Volume.art is a nice, free, cool thing on the internet, and I just think that’s something worth celebrating these days. The microgame collection sees you manipulating volume sliders through various abstracted, surprising, and very funny ways.
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It starts strong with “A man named Bow” by Alice Bottino, which kinda reminds me of the Smash Bros Home Run Contest minigame, at least as far as you’re winding up to send something from the left side of the screen to the right. You drag back on the mouse to aim a bow and arrow, attempting to land it a set distance (and corresponding volume level) away.
Some of my favorite entries came from Lunacid developer Akuma Kira, like “What’s This About,” a riff on the criminally-maligned Elder Scrolls Oblivion persuasion pie minigame. You’ve got to reach a set likability level with a Gamebryo-perfect lumpy potato man, while also accounting for a game-accurate slow decay in persuasiveness as you rapidly cycle between cruelty, honesty, humor, and sucking up.
If I hadn’t known about the Oblivion gag going in, it probably would have been my favorite entry—”What’s This About” features fairly prominently in volume.art’s promo on social media. Surprise and delight is a big part of this thing, and from here there be, uh, spoilers? I guess?
“Ctrl+Alt+Date” by Iodine really did something for me: It’s a loving little parody of dating games and romance sidequests, presenting you with suitably deep and emotionally complex dialogue choices like “Uhhhh” vs. “You’re worth so much more than that,” all to woo your volume rocker boo and get the music pumping. It’s a great gag.
Returning to Kira, “In the Zone” was another favorite of mine. It drops you in a simple 3D environment clearly evoking the STALKER series, and tasks you with following a Geiger counter to the site of highest radiation (and thus, volume) in the tiny, open-ended level.
There are 29 games in total, and it took me a little under an hour to get through them all. Volume.art is brisk and goes down very smooth—I found that this microgame format is a great fit for a themed game jam. For me, it evoked nostalgic memories of getting carsick playing WarioWare in the back of my parents’ minivan, but I’ve seen some commenters compare it to old Flash games. Either way, volume.art is well worth checking out.