Very Very Valet (Switch)

Valet parking has an air of sophistication around it and a layer of trust involved greater than many other lines of work. When you hand your keys off to a driver you’re trusting they’ll keep perhaps the single most expensive object you own safe, not rummage around in any possessions you leave in your vehicle, and bring it back to you later expediently. With most valet services this is a safe bet, but in the world of Very Very Valet, when someone hands over their keys to the cast of colorful puppets, the best they could hope for is that the vehicle will be in one piece after their driver crosses airplane runways, drives off rooftops, and crashes through anything in their path.

 

Very Very Valet involves a team of up to four players airdropping in to any place their freelance valet service is requested. There isn’t too much to the story beyond the set-up of your avian commander sending you out to different locations that request your absurd services, but there is a minor concern brought up during the adventure about what appear to be UFOs abducting people’s cars. This is actually contextualization of the mechanic the game uses to remove cars from play if you don’t get them to where they belong in time, but the game does reveal the truth of what’s going on in the final level before wrapping up its story without even a credits roll. Since the game is more about the chaotic and cartoony handling of your valet services though, the barely present plot backing things up feels like it at least explains the things you’d probably want at least some answer for.

In a regular level of Very Very Valet, you can expect a fairly consistent flow to the action. People will pull up to a business, the player needing to grab their car within a set amount of time or you’ll have an unhappy abducted customer. Once you do pop into the driver’s seat there isn’t anything saying you need to park it safely while you wait for the owner to request its return, many levels deliberately making finding parking spots difficult or outright prioritizing dangerous or sloppy parking. Part of the chaos comes from the inevitable pileups as you try to fit a growing batch of waiting vehicles in the fairly small levels. Complications exist in many forms, some levels requiring you to use teleports to navigate their strange roadways, others have the customers request a car wash or auto repairs before their vehicle is returned, and in its optional unlockable levels the game really gets absurd when you need to make sure planes driving down the runway don’t smash into your cars or that you get your vehicles out of a parking garage before an earthquake complicates things.

 

Levels move by fast in Very Very Valet both in the actual time to complete and the pace of the action. Customers form lines quickly that make it so you can’t be too careful in how you park the cars off to the side, and then when the customers come out of the business looking for their vehicles, you’ll find they aren’t requesting them in the order they arrived. Usually a person will give some sort of clue when they arrive on how long they intend to spend at the business before asking for their ride back, but a level can wrap up with some cars never returned to their owners as a deliberate complication. In a similar manner, some cars are already parked at the start of a stage, meaning sometimes you have to find out how to worm them through the pileups you made with the arriving cars. Luckily your little puppet people can shove cars around a bit so that you can make a path without having to pop into each vehicle to drive it, and while you will be penalized if you don’t pick up or drop off a car before their timers run out, the only requirement for getting the max grade of three stars in a stage is to make sure none of those timers expire.

 

The hectic but manageable demands of Very Very Valet keep the game energetic and exciting, but the level distribution can be a little odd. Mainly, it feels like the game could have definitely kept going with more ideas, but the batch of levels it does feature are all enjoyable even if they are put in a somewhat strange order. For example, one of the late game stages seems to have the gimmick of having a fairly large parking lot which makes it much easier than earlier levels like the one with turntables dividing up roads. No parking zones or multiple businesses you need to deliver cars to do stick around in addition to whatever distinct gimmick later stages feature at least so there is still a good difficulty curve to the affair, and the power-ups like increased speed you can pick up start to feel more important to success as elements in combined to make things a bit tougher. Retrying levels isn’t frustrating either if you do fail because of their compact nature and straightforward goals, with only the final level really demanding puzzle solving and outright careful driving. Your customers thankfully will accept even a heavily damaged vehicle, although outright breaking them will lead to slow respawns so you can’t be obnoxiously careless in how you treat them.

To add a little spice between the valet levels, there are a few extra stages focused on different goals and vehicles. These involve tasks that definitely require more driving talent as you’ll need to do things like knock over every bowling pin in a shifting stage, deliver bags of garbage, or sweep up dirt with a street sweeper. Driving is, thankfully, pretty easy in Very Very Valet except if you want to reverse. While regular driving just asks you to point your control stick in the direction you want to go and tight turns or changing the direction you’re facing involve holding the brakes, reversing requires you to come to a full stop and then pull back on the stick. In a game where you’re constantly racing a clock it’s fairly easy to accidentally hit the stick before your vehicle’s fully parked and it can lead to a moment of confusion, but its a control idea that you can at least acclimate to.

 

The physics in general can be a little silly at times, usually benefiting the absurdity of the game and making for delightful highlights when the game can actually pick a decent moment for the short after level replays. However, at other times those physics might launch a car high into the air, but much like the reversing these instances feel like a problem that can rarely crop up but can be recovered from easily enough. It’s only when I retried a level while a car was being abducted that the game had an outright issue, the retry from the pause menu not removing that car from where it was floating in the level and creating an impenetrable blockage that required a game reset to clear. The delightful insanity and short levels prevent these little problems from undermining the experience though, players able to focus on the absurd action of delivering cars in areas that make the task anything but straightforward.

THE VERDICT: Very Very Valet’s frenetic pace and short stages play excellently into the absurd chaos of delivering cars in all sorts of crazy situations. While it feels like it could have been a heartier package and a few little programming quirks might interrupt the fun ever so briefly, most of Very Very Valet makes for an enjoyable challenge as you manage incoming and outgoing vehicles while contending with absurd circumstances or odd level layouts. With a few levels that break away from valet and the basic play getting some decent complications as you get deeper in, it’s definitely a good little game to pull out for a wacky co-op gaming session.

 

And so, I give Very Very Valet for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. Very Very Valet’s 24 levels are definitely an enjoyable batch and despite perhaps not being placed in the best order, they all pack in a good bit of ideas before the unfortunately early ending. Managing the cars is possible no matter the size of your player group and seems to be balanced well to always bring a bit of chaos to the affair as you’ll always be fighting for space, making clutch car deliveries, and contending with the level’s specific twist to the affair. Little conveniences like the car you’re in being impossible to abduct means you can snag a car right when the timer’s almost out to keep it in play, and making stages so small both benefits the potential retries needed to get all three stars while adding to the challenge by requiring you to figure out how to cram all your cars into the available space as they wait to be picked up. If there was one area to be improved upon it would just be cranking up the dial a bit more on how silly things get. The addition of teleportation portals feels more a necessity for level designs, but adding in more unusual complications similar to the stages where you cross train tracks or need to operate car elevators would make many levels feel more distinct and pack in exciting setpieces. The levels with extra goals like washing the cars could have also been iterated upon more, but Very Very Valet also avoids running any idea into the ground and if one doesn’t click for you, you at least can expect something new and different in the coming levels.

 

While I wouldn’t say Very Very Valet is very very good, it is definitely a good time with a few friends and a fairly quick play at that. The little problems hinder the game’s enjoyability very little, and while beating the clock definitely requires quick strategy adjustments and figuring out how to use the level geometry to your advantage, it never gets to the point it feels too demanding or like an overly strict job. Unlike a real valet driver you can go wild in how you treat vehicles and will need to if you want all three stars, so if you do grab this game and a group of friends to play with it, embrace the silly chaos of this twist on a usually delicate profession.