So before I begin, this game is horrible. However, this is slightly higher than the other sorts of horrible for two reasons:
1. I had absolutely zero expectations of it being good when I first saw it, but I just had to play it out of some bizarre form of morbid curiosity
2. The ways its horrible simply fascinate me, and leads to a lot of fun things definitely not intended by the developer
Hell, I had to update my graphics card driver for THIS of all games. For reference, my PC is from 2022, the graphics card a GeForce 3080 Ti. Thing is, this game just copied assets from Unity without changing a damn thing or even attempting optimization (I even found platforms and lives far beyond where the player is intended to go that serve no purpose, but they're always loaded in the level). The hyper sensitive camera that moves at a mile a minute also has this extreme motion blur that you can't turn off. Shoutouts to being on the spinning platform, where in a good game it would spin with the character on it, it really just rotates the camera, forcing you to deal with this sickening motion blur. The music isn't any good either, and you're the only thing in the world with sound effects, so its just you and the two BGM tracks that are playing at the same time vs the 16 levels in this world.
You are Vigaro I think. If Vigaro means anything someone please let me know because Google is giving me nothing. You have a jump but since the game never explains its controls anywhere, you may never figure out that you also have a dash. The jumps are okay but the dash actually allows for a lot of skips, intentional or otherwise, since your momentum is retained if you say leave the ground with a dash and then use your mid-air jump. The dash isn't once per airtime like you'd imagine but actually on an invisible timer, so if you do things just right you can get another air dash which makes you go faster, something I found a use for in a few levels. The dash saves this game from being...well worse, but even this has issues: You can't quickly turn, so you have to prep your dashes rather than say just turn where you want to dash and then do it. But I like the mechanic here because it's completely unhinged and unrestricted unlike much more polished games, you can just ZIP y'know? There's also an issue with landing where Vigaro does a little bounce and you can't jump or adjust your momentum much as he does it which can and will get you killed. So while his turning and landing could use work, it has the potential for interesting controls but obviously it's only there in the so bad it's fun way.
The stages themselves aren't that interesting beyond the skips, but I do like the few times when the game does that thing where it combines two hazards you already saw on their own individually to make a new challenge. When you can't just skip them they really make you think on your toes. There's also these flowers that are actually springs, but it definitely doesn't add momentum right as it becomes very easy to skip chunks of levels, if not entire levels with these if you get on a spring just right. Again i wouldn't change any of these skips if you asked me to fix this game I find that sort of stuff very fun, but again the levels just aren't polished at all.
The "lives" mechanic also ties into it, and it is by far the most pointless lives system ever. If you get touched in a level, you're dead. No matter where you are when you die, it's back to the start of the level with you, which can be frustrating as without skips these 16 levels can get long and with imprecise physics you're bound to run into trouble. You have three hearts, and once you run out of them...you still respawn at the start of the level, just the BGM starts over. There's even extra lives in some of the levels, but they just don't do anything since lives don't mean anything. There's no point to them. It's on the less exciting oddities in this game, but it still makes me wonder.
Vigaro runner is an awful, awful game. But it is a game that is easily broken. Hell I even made myself immortal in Level 13 and I couldn't tell you how to reproduce it. But that's the joy in these rushed asset flips, there's just so much you can break. I may have put more thought into this review than the devs put into this game, but Vigaro Runner is fascinatingly bad, and I recommend it to anyone who's into bad games. It usually goes for under a dollar and can be done in 30 minutes to an hour, so even if you're losing playing this game, you're not losing much, and will gain a funny experience out of it.
