Multi-dimensional puzzle platformer Vextorial will test your mental gymnastics

Dayten Rose, 4 March 2025

Some puzzle games give the player one minor supernatural gift to exploit across hosts of levels. Vextorial is not that. Others drop their systems into a messy pile at the player’s feet, and the challenge comes simply from sorting them all into something intelligible. Vextorial isn’t that, either.

Vextorial’s multidimensional platforming shtick is instead so brainbusting, it actually whips all the way back around into something chill. I make peace with the fact that I have no idea what’s going on. Meditating too long on its inner workings will only give me a headache. So I opt to relax and let the spacey calm of its slowly rotating polygons propel me, and they do uncommonly well. Running my mind across the surface of each level was where Vextorial grabbed me, even as it occasionally threw unnecessary obstacles in my path.

You play as Pilo, who looks a bit like the Discord logo, as he arrives at a place called The Bridge, which looks a bit like a PS1 startup screen, to search for his brother. The Bridge is a transitional realm between 2D and 3D space. That’s a little more narrative detail than I needed starting out, but since the game gestures at the mystery of its plot early and often, I figured I’d recount it here.

Thankfully, I don’t need to know what The Bridge is to understand that it’s thick with platforming puzzles. The demo plopped me into your typical hub area—doors leading to levels gated off by other levels—with the twist that even this hub area is a level in its own right. Door 1-C might be behind a switch puzzle that needs its own solving, requires backtracking to previous areas, or be hidden altogether. The miraculous thing is that none of this feels like an obstruction. In fact, the more time I got to spend engaging with Vextorial’s unique movement system, the better.

I’ve danced around explaining the movement system so far, so let me take a crack at it now. Each level starts you on a 2D plane. Colliding with any of the plane’s walls causes it to become a new floor, rotating the level and adjusting gravity. But the 2D plane you start on is just one of up to six along the interior sides of a cube, which a button press allows you to view in full 3D. Run up against an edge now, and you move to a new plane. Another button press returns you to a 2D perspective, shifting gravity accordingly.

I promise this is a million times more complicated to explain than it is to actually play. Each level smartly limits the number of transformations you can perform at a given time, funneling you towards the goal with minimal frustration. The nearest comparison I can make is to highly kinesthetic games like Neon White or OlliOlli, where levels only seem daunting until you move through them. The joy comes from the movement itself. Vextorial does the same thing, but to my brain.

Combine that with a retro palette and some exquisite sound design (like the little “plonk” that happens when you switch gravity, which blessedly never gets old), and the whole experience is a curated vibe. Honestly, juggling so much without overwhelming the player is a herculean design feat all on its own.

Often, though, Vextorial fails to recognize where its strengths lie, and that shaky confidence qualifies everything the game gets right. Moving the stage itself feels great, but Pilo’s movement is clunky and imprecise. Multi-dimensional platforming has some serious inertia to it, but certain introduced mechanics, like block pushing, force me to stop in my tracks. The narrative components will appeal to some, but the writing just isn’t compelling enough to warrant pulling me out of my flow state.

This is especially noticeable early on. Vextorial could absolutely have gotten away with a show-don’t-tell approach, but it overtutorializes. An NPC, mysteriously dubbed “The Stranger”, pops up frequently to explain mechanics, even bog-standard ones like buttons and boxes, and when I didn’t use my dimension-shifting power for all of 15 seconds, a massive tooltip appeared to remind me. I had to tap the button (often uselessly) just to clear it. 

Stumbling blocks like these may well disappear as the game hits its stride. Plus, though I’m personally hard pressed to ignore an NPC waiting patiently near the end of a level, these interactions are all technically optional. I’ll also admit that I’m naturally suspicious towards games that promise mystery at the expense of actual gameplay, but you might not be as lore weary as I am.

I’m interested to see how these elements will come together in the full game. As long as I can engage with them at will and not feel like I’m missing out, Vextorial’s uniqueness will likely compensate for its rough edges. After all, Vextorial is a brain scratcher, not a head scratcher, and for a quick spot of multi-dimensional gymnastics, I’m not even sure it’s got competition.