VHOLUME Is the Mirror's Edge Successor Fans Have Waited a Decade For

VHOLUME is a melancholic first-person parkour adventure from developers Nathan Grange, Leonard Lemaitre, and Niels Tiercelin, published by IronEqual. You play Robert, navigating a decaying brutalist megalopolis ruled by a faceless, all-controlling Ministry, on a quest that is deliberately mundane: to restore your family's revoked ration tickets. It is a small, human story about bureaucracy grinding down an ordinary person, and it is the perfect frame for the game's grey, oppressive, quietly sad atmosphere.

The actual playing of it is where the Mirror's Edge comparison earns out. You jump, run, climb, and slide through the city with a freedom that feels sensational, chaining momentum from one obstacle to the next. It is the pure movement high the genre is built on, and by all accounts VHOLUME nails it.

What separates VHOLUME from a simple tribute is the depth underneath the flow. The levels are built to be broken. Players are encouraged to exploit momentum, find hidden shortcuts, and pick apart the labyrinthine design to shave seconds off target times, which turns the game into a speedrunning playground as much as an adventure. A light multiplayer layer lets you see other players' ghosts, and Steam Workshop support at launch opens the door to community-made levels and an endless supply of new routes.

That combination, sublime core movement plus deep, replayable, exploit-friendly design, is exactly what kept people coming back to Mirror's Edge, and it is why VHOLUME feels like a genuine continuation of the idea rather than a nostalgic echo. It even carves out its own identity aesthetically, trading Mirror's Edge's clean white futurism for something greyer, heavier, and sadder.

VHOLUME is a reminder that dormant genres rarely die because players stopped wanting them; they go quiet because big publishers stop making them. It took a three-person team, not a major studio, to finally deliver the first-person parkour game people have been asking for since 2008, and the overwhelmingly positive response is the proof of how much demand was sitting there unmet.

We reviewed VHOLUME at 8.2: a focused, gorgeous, deeply replayable movement game that is essential for anyone who has missed Mirror's Edge, with the honest caveats that it is short and carries a little small-team roughness. If you have spent years wishing someone would pick up that torch, this is the one to play. Sometimes the successor you have been waiting for comes from three people, not three hundred.