I am not what you would call a casual fan of stealth games. I am, however, a fan of Mike Bithell: the UK developer of this game, Volume, as well as Thomas Was Alone and, more recently, Subsurface Circular. In addition to producing mordantly amusing games with minimalist looks and an emphasis on layered game design, he's an entertaining figure to follow on social media; like Rami Ismail, he's a perceptive fellow when it comes to the games industry and is rarely afraid to speak his mind on a number of contentious matters. I'd been hesitating to get into Volume - which boils down Metal Gear-style top-down stealth action into what feels like an N++ or Super Meat Boy model of a quick-fire barrage of bite-sized levels that can be completed in a minute or two - because I was pretty sure I wasn't going to enjoy it, at least not to the extent that it deserved to be enjoyed. Instead, I actually found it quite agreeable; my usual antipathy for the stealth genre format melting away due to a wealth of welcome concessions.

Volume is set in a dystopian version of the UK where an autocrat has risen up and taken power, using his own tech company's state-of-the-art volumetric VR military training programs and AI to train his own team of operatives to pull off a rapid coup of every major level of government. In his new vision of Britain, the various countries of the United Kingdom and the outside world are cut off from one another, and everyone is consigned to a rigid caste system. Several decades later, and the scion of one of the elite class decides to broadcast himself in the same VR training program to teach would-be rebels how to steal back the elite's ill-gotten gains from their various repositories. In a not particularly subtle twist, this insurgent is named Rob Locksley and the tyrant Guy Gisbourne. Most of the game's worldbuilding is delivered incidentally through pieces of lore that Locksley can find in the simulated levels, though there's plenty of dialogue between Locksley, Gisbourne, and Locksley's captive training AI "Alan" who slowly comes around to Locksley's way of thinking. As with Thomas Was Alone, the game never stops in its tracks to deliver this dialogue: you can continue to play the game as people talk, and any sudden interruptions (like being spotted) will simply cause the last line of dialogue to repeat once everything has calmed down again. It's a method of storytelling that has the humility to recognize that players might not be entirely invested; though, for the record, I both enjoyed it and looked forward to each new sparsely-apportioned conversation. Sometimes it felt like it was the best yardstick to indicate progress.

Volume contains 100 story missions, which initially felt like too many. I was ready to tap out and start putting together this review around the game's mid-point, but half of Volume's ingenuity is that it never stops delivering new twists and ideas to its levels. Whether these were new gadgets that Locksley could use to distract guards (noisemakers, stun traps), or conceal himself from same (disguises, invisibility), or new obstacles and elements in the world that the player must factor into their plan of attack, from laser tripwires to forcefields to hiding spots; it always felt like there was some paradigm-shifting change just around the corner. It also helped that Volume avoided the difficulty curve traps that normally hit games of its bite-sized persuasion: namely, that in order to make levels harder, they simply make them longer with fewer checkpoints. No single level in Volume stretches out into infinity because of poor checkpoint design, and even tough levels where I was getting spotted all the time very rarely took me longer than ten minutes total. In spite of my own animus towards stealth games I was hooked all the way through to the end and that's largely due to that well-designed difficulty curve, which didn't so much slowly curve upwards in one straight line but offered occasional valleys with which I could recharge and refresh - the late-game additions of shadowy areas on the floor, where it was impossible to be detected, and the overpowered "veil" invisibility power-up made some of those end levels far breezier than I anticipated, even as the game continued to add tougher guards with broader vision cones to the mix.

The other half of Volume's ingenuity, not to leave a thought unfinished, is the interface itself. The minimalist look - which the game self-effacingly calls "cheap" - has the added benefit of clarity, making the extent of the vision cones and the effects of loud sounds apparent when layered over a lot of otherwise pristine, untextured environments of walls and floors. Sound is represented through a disruption of the nearby floor tiles - they all sort of vibrate out of their sitting location, briefly becoming loose polygons - and the game's very discernible vision cones become darkened when there's a low wall partially blocking them to indicate that you will remain undetected as long as you're crouching behind cover. Enemy guards have predictable patterns, gadgets generally work as you expect them to, the controls are intuitive for the amount of tactical options they provide, and being detected isn't necessarily the end if you can continue breaking line of sight long enough to lose any guards in pursuit. Measures have been taken to ensure that there's no aggravation borne of falling to misfortune: any failure is all on you, which means you can always improve on your timing or reconsider your strategy. That aforementioned frequent checkpointing also does a fine task in mitigating frustration, and I can't reiterate too many times just how glad I was that it wasn't phased out in later levels for the sake of some misconceived notion of "fair" escalating difficulty.

All that said, Volume isn't perfect. Games rarely are, especially when they have this many moving parts and a relatively small team to work on them. You can be killed by guards - simulated killed, at least - in the midst of a daring escape, having leapt over a waist-high barricade or darted behind a wall in what seemed like the nick of time. When the game later introduces teleporters, I've been killed in the process of coming out of the other end to safety. Sometimes the nature of these "defeats snatched from the jaws of victory" deaths are comical, but you could argue that if the failstate was nipping at your heels that closely than perhaps there was a better way of approaching that particular instance. Vision cones also lie: they extend about an extra half-foot than they proclaim, and that makes threading the needle between two or more cones nigh-impossible. There's a level with two turrets adjacent to one another with a gap between their vision cones: there is no gap in reality, and the goal there is to figure out how to distract a turret long enough to create one. In addition to random little glitches - given the virtual nature of the levels, Volume could (and does) try to claim that the glitches are part of the in-game simulation - there's also some disagreeable design choices which I'm sure were only made because the alternative screwed things up even more. In particular, you always respawn with your gadget on cooldown: some gadgets have an unbearably long cooldown, especially the "aud" sound mine that can be activated any time after being placed, and so whenever you mess up you have to wait five to ten seconds for it to recharge before you can resume with the level. It doesn't sound like a long time, but these levels are built to take around a minute to beat, and it's a huge pace-killer. Consider a Super Meat Boy level where the floating platforms start at the wrong part of their cycles every time you respawn and you have to wait what feels like an eon before they move back into range. There are also some obstacles, like the lasers, that can also kill the flow dead in its tracks as you impatiently wait for them to rise and fall to the point where they can be bypassed.

Overall, however, I found myself pleasantly surprised by Volume. It's a testament to Bithell's craft that he managed to sidestep all the obvious design pitfalls in this particular subset of the stealth genre, as well as making 100 levels of tactical stealth action compelling enough - via a well-paced difficulty curve and a constant influx of new wrinkles - that I was willing to beat them all in a couple of sessions. It's probably my favorite "pure" stealth game, excepting the broader hybrid nature of something like Metal Gear Solid V, and something I'm glad I finally took the time to check out. I suppose I really should look for a copy of Subsurface Circular next...

Rating: 4 out of 5.