Verlet Swing is a game where you swing. You swing from pizza, you swing from meatballs. You swim from dolphins and from trees. Swinging is all the game is, and I just can’t stop swinging.
Essentially, the game is a surrealist fantasy where players are required to traverse a variety of whacky landscapes, all while swinging from a single web, and not touching anything around them. It’s the physics of Spider-Man, coupled with a mind-melting, vaporwave art style, and it’s brilliant.
There’s 100 levels in total, each with its own unique style, and the vast majority of the middle portion (and the one I’m currently travelling through) is themed after food — mostly meatballs and pizza, but there’s dolphins, too. And giant bubbles, sometimes. Also, forks. And sausages.
There’s no better feeling than swinging through the air into a giant sea of flying spaghetti and meatballs. If you played Sony’s recent Spider-Man game, you’ll know the exact sensation that I’m talking about. Swinging is absolutely fab, and Verlet Swing does it so well.
And really, there’s not much to the game. You swing, you avoid obstacles, and finally (hopefully), you reach your end goal. Then it’s on to the next level. There’s no overall story, there’s no reason for the swinging — you’re just swinging for swinging’s sake, and it’s beautiful.
Some of the levels are trickier than others, and I was stuck on a rotating meatball puzzle for longer than was fun, but the sheer satisfaction of manoeuvring through a tricky level was worth it.
The weirdest part of my journey through Verlet Swing is that I never planned to fall in so deep. I opened it up on a whim because the file was small and I was impatient to get my shiny new Switch Lite up and running. But then I played the first level, and I’ve been swinging ever since.
I’ve got so many games waiting in the wings that I just haven’t touched. I’m only two hours into Borderlands 3, a game I waited seven years for. I haven’t even touched Untitled Goose Game, a launch day purchase that I’ve been salivating over, because I can’t stop swinging.
I want to swing in this meatball heaven forever, gooses be damned.
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