So you find yourself between two sets of pylons which effortlessly inverse the laws of gravity and no less than five sets of absolutely fatal spike traps. Somehow, this is actually close to the safest you’ve felt since you left the ship.

Welcome to VVVVVV, the eagerly anticipated platform adventure from the brainly fantastocity of Terry Cavanagh whose work last year with Judith and Don’t Look Back sowed the seeds of anticipation for this his biggest title to date.

To surmise, your ship has befallen some sort of disasterous event and your crew have become separated across a strange dimension. It’s your job to reunite them and possibly pick up some secret trinkets along the way. Aside from your ability to walk either left and/or right, you also have the power to flip gravity at your will. The rest of the adventure then builds on this power again and again, adding new and interesting ways to solve puzzles with no small quantity of intelligence or dexterity.

There’s a demo available online which contains two levels for you to sink your teeth into, and the full version is available through the main site at the generously quaint sum of $15/£8.99 (For both Mac and PC, with the Linux version coming VERY SOON), and the game does seem rather packed full of extras for those of you brave enough to seek out all those trinkets. You’ll probably struggle, you will definitely die and you will absolutely do it all with an unrelenting grin on your face.

Congratulations to Terry, and happy V-Day everyone!

Peter Sjostrand’s Mega Man 2.5D sadly doesn’t have a playable public build yet, but this video uploaded just recently was enough to get me excited enough to post it. It seems to reimagine Mega Man 2 as a Paper Mario style platforming adventure, with a number of interesting play twists on the original’s classic layout. A few of the pictured sequences involve a seamless transition between stages of the Mecha Dragon fight, and a usage of the conveyor belts in order to move Mega Man around between the foreground and background. It seems the Blue Bomber is only capable of movement in his regular dimensions so the only way to explore requires using the changing environment to his advantage.

(Update: According to commentors and some googling, this appears to not actually be a gameplay video but rather a concept video. Well… shit…)

The most interesting part of the video however is roughly halfway in where the game showcases a sequence from its Mega Man 3 mode, which actually appears to be a co-op adventure with a player controlling either Mega Man or Proto Man. Far from a simple side-scrolling slog with an extra gun, these levels incorporate a number of rather crafty looking puzzles where both characters really must work together to survivor. My favourite part is probably where Proto Man is being attacked from a flying enemy, but he must remain on a button until Mega Man jumps to safety. It looks like a suprisingly tense experience that simply isn’t present in any of the main Mega Man iterations. Suprisingly I’m pretty damn excited for this. A 2009 release? We can only hope.

Look: In-game beta footage of Hitlers Must Die!, the first track off Cryptic Sea’s upcoming game album, No Quarter. Seems to be coming together rather well! (Those shadows… *swoons*)