Vholume is a $8 parkour game from one of the Straftat devs, and it's the best movement game in years

Vholume, a solo-focused parkour time trial game from Léonard Lemaitre — one half of the duo behind PC Gamer's 2024 FPS of the year, Straftat — just launched at $8, and it's already turning heads for its movement system.

Lemaitre built Vholume alongside co-developers Nathan Grange and Niels Tiercelin. The game drops players into desolate brutalist cityscapes with no waypoints or hard barriers, letting them wallrun, crouch slide, and bunny hop through levels at whatever pace they choose. There's a freeform exploration mode and a time trial mode for each level, and the two feel almost like different games — one mournful and wandering, the other a white-knuckle sprint. The movement toolkit expands on Straftat's foundation with a generously long wall run added to wall jumps and crouch slides, and crucially, the game never mechanically caps how many times you can chain these moves. Instead, level design does the policing — platforms are spaced to punish sloppy button mashing, and tight crouch-slide gaps will kill a mistimed bunny hop sequence dead.

Straftat was an atomically stripped-down arena shooter — Quake 3 filtered through the Source engine — built around lightning-fast rounds and movement mastery. Vholume keeps that DNA but pivots hard toward singleplayer momentum platforming. The closest comparisons the reviewer reaches for are F-Zero GX, Neon White, Counter-Strike surf maps, and the Quake defrag mod — which is high praise in movement game circles. Speedrunners are already posting world-record-level clears on YouTube, with players like Fobxx showing off what the movement ceiling actually looks like when someone really commits.

At $8, Vholume is the kind of game that tends to quietly become a cult classic in movement game communities. If the defrag and surf map comparisons land for you, this one is worth the price of entry without much deliberation.