“Palace of Peril” is a level I like a lot, but I feel like I can’t talk about it without first pointing out that I have some serious reservations with it. This is without question the most difficult level I’ve featured – in fact, it’s so difficult that I wasn’t able to see the end myself without cheating and removing a wall in the editor. It’s a 10×9 level and it’s biggest problem, I think, is just that it’s a lot of good ideas diluted in a level that’s way too big to contain them.

There are five “areas” in the level – an outside area at the start, then yellow, green and cyan areas, and finally a laboratory area.

Of these, the yellow area and the green area are absolutely fantastic. The yellow area introduces a new mechanic, using VVVVVV’s primitive scripting in an unexpected way to do something I haven’t seen before. The green area expands on this, then, but takes in a different direction to make challenges that weren’t possible in VVVVVV.

This is a flawed level, but its flaws are more than made up for by the very inventive areas which do work, which I absolutely loved. I’m really looking forward to whatever its creator works on next!

To play a VVVVVV player level, extract the .vvvvvv file into your VVVVVV levels folder. On windows, that should be in My Documents/VVVVVV, on Mac it’s Documents/VVVVVV, on Linux it’s ~/.vvvvvv