Venineth is a single-player game focusing on unraveling the mysteries of ancient alien technology, somewhere in the universe via exploration, platforming, and puzzle-solving, in a dangerous, distant worlds.
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The vibes are immaculate.
This game has great visuals, and the music that (usually) accompanied it combined for a great Experience™, but the Marble physics completely detracted me out the game so much as to not feel good anymore.
The first two levels are great showcases into the beauty this can show, then the third level rears its head and shows you this will be long and frustrating. I just decided I was gonna be extremely pissed at how this ball controls for the entire game and stopped playing. It asks for precise platforming on a momentum based ball that feels bad. (Also the music cut out and it was completely silent, idk if that was intentional or not but the lack of the music was also pissing me off).
I don't even particularly hate the ball being a hostile entity to control because it leans more into the alien (much like the UI being almost non-readable); it all fits into a vibe. But, it's just too much for me to bear.
The first two levels are great showcases into the beauty this can show, then the third level rears its head and shows you this will be long and frustrating. I just decided I was gonna be extremely pissed at how this ball controls for the entire game and stopped playing. It asks for precise platforming on a momentum based ball that feels bad. (Also the music cut out and it was completely silent, idk if that was intentional or not but the lack of the music was also pissing me off).
I don't even particularly hate the ball being a hostile entity to control because it leans more into the alien (much like the UI being almost non-readable); it all fits into a vibe. But, it's just too much for me to bear.
I say completed, it broke literal inches from the ending so I just watched it on youtube lol.
It's fun. if someone tells you it has a story fucking run from them.
It's fun. if someone tells you it has a story fucking run from them.
WHY is the ui like that
One cannot live on vibes alone.
It goes without saying that Venineth is absurdly beautiful. Impossible landscapes stetch into the far distace, mysteriously floating shapes and vast mountains ripped straight from demoscene visuals of the 90s, whilst vast unknown planets hang in the skybox and light jungle plays in the background, and your mysterious little ball rolls across all of it.
And the game's opening sequence, a joyous voyage in through an impossible valley, guided only by the curves of this demoscene land before you enter it's main hub, is absolutely joyous. It's absurdly immersive, fast and just really gets the whole thing across. I thought at that stage, going into the hub, i would love Venineth, even if a few cracks were beginning to show on the surface.
But god knows why, but the rest of the game is not like that. It feels like there are a dozen different directions that could have been taken with the "marble ventures over the coolest landscape ever". Something like an extension of the opening where the game was focused entirely on the exploration and wandering. Something like monkey ball which is arcade based and consists of short levels in a set, hell, even something like Sanic ball where the bizzare environments form the playground for a racing game of extreme speed and sick music. But nah the formula chosen for Venineth is just bad. It's formula is extremely long levels of very small scale puzzle platforming, often on the same bunch of bridges and switch assets and the same doors that block your way. And when i say long, I mean it. You're looking at an hour for some of these levels, slowly chipping away at uninteresting puzzles that mostly challenge your ability to work with wonky controls at low speed. Monkey ball this aint.
And it gets worse, because the cracks in the aesthetic really start to show when you stop barrelling through these worlds and start looking at them from 3 feet away to judge an awkward jump. Texture resolution is pretty low even on max which makes some stuff look so not so great up close, there's a pretty silly amount of asset reuse, some effects look outright awful (Stage 2's Lava is such a poor effect that it completely ruins the levels atmosphere, what were they thinking). These are things that absolutely would go unnoticed by me if they were going by quickly, i wasnt forced to deal with them for an hour, or if they served more as a background to the core puzzle challenges like in monkey ball. But no. Must also be said the framerate is really wonky - I'm playing on steam deck and it will go from over 60 to like 20 in a small turn of the camera. It's telling that the game straight up has an option for a 30fps cap just to keep things consistent, and it's like the only straight up latin text in the entire game.
The aesthetic and general vibe does carry it an awful long way. To the point where if this game had the gameplay of a point-to-point Sanic Ball, which isnt even good, i'd probaly give it 4 and a half stars. But instead it seems to shove your face in all it's flaws on go on interminably.
All it really does in the end is make me wish Arthur Maclean's Mercury had higher resolution backgrounds...
It goes without saying that Venineth is absurdly beautiful. Impossible landscapes stetch into the far distace, mysteriously floating shapes and vast mountains ripped straight from demoscene visuals of the 90s, whilst vast unknown planets hang in the skybox and light jungle plays in the background, and your mysterious little ball rolls across all of it.
And the game's opening sequence, a joyous voyage in through an impossible valley, guided only by the curves of this demoscene land before you enter it's main hub, is absolutely joyous. It's absurdly immersive, fast and just really gets the whole thing across. I thought at that stage, going into the hub, i would love Venineth, even if a few cracks were beginning to show on the surface.
But god knows why, but the rest of the game is not like that. It feels like there are a dozen different directions that could have been taken with the "marble ventures over the coolest landscape ever". Something like an extension of the opening where the game was focused entirely on the exploration and wandering. Something like monkey ball which is arcade based and consists of short levels in a set, hell, even something like Sanic ball where the bizzare environments form the playground for a racing game of extreme speed and sick music. But nah the formula chosen for Venineth is just bad. It's formula is extremely long levels of very small scale puzzle platforming, often on the same bunch of bridges and switch assets and the same doors that block your way. And when i say long, I mean it. You're looking at an hour for some of these levels, slowly chipping away at uninteresting puzzles that mostly challenge your ability to work with wonky controls at low speed. Monkey ball this aint.
And it gets worse, because the cracks in the aesthetic really start to show when you stop barrelling through these worlds and start looking at them from 3 feet away to judge an awkward jump. Texture resolution is pretty low even on max which makes some stuff look so not so great up close, there's a pretty silly amount of asset reuse, some effects look outright awful (Stage 2's Lava is such a poor effect that it completely ruins the levels atmosphere, what were they thinking). These are things that absolutely would go unnoticed by me if they were going by quickly, i wasnt forced to deal with them for an hour, or if they served more as a background to the core puzzle challenges like in monkey ball. But no. Must also be said the framerate is really wonky - I'm playing on steam deck and it will go from over 60 to like 20 in a small turn of the camera. It's telling that the game straight up has an option for a 30fps cap just to keep things consistent, and it's like the only straight up latin text in the entire game.
The aesthetic and general vibe does carry it an awful long way. To the point where if this game had the gameplay of a point-to-point Sanic Ball, which isnt even good, i'd probaly give it 4 and a half stars. But instead it seems to shove your face in all it's flaws on go on interminably.
All it really does in the end is make me wish Arthur Maclean's Mercury had higher resolution backgrounds...
I Shoulda Never Smoke That Shit Now Im At Peshay Studio Set (1996)
A genuinely lovely and methodical puzzle platformer that leans into abstraction without sacrificing its internal logic for the player's sake. Much the same as The Witness, Popol Maya, and even Clutter 1000, Venineth is entirely atextual, its ruleset deduced purely through play. Whereas those other titles can lead to frustration and walls when their logic is not understood, Venineth makes every effort to delicately railroad the player towards their objective. These enormous levels might seem incomprehensible in scale at first, but clever design and the nature of the respawn system ensures that progress is always made, never undone. Patience can certainly be worn down -- one segment near the end of the game had me wandering in one locale for over an hour because I had missed an object -- but the experience on the whole is meditative enough to encourage slowing down and thoughtfully considering what lay before you. And if the atmosphere itself does not suggest such a pace, your immeasurable momentum does.
Gameplay isn't where Venineth shines brightest. Its landscapes are undoubtedly the best I have seen in possibly any game. The dev team's Polish background is abundantly clear through sweeping vistas and reflective corridors that seem ripped straight from the mid-2000's demoscene. Impossible geometric hyperstructures float above eternal seas of clouds, cubes intersect in perpetuity, hexagonal prisms stretch like unceasing columns of basalt. Yet even as an Unreal Engine 4 title, this feels less like a tech-demo and more like a set of playable Bryce renders. There is a specificity to its textures and lighting that encapsulates a simultaneously horrifying and heart-warming liminality. The abutting of perfect cones, cubes, tori, and spheres against the natural world exacerbates this. It is a (post?/hyper?)mechanical imposition on places not our own. The only evidences of life are those geometries, the occasional fleshy nodule, rare flittering yellow wings in the sky. All the while, space ambient music is your steady companion, sometimes puncuated by DnB. The absence of tracker music is to Venineth's benefit, as its presence would no doubt make the illusion err on the side of nostalgiabaiting.
By no means for everyone, by all means for me.
A genuinely lovely and methodical puzzle platformer that leans into abstraction without sacrificing its internal logic for the player's sake. Much the same as The Witness, Popol Maya, and even Clutter 1000, Venineth is entirely atextual, its ruleset deduced purely through play. Whereas those other titles can lead to frustration and walls when their logic is not understood, Venineth makes every effort to delicately railroad the player towards their objective. These enormous levels might seem incomprehensible in scale at first, but clever design and the nature of the respawn system ensures that progress is always made, never undone. Patience can certainly be worn down -- one segment near the end of the game had me wandering in one locale for over an hour because I had missed an object -- but the experience on the whole is meditative enough to encourage slowing down and thoughtfully considering what lay before you. And if the atmosphere itself does not suggest such a pace, your immeasurable momentum does.
Gameplay isn't where Venineth shines brightest. Its landscapes are undoubtedly the best I have seen in possibly any game. The dev team's Polish background is abundantly clear through sweeping vistas and reflective corridors that seem ripped straight from the mid-2000's demoscene. Impossible geometric hyperstructures float above eternal seas of clouds, cubes intersect in perpetuity, hexagonal prisms stretch like unceasing columns of basalt. Yet even as an Unreal Engine 4 title, this feels less like a tech-demo and more like a set of playable Bryce renders. There is a specificity to its textures and lighting that encapsulates a simultaneously horrifying and heart-warming liminality. The abutting of perfect cones, cubes, tori, and spheres against the natural world exacerbates this. It is a (post?/hyper?)mechanical imposition on places not our own. The only evidences of life are those geometries, the occasional fleshy nodule, rare flittering yellow wings in the sky. All the while, space ambient music is your steady companion, sometimes puncuated by DnB. The absence of tracker music is to Venineth's benefit, as its presence would no doubt make the illusion err on the side of nostalgiabaiting.
By no means for everyone, by all means for me.