Wings of Vi

My first ten minutes with Wings of Vi ended with me tumbling into a spike pit because I jumped from the ground when I should have walked off the ledge and jumped in midair. That one distinction, a conditional air-jump that only works if you haven't already left the ground, rewires your muscle memory from the first room and never stops demanding respect. It sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It is the foundation on which everything else is built, and the game knows it. Developed solo by Solgryn, who the precision-platformer crowd will recognize from I Wanna Be The Boshy, Wings of Vi channels that lineage into something with more structural ambition. The world has light exploration threading through it, there is a genuine boss rush mode, online leaderboards track your deaths and completion times across difficulty tiers, and Vi accumulates new tools as she progresses: a flutter, a dash fueled by feather pickups, and a suite of weapons named after the seven deadly sins, from the wide-arc Staff of Purity to ranged options unlocked through optional platforming sections. Each new ability arrives accompanied by level design built to immediately stress-test it, which keeps the pacing from ever going slack. The three difficulty modes are named Angel, Mortal, and Demon. Angel mode adds more checkpoints, gives pit deaths a second chance, and places additional platforms under tricky sections, functioning as genuine anti-frustration scaffolding rather than a token easy setting. Mortal strips some of that back. Demon strips nearly everything, and if that isn't enough, there is a Doomed modifier that turns any hit into instant death. The checkpoint color-coding between difficulty tiers is a lovely piece of design honesty: you can see which checkpoints will vanish if you step up to a harder mode before you commit. That kind of transparency is rare in this genre. What is not rare, and what some players will simply bounce off, is that even Angel mode requires serious precision. The claim that the game avoids arbitrary difficulty is partly true and partly aspirational marketing. There are sequences with near-zero margin for error, and the final boss in particular has a reputation for breaking people who breezed through everything before it. What keeps the whole thing together is craft. The SNES-inspired pixel art gives every environment its own tileset and atmosphere, from gold-lit angel architecture sliding into demon-scorched ruins. The soundtrack, composed by Ashton Morris, is one of the quietly great things about this release: it has the kind of chiptune energy that pushes you through a room you've died in forty times, because you want to hear what the next track sounds like. Character customization unlocks through secrets and no-damage boss clears, giving completionists a long reason to stay. The controls are so tight that players coming back to other platformers after a session here have reported those games feeling sluggish by comparison. That tightness is also what makes each death sting cleanly: you know exactly what you did wrong, which is the only condition under which high-repetition platforming ever feels fair. This is not the right game for players who want to see the story at a comfortable pace. The story is thin anyway, a cheerfully functional setup involving two angels accidentally freeing a demon lord, and you will spend far more time reading spike patterns than reading dialogue. But for anyone who finds a specific kind of peace in pure movement problems and incremental mastery, Wings of Vi is a well-made, well-sounding, quietly handcrafted thing that the genre needed alongside the joke-difficulty titles it grew out of.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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