clickbliss

Velvet Swing short review

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Velvet Swing
• Developer: Flamebait Games
• Publisher: Digerati
• Switch, PC

Velvet Swing makes a great first impression. The art style and moody soundtrack set up a trip into a surreal, vaporwave inspired landscape. It’s swinging manages to convey a sense of momentum while giving me enough control to keep it from feeling like I could be carried into an inescapable situation by mistakes I made three moves back. So already it manages to swing right past so the traps so many other momentum platformers fall into. Then it drops into the rest of them.

Velvet Swing suffers the same problems that almost every platformer in this post-masocore, speedrun focused style does. Despite its strong command of momentum, it’s more interested in miniature challenges that keep you compulsively playing through a cycle of deaths and restarts. It’s a design that seems obligatory in indie platformers at this point, but it’s often replicated without consideration of why it works for the best games in the genre. To make the cycle of instant death and restarts work you need immediately readable levels and the ability to reach top speed in an instant–the cardinal opposite of Velvet Swing’s core conceit.

Masocore cycle’s rhythm is one of sharp beats building to a complex drum pattern–Velvet Swing, by contrast feels like a series of sustained piano chords abruptly cut off before they reach their peaks. Chaining swings together brings you a beautiful melody, but more often I found myself getting the equivalent of smashing random keys as I crashed into a wall before I build up any momentum. Velvet Swing simply demands too much precision too quickly, and its structure results in a disjointed rhythm that doesn’t play to its strengths.