Volvox on PC

With such a variety to puzzle games over the years, it’s always fun and interesting to find something that’s new. Enter Volvox, a curious hand-drawn game about guiding three-sided “Trimoebas” across the level to fit into abstract solutions. While it’s pretty simplistic in overall design, the game’s challenges require some solid spatial thinking skills to move forward.

Each level in Volvox is presented in the same sort of fashion. Certain Trimoebas are marked along one or more of their sides, showing where they must be aligned with similar markings on the level itself. The player’s goal is to move all of the Trimoebas until each of these are aligned at once, which completes the level. Of course, the path to this is littered with obstacles, gaps, and more in order to make progress more difficult than simply rolling the three-sided creatures around.

While Volvox starts with some relatively easy going that’s guided to help players get their feet wet, it soon ramps up the difficulty. In addition to diverse level design, players will have to overcome Trimoeba-trapping glue, wide gaps that must be bridged, and more. Many levels also focus on finding ways to change the alignment of the Trimoebas relative to the landscape in order to line their marked edges with the goals.

While the hand-drawn, watercolor-style look of Volvox and the overall design may give it a somewhat childish appearance, the difficulty of the game’s later levels is anything but simple. With 250 increasingly-challenging trials to tackle, players will surely find some stumbling blocks along the way. Fortunately, Volvox allows players to skip up to two levels by marking them to play later.

With its beautiful art, curious level design, and numerous challenges, Volvox is an appealing and fascinating game for both established puzzle fans and curious outsiders. For a reasonable $7.99 on Steam, players will certainly get their money’s worth simply from the number of levels to take on, not to mention the brain-testing difficulty within them, though a bit more variety to the puzzles presented would kick this game up to another level.

Score: 3.5/5