When I open up a trailer for a parkour game, I expect breakbeats or bassy electronica. You know, something radical—Vholume zigs where other games zag, scoring its run 'em up action with dejected, atmospheric synths punctuated by lonely footsteps and effortful grunts. A self-billed "melancholic first-person parkour adventure," it looks like the moody stepchild of Mirror's Edge.

A new trailer for the game dropped last month and revealed it comes out Aug. 21. It provides a sneak peek at the game's overgrown, brutalist jungle gyms and shows off Vholume's multiplayer. According to its Steam page, you can race your buds in real time or compete against their ghosts. It seems ambitious given that just three people are credited as developers on Steam, one of whom you may recognize as one of the Lemaitre Bros. behind Straftat. We called that game 2024's best FPS, and its music is, in fact, radical.

I hear the kids are really into liminality these days, so Vholume's dystopian dream world should appeal to anyone who saw Backrooms and felt like, for the first time in a long time, they were right where they were supposed to be. It also honors the parkour game tradition of being overtly anti-authoritarian, centering a plot where the protagonist has to get "ration tickets" for his family.

A cliche? Maybe, but parkour platforming is kind of the perfect setup for dystopian themes: why bust out of a cage if you're not going to run, jump, and be free? Living in America's contemporary car-centric world, I sometimes long to leap from rooftop to rooftop just so I can be somewhere without filling up on gas. I can't wallrun or strafe jump, though, so videogames will have to do.

And it's a great time for that sort of thing, as there are plenty of other Mirror's Edge-likes on the horizon. If Vholume has piqued your interest, you can try a demo out on its Steam page.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...