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...