Venture to the Vile [Review]
Venture to the Vile is a promising game hampered by performance and control issues.
Venture to the Vile. Credit: Cut to Bits / Aniplex.
Venture to the Vile, a metroidvania action-adventure from developer Cut to Bits, has some interesting gameplay ideas and takes place in a compelling setting. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of this game was severely diminished by frustrations around its combat and performance.
You live in an idyllic Victorian village where all residents wear animal masks at all times for mysterious reasons. In the game’s prologue, your character is given a new mask for his birthday—his stag mask now has antlers, representing his growth. An incident that day causes an antler to break off, and when we jump forward in time, your mask still has a broken antler with the other fully grown, a visual design I appreciated for the character.
Venture to the Vile. Credit: Cut to Bits / Aniplex.
Now as an adult, an accident causes you to fall into a deep cave. When you escape and wake back up in town after an unknown period of time, you find your village ravaged by some kind of disaster involving what they refer to as the Vile, which has mutated some people and animals into vicious creatures. You were exposed to the Vile as well, but you’ve retained your sanity while gaining the ability to turn your hand into a blade. As you play, you’ll consume more Vile to further transform—but at what cost?
The game plays as a sidescroller. You begin with just a jump, but soon you’ll earn a double jump and other traversal abilities. Level designs are interesting—rather than being made up of a single 2D plane, areas are a collection of layered planes accessed by moving into the foreground or background. As you explore, you can see other layers in the background, into the level’s depths. The design makes levels more maze-like and offers opportunities for creative puzzles.
Venture to the Vile. Credit: Cut to Bits / Aniplex.
Combat is hand-to-hand as you strike with your blade; countering blows is important as well. I found combat and movement clunky. It felt imprecise and unresponsive, with floaty, unsatisfying physics. To make things worse, the game’s performance was abysmal. I played on Steam Deck, admittedly a more limited device, but no matter the settings, whether at high quality or a resolution below 640x480 with lowest settings, the game would perform identically. The display would dip to below 24 fps frequently, making some of the combat encounters frustrating and then arguably impossible.
Because of the performance issues, I abandoned the game early. I would love to come back to it, as I was intrigued by the game’s world and story, but it wasn’t worth the frustration in the game’s current state. I hope to return to Venture to the Vile again after the issues are addressed in patches and revise my review.
Venture to the Vile is available now on Steam for PC and will release on consoles at a later date.
Overall Score: 3/10
Played on: Steam Deck
