained away by the 2D nature of the levels and lack of stairs - even the AI insists it has limitations and you have to take the designs with an open mind. The AI and main character Rob Locksley (pun intended) are voiced, by have less and less dialogue as the levels progress. Some of the text (in-game lore) is quite clever, such as comments about the colour palette, or the introduction of lights (but only much later than when shadows got added), or the comments about the library or the castle with the banners.

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It's a fun game. I wouldn't go by my play time as a guide though as my first game was on PSN, so I have a bit of foreknowledge this time around. There is a little bit of mop-up in terms of achieves after the game is complete, but some levels are really good for grinding the last few out. I'm convinced some are glitchy with keeping track of numbers but they do eventually unlock.

If you like stealth and you like quality gaming, then you're likely already sold. It'll get your mind working. I don't regret buying it on two platforms, so you should at least buy it on one ;)

If you crave more Metal Gear Solid 1 VR missions, this is the closest non-MGS game your going to get.

Great indie stealth game. Not an easy genre to tackle gameplay wise. Pleasantly surprised by this one. Same great atmosphere, music, art direction, and sound design in every other Bithell game I've played. A dev studio worth following.

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Yeah, I like sneaking around; this game's pretty great.

Simple to learn, difficult to master. Once you get a handle on how the AI robots behave, you can have a lot of fun messing with them.

You remember those VR trainings in MGS? Think of that, but with less creative room for improvising and more solidified, intended solutions. Pretty okay, but not for me.

tl;dr almost fun gameplay ruined by constant waiting for items to charge.

I'm torn on Volume. At first, it has really nice stylized graphics and arcadey gameplay that comes really close to being great.

The first couple dozen levels are so are fast and tense stealth gaming bliss. It takes the feeling of slipping just behind guards in MGS and boils it down to its most bare elements with a focus on speed. It comes off sort of like VR missions but faster.

However, after you start getting more items, it starts to show its blemishes. See, these items have really slow recharge times. It takes maybe a few seconds. That alone is not enough to ruin the game, although having such slow items in an otherwise speedy game brings it down a bit. However, when you respawn or pick up an item for the first time, item charge gets reset to zero. That alone is not enough to ruin the game either, although it is at least sometimes annoying.

What really ruins it is that Volume has multiple checkpoints per level that allow you to fail frequently and get a better time. These checkpoints reset your item charge when you respawn at them. In addition, you can only hold one item, and often levels are tight and designed around challenges that are impassable without a certain item. What you're left with is failing regularly, then waiting a few seconds for your item to charge before you can do literally anything.

Waiting in stealth games can be fun, but there's no tension or danger. You're just waiting in perfect safety for your item to charge and nothing else. It's the same as if it you took 5 seconds to respawn every time you die at random checkpoints.

This combined with the fact that it's a speed game means you'll be resetting levels constantly. You'll be coming into a checkpoint with a full charge set up for a good time, make a little mistake, and have to reset the whole level and throw away the checkpoint. Permanent failure isn't a bad thing in a game, but when you're just trying to work on your time and you randomly have to reset depending on what item you got and the checkpoint position, it becomes out of your control, and losing control isn't fun.

Even if you're not working on your speed, it completely breaks the flow of the game. Sometimes I'll reset the level just so I can keep playing rather than wait around. Waiting around for an item to recharge after using it can also be frustrating, because you don't just want to respawn if you make a mistake with certain items.

A much better solution would be to have checkpoints perfectly capture your state - your item charge, the enemy positions, etc. - or to have faster charge times. I'm sure the designers could have figured something out.

I'm sure there's a reason for this design flaw. However, whatever it is, it's not worth sacrificing the tight gameplay of some levels.

It might sound like I'm nitpicking, but it really is a constant annoyance. I feel like I'm having trouble painting just how frustrating it is when you're actually playing. At least half of the levels at this point in the game are designed around items with slow recharge rates. Every time I get a level with a fast item, I have a blast. Every time it's a slow item, I can't help but groan. It really comes down to complete inconsistency in the pace of the game. I really thought I found a tight new game I could throw on while listening to music or podcasts and chill out, but at this point I don't know if I'll come back to Volume. I have a tough time enjoying a game with such great potential ruined by one glaring flaw.

I'm sure some players will disagree and still find lots of enjoyment out of Volume. I think if I read this review, I might still want to check it out, so I'm not sure who to recommend it to. I'm not an impatient gamer. I like tough games; Dark Souls, Mega Man, N++. This goes beyond artificial difficulty - there's not even any perceived difficulty, it's just waiting.

There's also extensive lore in the game. It's also possible to skip all of it if you want.

Overall: 4/10

Puzzles are fine, didn't blow my mind tho. Stealth gameplay is fun. Story didn't hook me but ain't the big focus either. I would say that the game overall is fine.

The fact that you have to wait for gadgets to charge right after respawning in a checkpoint struck me as very annoying. Waiting ain't a fun mechanic, worse if it's right after death.

It just feels too gamey for me. You go through a series of levels, separated by a stage select screen, each one taking a few minutes to beat, and it just doesn't flow together or cohere into an experience. The mechanics seem pretty bare bones too. It's more of a thesis on game design than an actual game.

Volume is a game that would actually benefit from being shorter.

You have about half-an-hour's worth of decent script spread out across several hours of gameplay, and the sense of progression - even with the levels as short as they are - becomes painfully slow. There are many - far too many - points where it's clear the map designer ran out of ideas and chose to simply make something "interesting," which would be fine, except that it breaks the fourth wall along with any sense of urgency in the story.

The story as a whole is quite underwhelming, and the ending is too predictable for the amount of time it takes to arrive. Finally, as a point of personal annoyance for me, there's an achievement for reading every bit of text in the game, and despite my best efforts, it looks like I missed one somewhere in ~7 hours of playtime that I have no desire to repeat.

If you're a big enough fan of stealth that you're interested in this game, you'll probably find the gameplay too shallow to be engaging. If you're a Bithell fan and you're buying it for the story, you'll find there isn't much of one. Overall, this game isn't terrible but is too mediocre for a thumbs-up.

Not recommended.

The game is interesting to say the very least. It does a decent job at mixing stealth and timing puzzles but feels like it has an identity crisis at moments. Overall it feels very polished and the controls, ui, menus, art, sound, and transitions are all top notch. I don't pay much attention to the story so if its good or not I can't really say.

Each level is pretty linear and are partitioned in a "mini-puzzle" fassion. Each level containing multiple "mini-puzzles" to avoid a bot in some way to collect gems. Collect all the gems to open a waypoint to complete the level. After each of these mini puzzles there is almost always a checkpoint. Checkpoints are so common it ends up in "I can just half ass this attempt with no consequence with the hopes it will somehow work". Maybe if they were stretched out a bit more but as is and the game feels easy even though I know I fail A LOT. Yes it helps doing the same thing over and over but actions lose their consequence and that feeling of "I'm repeating the same shit" is still there only you're doing a shorter task over and over. It's a double edged sword and I don't think the dev really got around it too well. Some levels you run backwards after aquiring a different gadget, disabling alarms, or something else but most of the mini puzzles you complete have no bearing on future events once completed only compounding the feel of linear levels.

The mechanics are varied and introduced slowly; new enemy types, different gadgets, enemy behavior, and environment props. The build up of these new mechanics feels really strechted out and makes the first couple of hours feel a bit slow but I had moments in every other level that kept me playing. Once all of the new enemy types and gadgets are introduced it really varies the gameplay. At the same they are more segregated than I'd like.

There are a few things wrong with the bots.There's a delay before the bots one shot you and if you break line of sight the delay is reset. This way you have a chance to run away. A short range, wider fov, peripheral viewcone would be nice even on pawns as you can easily slip around a corner or stay just out of his fov when you're close to a bot to go unoticed. Also the attempt to "search" is so basic its almost insulting. Go to the last known position of the player/sound, wait 2 seconds and return patroling. Later in the campaign the bots might activate an alarm if they see the player but the bots all go to the exact same location. Also the patrol routes are exact with no variation. All of these feel like decisions to adhere to the puzzle play style but again makes the game feel easy. This is the identity crisis I was talking about.

I feel really conflicted about this game but tried my best to articulate why. It's worth a buy on sale or if you like puzzle and stealth games. If you just like stealth games it might be best to wait for a sale even if the idea of adding puzzle elements sounds interesting because like I said it's a little too much puzzle not enough stealth for me atleast.

Expectations upon indie developers with a single major hit are perhaps the Damocles that keeps many of these creators stuck within their own strengths and genres to reiterate their past successes rather than branch away to different ventures.

It would be quite the accomplishment for Mike Bithell if Volume happened to handle being both an indirect successor to Thomas Was Alone in terms of gameplay and story depth from the 2-D introspective platformer about context into a simplified Metal Gear Solid game about its lack of context. Unfortunately, the execution falls short of handling both changes, which undermines the narrative praise from TWA and the gameplay potential within Volume.

A Story Told One Pixel At A Time

As someone who appreciates the arcady-stealth approach from early Metal Gear Solid titles as well as the playful sandbox stealth games that followed MGS3, Volume manages to scratch that itch of the playfulness of disbelief and puzzle-like manipulation of the original titles that hasn’t been seen by MGS for a long time. Some people may dismiss this derivative nature to the VR package of MGS1, but Volume goes to show that just because a game has obvious source material there is still merit in the imitation. Even the minimalistic design inspired by the VR Missions feels distinct for Volume as the attention to detail of gameplay and style learned from Thomas Was Alone sets it within a game of its own right.

It would be easy to claim Mr. Bithell chose to focus solely on refining the gameplay without regard to the narrative touches that made TWA so beloved by many people. However, it’s the emphasis on gameplay that tells the half of the story by what makes Volume a sequel in its own special way aside from a subtle reference about the “seven architects.”

The real beauty behind Volume as a “successor” to TWA is how both the gameplay and narrative accommodate the transition from 2D to 3D with all the small touches of characterization found within Volume’s usage of shape, design and color. Whereas with TWA these small details and narration cemented strong personalities that gave faceless shapes distinct traits, Volume utilizes these details to inform the player about the level-design of the simulation, the real-world effects of each level and the growth of the main characters, Locksley and Alan. The one-hundred levels tell more about the plot than all the text-logs and prompts of every mission screen as the layouts are an idealized window of Locksley’s view of his battle and Alan’s adaptations to the level's design are his clarifications into the real-world. Despite how disjointed the narrative is with its overall exposition, especially with the antagonists not given enough presence, this is the caliber of quality that puts these games’ minimalistic design into a league of its own.

V for Cyber-Vendetta

Having praised the small touches that tells so much about the game’s world and narrative, the actual plot behind Volume is far weaker because of how jarring the game’s events are to the real-world consequences it wants you to believe has happened. As much as the gameplay wants to work in tandem with the storytelling, it will constantly break any sense of disbelief from the simplest of unresolved questions to an option within the menu.

The set-up for Volume is you are playing an allegorical Robin Hood figure in the near-future where AIs have evolved to a point of competing with human labor as the resulting conflict has developed a dystopian England under a corporate entity that has monopolized the democratic process by merging the corrupt corporate interests with national security. Although we never really see the effects of this dystopian society on the AIs that emerged from TWA, it’s implied from the guards that they are as bound of their potential as the masses enslaved by their poverty. As intriguing of an idea for a retold classic, the process by which Locksley goes about to redistribute the wealth undermines the seriousness of this plot as he live-streams his simulated heists to steal abstract riches for the masses to do the dirty-work for him.

Sudden tone-shifts aside, the problem becomes worse when combined with the gameplay. As previously mentioned, one option allows you to set check-points rather than do a full-restart on capture, which doesn’t sound bad until you realize you can abuse those check-points to make progress just before you get caught. Furthermore, there are tons of gameplay elements that takes away all sense of realism such as enemies’ cone vision shortcomings and lacking peripheral vision, the unreal usage of gimmicks in each level like shadows, and the usage of sci-fi cyberworld gadgets. Even if you could ignore all these conflicts as “It’s a game” the amount of time given for the story that plays its events out as well as the fact that a public stream is not being countered by Big Brother is beyond believable.

To describe the matter more succinctly, many games nowadays have used the fourth-wall to immerse the player with the consequences they make whereas Volume is the Deadpool of video-games where it is so immersed in breaking the fourth-wall it’s hard to take anything seriously.

Simplicity Limited Not By Ingenuity But Timidity

As for gameplay, however, how does Volume hold up? The basic gameplay is a polished version of arcade-stealth controls that annoying lacks a run button but offers a whistle button to compensate for your limited speed with various gadgets, environmental effects and superb level-design. No level or gadget feels wasted in exploring the game to its fullest potential amidst its many constraints that will bother avid fans of Metal Gear Solid titles.

Perhaps this was done to not overwhelm the player with so many tools to use for every level, but the biggest problem with Volume’s gameplay is the one-item limitation for gadgets. The game plays so close to MGS and mimics its VR-aesthetic; however, it fails to capitalize on the levels of interactivity that helps mitigate the linearity of these games with open-ended tools of chaos. Even if this limitation was to keep the game from becoming too complicated or exploitative with abilities like cloaking, the game already requires you to pick-up gadgets in every level and there is a resource-meter to prevent spam abuse. (This resource meter is also an annoying anchor to gameplay as you have to wait for a full recharge every time you respawn, regardless if it’s ready for use.) Another form of anchoring the player is the usage of banter within levels that can last up to 90 seconds without interruptions when caught and the blaring usage of chase-music that baffles me how the alert-phase for a MGS-inspired game could get it so wrong with how abrupt it is and its lack of pace. (Even the name Volume feels misplaced in a game that has no sound mechanics.)

When it comes to the issues of Volume, it’s not one single matter that breaks the appeal of the game but the many small oversights and blunders that keeps a good game from being great.

Next Time, Turn the Volume Up 11

As unlikely as the possibility of there being a direct sequel to Volume—especially if you consider how much each game has deviated in this “series” as well as the fact how the one-hundred levels explored the limitations to let the built-in editor and community explore whatever was left—I am excited to see what Mr. Bithell has in mind as there were a lot of lessons gained from Volume and a lot more left to be learned. The only thing I can hope is that any future limitations have more confidence behind them and seek to push the potential of whatever grand idea is in store.

Great stealth game that is heavily influenced by Metal Gear Solid (and especially its VR missions). Just like in Mike Bithell's previous game (Thomas Was Alone), the gameplay is simple and well executed while the graphics is minimalistic but stylish.

Pros:
+ Interesting story set in the future totalitarian UK
+ Stealth gameplay reduced to its core that's quite fun. Camera and controls are excellent.
+ Music during the normal play when there's no alarm
+ Includes in-game level editor where you can build your own levels and share them with community

Cons:
- There are only several levels where more than 1 gadget can be used. As a result, the solutions are most of the time pretty straightforward.
- Select few levels cannot be beaten without being detected on purpose. Or at least I did not find the way.
- Some of the music that starts playing when you are detected starts with a shocking "BWAAAAAM" and is also too loud. After getting seen/caught a few times it can get annoying; at times I played with sound very low or completely off which is a shame because I could not enjoy the normal music.

Despite the flaws, the game has its qualities and can be recommended to fans of the stealth genre.

Solid gameplay, smooth graphics. A nice game to blast through in a few sittings, and there is user made content if you feel the need to go further. Only a handful of the levels were pretty challenging, but still very enjoyable overall. The story could use a little help in being made clear to the player, but you get the gist of what's happening. I'd be interested in seeing what story develops out of a sequel.

Volume is a slow and patient game, and is rarely frustrating. What it lacks in difficulty, it makes up for in quantity: none of the levels posed much of a challenge (the only time I was over the "par" time was when I was listening to the story bits), but there are 100 levels in the "Core" story. Beyond that, there are tons of user made levels, and you can find the best through the Staff Picks section.

The pacing of the story does feel a bit drawn out, largely because there is so much content in the "Core" story - you get conversations every 5 or so levels, and you can't just sprint through levels to get more of the story. This makes getting to the continuation of a cliffhanger conversation a little tedious feeling.

Volume also controls brilliantly with the Steam Controller - it has minimal button interactions, but being able to use the right haptic pad as a mouse, while the rest of the controller functions as a Xbox controller, is very useful. The grip buttons also mean you can re-bind actions to a more easy to reach/easier to hold location (I moved the "use cover" command from the trigger to the grip, as it needed to be held).

Volume is not what I thought it would be but is still a well-made game. I had envisioned some sort of top-down Mark of the Ninja type stealth game. Instead, Volume presents a progressively harder series of challenge maps. I've played for an hour and all the ones I've seen are quite small, as in they can be beaten on your first run through in anywhere from 10 to 90 seconds. There is a story but it's kind of meh and involves a lot of side reading.

My main disappointment is the focus isn't so much on finishing the levels as it is doing it as quickly as possible to try and compete on the leaderboards. If you're like me and don't care so much about leaderboards, you will blow through a lot of levels and they won't leave much of an impression on you. So far each level I played was pretty easy as long as I took my time. The only difficulty stems from trying to rush through a map.

However, I like the graphics, the spoken dialogue, the music, the virtual atmosphere, and the gameplay & controls were designed well (if you're using a gamepad, at least; haven't tried with keyboard controls). They also have a level editor and allow people to post online challege maps. And if you DO like leaderboards and speed runs, this will be a real treat for you.

TL;DR
Good game, just not my cup of tea.

a brilliant game currently marred by a couple of irritating bugs. a patch or two from the dev (who really seems to care about his work in a rare and brilliant way) and we'll have one of the best stealth games since Metal Gear Solid on the PS1

Volume combines an eclectic cast of voice actors with poor delivery and poor characterisation. Charlie McDonnell plays his character well, but the character is "twee British person who streams a video game", and those lines manage to be both cringeworthy and repetitive. The world-building is severly hampered by it's rigid adherence to a "retro" aesthetic, with all evidence of a future Britain controlled by a dictator being limited to 3 line paragraphs before each mission and the mission spaces themselves are completely utilitarian "house", "office" or "museum" spaces. There is no further variation in level style, but you wouldn't notice because those 3 spaces look almost identical anyway.

The stealth mechanics are expected to be innovative but instead boil down to "the noisemakers" that stealth games have employed for years and various flavours of invisibility/disguises. Unlike other stealth games though, those noisemakers are on an obnoxiously long cooldown which you must wait for after every death, adding another 15 seconds to the respawn time. In desperation, you may find yourself running at enemies, chrouching intermittently around non-descript blocks to temporarily break line of sight to avoid instant death before leaping at a checkpoint that will reset the guards' positions while moving yours further. This is the most fun the game gets, but the results are inconsistent and the fact that the developer has announced that he wants to remove this feature indicates that is not intentional. Volume also features much slower movement than other excellent action/stealth games available on Steam at the moment, which will leave you sitting on the edge of your seat not because the action is tense but because "Rob Locksley" refuses to stop crouching for any situation and move a little faster when he has a gun trained on him.

The Robin Hood imagery is not just unsubtle, it's spotlighted multiple times. In fact, the game has a habit of highlighting it's own flaws, with a cameo starring Jim Sterling being particularly galling as he completely demolishes the game's plot with his characteristic flourishes. The game awkwardly acknowledges this and then continues on, doing little to rectify its issues. There's been a lot of talk about the game's humour, and not the good kind. It makes jabs at today's streaming culture but doesn't follow it up with a message, and it briefly flirts with the meta-humour found in Thomas Was Alone, but that tragically fails when the game is no longer examining the nature of platformers, as in Thomas Was Alone, but instead turning inwards on it's own mistakes. These issues are compounded by the inclusion of 100 levels, as the talent has to be spread thin among endless identical corridors. I stopped playing at around 50% and the game had already outstayed it's welcome by about 2 hours. I knew it was around 50% because the game proudly tells you how far you've progressed. If the game was enjoyable, then it would feel like an unwelcome harbinger of when the experience will be over. The game is not enjoyable.

If you are looking for a stealth game featuring comedic elements, I would reccomend Gunpoint.
If you are looking for leaderboards in a stealth setting, I would reccomend Monaco.
If you are looking for a stealth game set in the near-future featuring mega-corporations, I would reccomend Invisible Inc.
If you are looking for meta-humour (humour about the game itself), I'd reccomend Bithell's own Thomas Was Alone.
If you are looking for geometric people shooting at you, I would reccomend the upcoming SUPERHOT.
If you are looking for British People, Charlie McDonnell vlogs on Youtube at charlieissocoollike.

The above games are all much cheaper than Bithell's offering and are all made by independent studios with smaller budgets than Volume's. Maybe one day we can get an update to Volume, offering faster movement for abilities be usuable immediately after spawning as well as lowering their cooldown and to balance that smarter AI that can't be ignored by briefly touching a wall. Then this game might be able to compete with some of the stealth antics offered above, even if other aspects pail in comparison. Maybe Bithell could call it Volume II.

Volume is a stealth game where the main objective is to sneak your way through the levels, navigating around guards using different means such as whistling, hiding, throwing a distraction grenade type thing etc. Ultimately, the goal of the entire level is to collect all of the cones and reach the exit. There are 100 levels of the main story which will take you around 10hrs to complete. Every few levels a new element is added to the game which will change the way you play out the next few levels while some narrative/story telling goes on.

Firstly, I want to talk about positives. The games option menu is good. It's perfect and what you should expect from a game like this. Different sliders for volume, AA, shadow settings, resolution and fs/windowed. All keys are remappable (for keyboard). I also really like the art style. It's really unique, colourful and visually appealing.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of negatives for me. (Please remember this is my personal opinion so please keep that in mind and be respectful).
Ok first the voice acting. The voice acting of the robot (Alan) is well done. I believe it's the same voice that narrated TWA. But then your characters voice (Locksley/Rob) is a bit meh to be honest. As soon as he says a few lines it completely breaks the immersion of the game for me.

Secondly, I would like to talk about the AI. The AI seem to suffer from a very serious case of short sightedness. Their entire view is about 2m in length and spews out in a cone shape. This means you can literally stand 2.1m in length away from them and bingo! They can't even see you! Or you can stand right by the side of them (clearly being in their peripheral vision) but they won't know any different! Ok, I really like the fact that if you do get in the view cone, the enemies begin to chase you down. A really nice element. This is where you can try to run away from them and avoid being in their sights for too long otherwise you fail the level. The AI on this is a bit so so. At one point a guard was right on my tail and I reached a dead end. So, I decided to go up against the only wall in the dead end room and yeap the AI couldn't for the life of him work out where I had gone! It's like I vanished!

I'm also just going to add a little section here. It's a "Stealth game" but to be honest, it's pretty linear. Everything is kinda layed out for you and there only really seems to be one way of doing particular sections. For me, this is one of the most important aspects of a stealth game. Having the freedom to choose exactly how I progress through the level, but unfortunately that seems to be missing from this game.

Finally, coming from the creator of TWA (which had an excellent story) I was a little disappointed with this. I couldn't seem to get to grips with the story of the game and the notes dotted throughout the levels didn’t really seem to add much to the story. The whole story felt a bit disjointed.

Worth £15? Well, to be fair you get quite a lot of content for £15 so I think that is well justified. You also have online, and a level editor which is an excellent addition to this game. But for me, it doesn't quite do it. It needs more depth. I want the freedom to approach levels how I want to, play the way I want to.

(Again, please bear in mind that this is my opinion, and all I ask is to be respectful towards it. Because hey, not everyone is going to like the same games) :)

Volume is Metal Gear Solid burned down to it's very core, keeping it simple with classic stealth game tropes but not losing the fun in the process. I have been looking forward to playing Volume for a long time, as I am a big fan of it's creator Mike Bithell, who also created Thomas Was Alone.

Instead of taking place in large areas with different rooms, Volume is set in multiple small levels. Each one has a different colour scheme and layout, so you don't have to worry about getting bored quickly. The game has a very minimalistic (cheap, hehe) design, similar to Thomas Was Alone, but in a 3D enviroment. All in all, Volume is a beautiful game. However, I must note that a lack of a death animation or even sound effect means that death has almost zero impact. The fact that all items aren't already loaded when you pick them up or respawn means that you sometimes also have to wait around for them to hurry up so you can use them.

It is also oozing with charm, with spot-on voice acting featuring not only multiple YouTubers such as Charlie McDonnell, Jim Sterling and Dan Bull, but also Andy Serkis, from Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes fame. The dialogue is brilliantly written, with humour often tucked in. There is also plenty of backstory to read while wondering through the levels, which adds a nice layer of mystery to the game's plot.

For the speedrunners out there, leaderboards for the time it takes to complete a level are placed to add a layer of challenge to the already rather difficult game. I wouldn't advise rushing through it though: take your time to marvel at the visuals, laugh at the dialogue and read through the creative backstorys.

Everything about Volume reeks of Mike Bithell, from the design to the wonderful music, composed by Thomas Was Alone composer David Housden. If you liked Thomas Was Alone or the Metal Gear Solid series, you will adore Volume.

EDIT: Unfortunately, some negative stuff, but just tiny nit-picks in the general scheme of things. You should be warned that I have found a rather glaring issue with the checkpoint system, which almost feels like cheating. It involves plassing through a checkpoint to save your progress while being chased by a guard. The guards sometimesalso don't do what they're supposed to do when using an item called the "gimmick", which is supposed to distract the guard by making them look at a certain place and note respond to sound. On numerous occassions, however, the guards have moved to where the sound came from, even though the visions cone stayed focus, and on others they have straight up ignored the gimmick when they hear a sound. The not-so-smooth transition between the standard stealth music track and the "seen" track is rather irritating after a while, and Charlie McDonnell's portrayal of the main protagonist can get a little I-don't-really-care-anymore. I wish I didn't have to say negative things about Volume, I really do.

Great stealth/puzzle game with insane narration and great looking shadows and fragmenting textures.

Pros:
-Beautiful
-Offline play
-Controller compatible
-Havent encountered a bug
-User content;endless gameplay

Cons:
-Menu is slow with a controller and there are text and numbers everyhwere
-2gb required for graphics, holy shit no wonder vita is late...
-A little repetitive
-Devs' highscores already on the board, making users a little left out

Overall I'd rate 7.5/10