Volume review: without a face

Patterns are the concrete powder of video games, the heavy bags of gray stuff from which solid structure and delicately colored ornament are wrought. Mike Bithell is a designer who understands the fundamental appeal of patterns, both through the challenges he presents to players and in the cooly beautiful worlds he renders.

We saw this talent with his previous game, Thomas Was Alone, a humorously minimalistic take on the platform game. With Volume, Bithell further explores that pattern recognition with a game of hide and seek, in which quiet calculation triumphs over brute force.

Volume is a series of 100 isometric maps, viewed from an angle above. Each offers pathways, obstacles, gadgets, rewards and a resolution. The hero is a thief. The obstacles are guards. If used correctly, the gadgets serve to aid the thief.

I often found myself revelling in the joyful grace of an enemy's shifting cone-of-vision. This is the pleasure of all good stealth games: tapping an enemy on the shoulder, darting behind a wall, sliding into the guarded room. As the guards moved about, as pillars and walls splintered their line of sight, my hero paced and wall-hugged, jumped and sprinted, laid traps and whistled distractions. Zigzag cone patterns whirl across the floor, delighting the eye as they blink from extreme peril to brief opportunity.

Each elegantly constructed map offers up a series of puzzles that exercise the mind as well as the player's wit and dexterity. Volume works because, even in the tightest corridors and rooms, the interactions between hero, villain and environment are true.

Volume's adversaries appear as guards who come in various models, displaying different levels of malevolence and doltishness. They are always convincingly menacing, especially when they spot the player and execute their unflinching duty to rapid violence. Three of my children watched me play one level, and collectively flinched when I accidentally set off alarms, alerting the frightening robot-like centurions.

I managed to complete the main game without breaking any crockery or keyboards, which is always a plus. I did sometimes find myself needing to step away from one seemingly intractable problem or another, only to return later to see the answer staring me in the face. There were certain guards who I tried again and again to defeat, only to realize that I was taking entirely the wrong tack.

These observations aren't criticisms. A good stealth game tricks and bamboozles the player, even while the player seeks to outwit the game.

Players are scored on the time it takes to complete each level. I only managed to hit par on a few levels, but went back to try to beat the maps as quickly as possible. Speed-runs will feature on YouTube and Volume has obviously been tooled for just this purpose. Even as I carefully made my way through certain levels, I could see the potential for significantly faster progress, for those with the skill and the grit.

Aside from its mechanics, Volume is notable for a strong story. It's set in England in the middle part of this century. One Guy Gisborne has managed to corrupt the country's political systems to create a malicious corporatocracy. Robert Locksley is a hacker and activist who breaks into the simulated nerve-centers of Gisborne's power apparatus to steal incriminating data, which is then shared with the downtrodden people. The whole exercise is transmitted via some futuristic video channel.