OVIVO (PS4)

OVIVO is set in a black and white world where one color is the background and the other makes up the floors, walls, and dangers to avoid. However, which color serves which role is a power put into your hands, this side-scrolling platformer all about moving around by swapping to the color that will help you move through its monotone environments.

 

Playing as a small circle with an antenna apparently named OVO according to materials outside of the game itself, the only things you find yourself able to do are jump and perform that color swap. When making contact with a surface, you can swap OVO over to the other side, the gravity of the world inverting to match you swapping between black and white. The most simple way this manifests will be something like moving along a slope and finding you can’t get all the way uphill, only for the color swap to shift so that that hill is now going downward instead. A hill can become a valley, and an object you might be inside can easily be escaped by just swapping the colors so you’re now outside of its borders. It’s a simple idea in practice with some flexibility, although the game does strain how it works a fair few times. Normally, the swap is meant to be done while on the ground. It’s impossible to swap colors in mid-air since you would be crushed as the black or white background suddenly becomes solid, but there are times where OVIVO sees you jumping towards walls and needing to swap coloration to pass through them. This doesn’t always work and even when it’s necessary it can be finicky, it possible that the slanted walls technically count as ground but getting the timing right can be tricky in a way that’s annoying rather than much of a test of player skill.

In fact, color swapping loses its novelty rather quickly as you start to realize its issues. At first you can use it for some rather smooth and quick movement, doing things like swapping the moment you drop down a pit so you fire out the other side with the momentum you built up from falling. This trick gets used fairly often and stops feeling special well before you’ve cleared the first set of levels, and later moments in the game where building momentum for a jump become crucial to progress can be strained by the fact you need to reach what feels like the absolute maximum point and then time your color swap perfectly to pass through a surface you touch only for an instant. OVIVO’s levels also can do a poor job signposting the direction to travel, the black and white environments sometimes lacking distinctive visual elements so you can end up going down a pointless path, accidentally going backwards, or find an occasional split path where it’s unclear which direction to take. Some collectible Morse dots usually indicate the way to go but disappear after grabbed, and what’s more, the junction points will sometimes instead put the dots down the optional path while taking the required one makes it impossible to go back and grab the collectibles without restarting the level.

 

Later stages in this short platformer do start to build actual environments instead of just black and white areas filled with momentum friendly shapes. These seem to somewhat tie to OVIVO’s efforts to tell a wordless story, the player traveling through spaces that feel like illustrations and, when you beat a level, there will actually be a grand zoom out to reveal how sometimes they do fit into one giant picture. Not every level comes together into a nicely realized image, but it does make the progression of themes a little clearer, the first level for example having single celled organisms while later you start seeing plant life and then machines and electricity, and appropriately enough, more complex life and creations come with more apparent objects in the game world. You can start interacting with objects like a floating flower that will go up and down based on if you are inside it or on top of it and the machines start to introduce more active dangers than the thorns and spikes that punished bad jump timing elsewhere. However, you also are eventually introduced to special black and white spaces that almost look like a star field. When OVO enters these spaces, it will rise up and down repeatedly, this sometimes used as a means of jumping with a bit more of a timing element, but moving star fields can be rather tricky to build up momentum in and they also start to run into the issue of often having to do the same thing over and over until you can get the jumps just right.

Each of the slightly sizeable 9 levels in OVIVO can be completed the moment you reach its end, but along the way, you not only can collect the Morse dots, but there are three story symbols. These symbols are usually either along the main level path or slightly adjacent to it, but the story they tell is actually saved for the names of the PlayStation trophies you earn for grabbing them. Read in order, the trophy titles feel like a bit of a poem that also follows the idea of advancing through the history of life, although beyond just showing the increasing complexity of life before culminating in a rather basic thesis, it’s hardly one with much meaning since the adventure itself is mostly just about moving your little circle around the art. There is some novelty in finally realizing the space you were traversing might look like a giant tree or seashell when you can see the level from a zoomed out view, but it feels more like a nifty aspect of the level design rather than something that builds towards a notable story or emotional sensation.

 

Being as short as it is, a game that might not even take three hours if you do everything, OVIVO ends up feeling rather empty, especially since the game’s use of Rorschach ink blots early on feels like an indicator it’s trying to foist some of the interpretative work on the player rather than having some clear purpose behind choices like using a platform shaped like the painting The Scream in a level mostly based around things like jellyfish. The lack of story depth isn’t help by how even later in the game you’re still doing a lot of the simple swapping just to actually move forward, and while some obstacles like moving circular mazes mean there are a few more involved and interesting ideas nearer to the end, the game spent too much of its time with more basic movement trials to really explore the ways navigation could have been evolved or tweaked.

THE VERDICT: There is some impressive black and white art in OVIVO, especially when a post-level zoom out reveals you were walking across the lines of a grander picture, but actually traversing its stages loses its charm quickly despite OVIVO also being a very short game. Your momentum based movement is overused so it loses its initial fun fluid feel and yet the ways it ends up tested are often prone to problems since they involve finicky surfaces you need to swap between just right. The collectibles give you a tiny bit more to do but the lacking and mostly interpretative story doesn’t add the interesting substance you’d hope for in a game that’s leaning so strongly on its artistic side.

 

And so, I give OVIVO for PlayStation 4…

A TERRIBLE rating. One of the more telling parts of OVIVO is that at times it would set up what looks like a tricky jumping challenge that involves a good deal of properly timed little swaps only for it to be smarter to hold forward and mash the color swaps to easily clear the supposed trial. Many times trying to time things right is less intelligent than hammering the swap the moment you’re heading towards your destination and hoping it works out, although since the game isn’t entirely made of those kind of momentum and jumping challenges, it thankfully isn’t a case of constantly mashing your way to success. A few later levels start cooking up some new ideas beyond building up the speed needed to reach a spot by dropping from high spots and swapping, but OVIVO really doesn’t pay off your investment well. The occasional grab bag imagery may be trying to throw you off the scent of the grander story despite a pretty crucial part of what small statement it does make appearing right when you start playing, but the art is ultimately the best part of the experience and one of the elements still worthy of some appreciation despite not being used to its fullest. Some end level zoom outs are a bit underwhelming since they’re shaped too much by practical level geometry rather than taking a grander shape when it all comes together, and a few like the tree fudge the final image by having inaccessible areas be what truly gives it shape. Still, even on the smaller scale, there is some intrigue built by coming across a more clear design element in a level and the trophy poem does encourage you to look more closely even if the ultimate message is rather plain. With its heart still being a slightly sloppy momentum platformer though, OVIVO is best avoided because even its strongest imagery isn’t really going to make doing the same basic jump tricks again and again worthwhile.

 

OVIVO feels like its let down by the fact momentum is often more an impediment than a tool. You might be trying to move fast but OVO is naturally slow and you have to do a bunch of swaps to even travel a relatively straight path. When the momentum then becomes important, it is sometimes pitted against rough ideas like swapping between walls or at the very height of a jump, or you might need to contend with the starry fields that become a bit obnoxious when they start moving. Building up speed loses its thrills early on especially since it’s less rewarding and more just the only way to get around, and even then you might throw yourself off a level or into spikes because you didn’t know that drop ahead was deadly or that you weren’t meant to leap that high. It’s not necessarily challenging because you often know what you’re meant to do and just need to get the right timing or alternatively hammer the swap button and hope, so OVIVO ends up the kind of artsy platformer where appreciating the visuals feels like the only upside and yet the gameplay only gets in your way rather than serving as the engaging trial to overcome to get your reward.