Vholume, a first-person parkour game credited to a three-person team on Steam, launches on August 21. A trailer released last month set the date and gave the first extended look at the game outside its store listing.
The game bills itself as a "melancholic first-person parkour adventure", and its trailer leans away from the genre's usual high-tempo electronic soundtracks. PC Gamer, which covered the trailer, described its score as atmospheric synths punctuated by footsteps and audible effort, and compared the overall tone to a subdued take on Mirror's Edge.
What the trailer showed
The footage focused on overgrown, brutalist environments built as run-and-jump courses. Its plot centres on a protagonist trying to secure ration tickets for his family, placing the game in the anti-authoritarian tradition that first-person parkour games have tended to work in.
PC Gamer characterised the setting as a dystopian dream world, and drew a line between its empty, repetitive architecture and the liminal-space imagery that circulated widely online in recent years. The comparison is one of atmosphere rather than mechanics: the running, jumping and wall-running remain conventional first-person parkour.
The trailer also confirmed multiplayer. According to the game's Steam page, players can race each other in real time or compete against recorded ghosts of other players' runs — an ambitious feature set for a credited team of three.
The team behind it
One of the three credited developers is one of the Lemaitre Bros., the pair behind Straftat, the multiplayer shooter PC Gamer named its best FPS of 2024. Vholume is a substantial departure from that game in pace and register, trading arena gunplay for solitary movement through empty architecture.
A demo is currently available on the game's Steam page ahead of the August 21 release. Vholume arrives alongside a run of other movement-focused first-person games in development, several of which trace their design back to Mirror's Edge.
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