Venineth is an Indie Game developed by Venineth Team and published on April 16, 2020. The game is about rolling a marble through various beautiful alien landscapes and doing... something. Frankly, not even the game tells you what your ultimate aim is.
Venineth provides examples of these tropes:
- Anti-Frustration Feature: The reset button can help you get unstuck.
- Bottomless Pits: A very frequent part of the scenery. Technically, some of the pits do have bottoms, but you wouldn't be able to recover from them and you just get reset.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If you ever have to reset or your marble gets destroyed by a hazard, you get placed at your last checkpoint, which frequently is very close to where you died.
- Diegetic Interface: In the Hub Level, you can clearly tell which levels you have completed and which cubes you've collected by the markings under each level portal - an empty diamond indicates a cube that you haven't collected yet, and a filled diamond indicates a collected cube. Completed levels are highlighted in blue (in contrast to the orange colour of uncompleted levels).
- Floating Platforms: As well as floating spheres, cones, cylinders and other shapes. Sometimes used as part of the scenery, but often used as a gameplay element.
- Gainax Ending: In Venineth, you enter a congregation of marbles, and as soon as you enter, all other marbles start flying towards a central point. They disintegrate one-by-one, and after you enter the center, Venineth gets lit up. What?
- Gravity Screw: The magnet power-up can let you attach to specific magnetized surfaces, even upside-down ones.
- Hard Light: Some Floating Platforms are these. The elevators are technically invisible Floating Platforms, but they emit light whenever they touch another surface, including your marble. Neither can be rolled on with a powerup.
- Hint System: You may occasionally find hint drones hovering around spots that you haven't explored yet, which will fly away as soon as you approach them. They can be turned off in the options menu.
- 100% Completion: If you collect all the cubes, you'll unlock six secret stages where you can play Break Out. Once you've done that, the ending consists of you rolling into an underground chamber in a sandy environment and smashing a human rock face. Yeah, that explains a lot.
- Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: The powerup gates will take away your previous powerup before giving you a new one.
- Ontological Mystery: The architecture seems to have a purpose, but besides rolling around on it, you don't learn anything about it. Not even the ending explains anything.
- Power Glows: There are plenty of glowing things in Venineth. The hard light bridges, the sliders, the magnetic surfaces, the portals - sometimes even you, depending on the power-up that you're carrying.
- Press X to Die: There's a dedicated reset button, which will place you at your last checkpoint. Especially useful if you get stuck in the scenery.
- Scenery Porn: In spades! As AlphaBetaGamer puts it:AlphaBetaGamer: “The worlds are expansive and jaw droppingly beautiful – so much so that you could freeze any frame from a playthrough and it’d look like a work of art.”
- Sequence Breaking: With a lot of speed and a bit of finesse and luck, you can skip entire sections of various levels.
