VHOLUME is out: parkour under a brutalist Ministry

Robert wants the family's ration tickets back. That is the whole premise of VHOLUME — no combat, no chosen one, just a man chasing paperwork through the derelict capital of Afro-Eurasia, a city run by an entity called the Ministry that would prefer Robert give up. The game is out now on Steam for $8 with a free demo, and the release announcement arrived, fittingly, through the account of its composer, 1000 Eyes, whose score is headed to Spotify and Bandcamp.

The pedigree here is real. Léonard Lemaitre is half of the brother duo behind BABBDI, the free 2022 exploration game that made gray concrete feel like a place you could grieve in, and STRAFTAT, PC Gamer's pick for best FPS of 2024. For VHOLUME Lemaitre works with Niels Tiercelin and Nathan Grange, with IronEqual publishing, and the trio has gone the opposite direction from STRAFTAT's speed and violence: there are no weapons and no enemies. The threat is systemic — locked doors, revoked permits, forms. Movement is the only pushback available: run, climb, slide, learn the city well enough to beat it, alone or racing a friend's recorded ghost.

Brutalism in games usually works as mood; here it works as policy. The city's monumental concrete is the Ministry's org chart rendered at 1:1 scale. Killscreen has been chewing on this since at least 2016, when we asked where brutalism goes after concrete and read Mirror's Edge as a politics of parkour. VHOLUME's answer to both: it goes into the welfare office, and the politics is whether you can outrun the queue.