There isn't anything quite like it.
If you’re able to read this post, this means that I’ve announced Virtue’s Heaven’s release date, as well as the release of a new Demo. It also means that I have to earnestly talk to other people about the game and what it means to me.
How do you talk about a project that you started in late 2017 and whose foundation was built during the grief-riddled first half of the following year? A project that went through at least four different narrative concepts, about as many visual iterations and god knows how many attempts at actually building something resembling a level?
2018
Why did I keep “canceling” the game over and over again and yet, kept coming back to it? What is it that compels me to spend years of my life trying to figure out how to turn this thing into a playable videogame for other people?
As I said, I stopped working on Virtue’s Heaven several times. And yet, every time when I booted the project up, be it out of boredom, or because I wanted to look at something, I felt that not finishing it would be a mistake. I couldn’t describe what exactly, but I felt there was something in there that was worth showing to other people.
I keep saying that Virtue’s Heaven is an “expressive” game, but what exactly do I mean by that?
2020
On its most basic level, and this is how I described it to myself for the longest time as well, it just means that you have a big set of moves that you can perform, and that the main focus of the game itself isn’t centered around the question of finding the correct set of moves to progress, but more around the question of “how do you want this to look like?”
So that means that Virtue's Heaven is a game that tries its best to not get in the way of the player. There are no hard restrictions on what moves you can perform, it’s just that the space and the enemies that inhabit said space might encourage a specific approach over another, without closing off the possibility for the player to attempt something different.
2022
I want this to be a game that is not afraid of the players trivializing its challenges, or getting through it very quickly.
However “doing a lot of cool moves and having a lot of liberty when it comes to how you approach a challenge” is only part of what might make a game “expressive”. A lot of action games do what Virtue’s Heaven tries to do, maybe not in that open of an approach, but the idea is still there.
So how come that I still believe that Virtue’s Heaven does something that no other action platformer out there does? This part took me until yesterday to understand: For a game to be expressive, you also need to have an idea of what is being expressed through it.
Still 2022
A lot of action games out there are really competent at being action games, but fail to express anything aside from naked technical excellence. Sure, the screen shakes in the correct way, the explosions look nice, animations are cool and flashy, but the violence itself doesn’t communicate anything.
There isn’t much of an emotional connection being established between the actions that are performed, even when the game’s narrative tries to frame what you’re doing in some way or another. It is a spectacle without a purpose.
2024
You don’t just do violence without reason, especially when you want it to be the focus of your game. A game that closes off any other kind of interaction to the world, aside from leaving a wake of destruction in the player’s path should try and communicate in some way, why violence is the only viable path forward. For me personally this always comes down to trying to instill a sense of desperation in the player’s action and movement.
I think that “something” I feel every time when I play Virtue’s Heaven with a clear head, is that specific sense of desperation. Yeah, there’s spectacle and you fly through the air and do cool kicks, but you also keep launching your own body towards danger in order to perform violence. Almost every action you perform comes at the risk of harm, if you perform it wrong, but yet you keep doing it anyway, because it’s the only thing you have at your disposal.
2025
The world is ending, capitalism has ruined the planet, imprisoned your friends and its perpetrators are now trying to escape the apocalypse they have caused. And yet here you are, throwing yourself into danger, because you desperately want to spend the remaining moments of your life knowing that those you care about the most are safe.
There is violence involved and this violence has to be aggressive and desperate, but there’s also beauty and joy as well. After all, you are about to do something amazing. It might hurt and it might all be utterly pointless, but you are still doing it.
So when I say that Virtue’s Heaven is an “expressive” action game, I not only mean that you can perform a cool kick in mid-air and shoot laser beams out of your mouth. You can do all these things, but through these actions you are also expressing someone’s desperate wish to live in a world that isn’t on the brink of collapse, where their friends aren’t treated like refuse and where, at least for a day, they can feel like actual human beings.
This is Virtue’s Heaven, it’s coming out on May 20th, 2025. There’s a Demo that you can play and I’m happy that I can finally share this game with other people.
