Aviici Invector
Eulogises the Swedish star with mournful passion.
Videogames have the power to work miracles. Songs like Levels, Waiting for Love, and Wake Me Up soundtracked my evenings in nightclubs. I fuzzily recall grumbling, “You’ll never find me listening to this at 3.00am on a weeknight when I’m older.” Instead, the best part of ten years later, I’m doing exactly that. Except this time I’m toe-tapping away to Tim Bergling’s (aka Avicii) inoffensive earworms in my flat. And slippers.
This is thanks to Avicii Invector, but this isn’t your average rhythmaction game. The project that aimed to enhance Bergling’s brand of electronic dance and house music by combining it with interactive and mesmeric environments commenced in 2015, but the Swedish club sensation passed away in April 2018 before the game’s release. Hello There Games and Bergling’s team subsequently finished what had been left off, with a percentage of the proceeds going to the Tim Bergling Foundation, which supports those with mental health problems. It imbues the final experience with profound poignancy beneath the upbeat sheen of the Swedish DJ’s party anthems.
That final experience is 25 of Avicii’s biggest hits grouped into five distinct, ravishing worlds, and each song plays in a way reminiscent of Amplitude and Thumper. As you endeavour to match each note to the corresponding one on your pad – I prefer this to the keyboard controls, but they work just fine – with the best timing possible on three different lane types that ensure that no song becomes a chore.
PURE GRINDING
First, and most simple, is a flat road where your ship merrily hops from one note to the next, but you’ll have to move laterally to hit them all. Then there are the triangular pathways: here you flip the lane onto its relevant side, instead of moving right and left, and manoeuvring the wrong way can throw you way off as notes fly past you, upside down. The third and final type isn’t really a lane at all: it launches you away from a path altogether, giving you floating targets through which to zoom.
It’s in these moments that the neon grandeur of your environments stand out; eschewing a fixed path completely sees much of the UI disappear, letting you fully appreciate environments filled with towering skyscrapers and craggy cliffs, all pulsating with the track you’re playing and exploding with colour. It plays a little like Rez Infinite as you’re relieved of the shackles of traditional notes and lanes.
Your charming pilot appears between-planets on your first playthrough in a series of short, nicelydrawn vignettes, but their story is incidental. That said, they are skippable and don’t appear again after your first playthrough, which should take one to two hours.
Of course, determined Avicii detractors will get little from Invector, but those on the fence will struggle to remain unmoved as everything falls into place. That said, the distribution of the 25 of the artist’s biggest hits that make up the game is a little off: the best-known are heavily concentrated in the City and Ice worlds.
While that isn’t necessarily a problem on your first go when everything feels fresh, it’s something that becomes more pronounced over time. After each song and planet is unlocked, it’s available on all three difficulties. But when I tried to launch straight into the mid-game City world after polishing off easy, the jump to medium proved too much at first. Invector does a good job of onboarding you to the next difficulty if you progress from beginning to end, but that may mean repeating your least favourites.
Despite that, Avicii Invector is an excellent, sometimes overwhelming, experience. While it’s impossible to know the state of the game when the DJ passed away, an infectious affection for Bergling’s work now oozes from the rush of each break to every cathartic drop. HARRY SHEPHERD
It’s in these moments that the neon grandeur of your environments stand out; eschewing a fixed path completely sees much of the UI disappear, letting you fully appreciate environments..