Immaculate vibes and a great gameplay loop! I love to live through the Dreamcast indie renaissance, long live frutiger aero.

Vividlope was released in 2023 by solo hobby developer Jaklub. Playing it gave me flashbacks to sitting down with some of the weird and colorful games of the Dreamcast era like ChuChu Rocket! In Vividlope, a bunny character named Cerise and her bunny friend Ecru get sucked into a TV and end up in a strange land. You progress through the game by taking whichever character you selected (Cerise, Ecru, or a third character named Miss Noir who is the antagonist of the story for the other two, each with their own abilities.) Each level is a 3D map composed of tiles. You move your character around the map, painting tiles as you step on them, collecting power ups, and evading enemies. Stepping on tiles increases your power, hitting enemies and hazard tiles decreases your power, and losing all your power will cause you to lose a life. Lose all your lives, and you lose the level. The map is complete once you’ve painted a certain percentage of tiles.

The controls are quite smooth. Cerise and co. can pretty smoothly move in the 8 cardinal directions, jump, and utilize jump pads or specific borders of the map to reach other areas. Some maps require precise controls, and missteps where you run into enemies or hazard tiles never feel like an issue with the controls but instead an issue of practice and skill. As a colorblind gamer, I did struggle at first with some of the maps that required you to step on some tiles twice to paint them, because if the tiles colors I struggled with it made completing the map that much harder. Luckily, Jaklub included a high contrast toggle in the game’s options which resolved the issue for me completely. A sincere thank you to the developer for that consideration.

The characters are all made of simple geometric shapes and are very colorful. The game has a very distinct artistic look to it that has its charm. I did find that this made it a bit difficult to distinguish some of the enemies from each other, and it took some time and practice to distinguish enemies from power ups - notably there are both a power up and an enemy that are Looney Toons style 1 ton weights. But none of this is a problem that can’t be overcome by just playing the game and getting familiar with the enemies and indicators.

The music was a real standout as well, with most of the upbeat and punchy EDM soundtrack composed by musicians Baycun and ViRix Dreamcore. Some of my favorite tracks were in the finale, with dreamy vocals.I even got comments on how nice the soundtrack was when I was playing it on my Steamdeck around my family.

The game currently sells for 9.99 USD at full price, and consists of 9 levels, and each level has a number of stages. You only have to beat a certain number of stages, not all of them, to progress to the next level which lets you skip past levels you might find too challenging or that you just don’t enjoy. I was able to clear the game in about five hours, but that’s without trying to go for perfect ranks in any of the levels, which is where the game finds its replayability. Additionally, there is an Endless mode where you do one level after another, and once the Story mode is cleared once it unlocks a Gauntlet mode where you try to beat 9 levels in a row. If you enjoy the gameplay, you could sink a lot of time into the game getting perfect scores on each level. The game feels perfectly suited to both casual gamers and people who want a hardcore challenge, and anywhere in between.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game, and if you’re interested please follow my Steam Curator page Hidden Gem Highlights for reviews of lesser known titles like this of all genres.

A truly stellar arcade game. Play it.