Thanks to Jaklub for the review code

Title: VIVIDLOPE
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 08/08/2024

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Story

In this painter action game, you take control of one of three furry characters as they set out to explore a VIVIDSCAPE! Not much of a plot here besides that of a rescue mission, but there are some amusing cutscenes unique to each of the three characters, and they do a great job of demonstrating their personalities.

Presentation

Vividlope goes for a lovely visual style, reminding me very much of a simpler 3D game from the early 2000s era. It’s tough to describe things any further just being low poly and cute, but Vividlope just oozes that style, and the cutscenes are equally very cute and silly, as are the character designs, all being pretty darn adorable. You also have the option right away to toggle between several visual settings, including the ability to increase the framerate or toggle on reflections; very, very rad for a Switch port, and a big rarity in 2024. Turning off the reflections and setting the FPS preferences to 60, and you have yourself one gorgeously running game.

The audio design is also notable. There are plenty of relaxing tunes and sound cues which remind me an awful lot of Sega system menu noises from their Gamecube efforts, and it fits the early 2000s retro vibe rather well. Nothing that’ll pump your blood up or anything, but plenty of pleasant sounding tunes to accompany your floor painting efforts. Each of the characters also make adorable noises every now and then, not unlike Klonoa or the like, and there’s plenty of personality here even if the characters here don’t speak full sentences to your face. Just a really charming presentation that you’ll click with right away if you grew up in the early 2000s.

Gameplay

Vividlope is an Arcade-style game where the main goal is to go through stage by stage as one of three characters, and paint enough tiles in a level a target color by walking over them. Each of the three characters specializes in a unique attribute, with me going for Miss Noir in the end due to fox bias and also her being the offensive character.

Still, regardless of who you choose, the game gets right to work on making you comfortable with the controls. You can move, jump, use a powerup or special ability, and rotate the camera with the L and R buttons. Considering the spherical nature of a lot of these stages, these camera options come in real handy as the difficulty ramps up, and while painting a tile is done by simply walking over it, the real fun in Vividlope is by trying to get as high of a score as possible by carrying on as long of a chain as possible, and the simple controls really makes Vividlope easy to get into.

For the main story stages, you have a ton of handmade, short levels, and here the main goal is to just paint everything while avoiding hazards. You could do that, and for your first go around, you probably should stick to just surviving and clearing the level normally, but if you want to fully max out your rank and become a 100% maniac, you must clear the stage with as high of a chain as possible,  paint every tile during the bonus time, collect both bonus fruit, and avoid death. Do this and you’ll get S+ rank on Normal, or the elusive V rank on the Hard setting.

I had some fun going after the V ranks for a while, but eventually found things to get incredibly frustrating when trying to grind for them, and I ended up having a lot more fun just playing casually through the stages without worrying about perfecting the bonus time, and seeing what new gimmicks the stages would throw at me, ranging from tiles you have to step on multiple times to get to the target, or layouts where if you paint tiles the wrong color, you have to go back and fix your mess and prevent the tile from flipping to a wrong color again. You also have handy items on stages such as a paint roller that’ll color a line of tiles for you, which helps make the job a bit easier.

You also get currency whenever you clear a stage, which can be used to either purchase items that can be used at the cost of a higher rank, or to buy all the silly hats that you want to decorative the characters with. Yes, there are a bunch of hat recolors in this game, and you bet I had fun goofing off until I found a color I liked for Noir!

Another fun mechanic is as you build up a chain of painted tiles, a meter fills up on the left side of the screen, which allows Miss Noir to use her special fireball attack, while the other characters gain their own benefits such as increased speed, though I found one of those characters to be too fast to control while the meter was maxed out. Still, for clearing the stages normally, I had a decent time, there are a ton of stages, and thus a lot to work for if you want to get all those V ranks. There’s even a bunch of in-game achievements too, plus new content not in the original Steam release, making this a pretty packed game.

The last thing I want to touch on is easily my favorite part of Vividlope, and that comes from the Endless mode. See, the chaining of painted tiles can be fun if frustrating when going for V ranks, but what about just pure scorechasing? Well that’s where the endless mode comes in, and it’s brilliant. Here you just get thrown into a gauntlet of stages that continue one after the other, throwing all the gimmicks at you while you try to aim for the highest score. The best pick up and play aspect of the game, and honestly the mode I spent the most time enjoying myself in, due to just how addicting it was to try and keep up my chain and take crazy risks to maintain it. You’re darn right that I used diagonal jumps to keep the combo going!

Unfortunately, there’s no online leaderboards for the Endless mode, nor are there for the main stages, but there’s at least a local leaderboard for Endless, which was good enough to satisfy my scorechasing habits for the time being. All in all, a rather fun, content packed game.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I had a decent time with Vividlope. The presentation was stellar, the characters are adorable, and the core gameplay ends up being rather fun. However, I found the game to shine far better as an endless scorechaser than the stage-by-stage nature of most of the game. Sure, it’s satisfying to V rank a very tricky stage after throwing your head at it a bunch, and you’re better off just playing the handcrafted stages more casually to see all the worlds on offer and unlock more hats and features, but the core loop works brilliantly with the Endless mode, and sadly that doesn’t seem to have as much depth to it as the bulk of the game, and the lack of online leaderboards here stings just a little!

Still, even without an online leaderboard, I had fun with Vividlope, and the differing characters all having their own attributes makes picking one and finding a favorite incredibly easy. The new stage gimmicks thrown at you during each new world are enough to keep you on your toes, and there’s still lots of fun to be had, plus tons of content to master if you want all the in-game achievements. Still, I’m eager to see what other throwbacks this dev may cook up in the future, though, if their first one was this solid!

I give VIVIDLOPE a 7 out of 10.