One studio looked at November 19, the day Grand Theft Auto 6 is due out, and decided that was a fine afternoon to put out a 2D platformer starring a rat-looking thing with one big hand and one small hand.
The studio is Doinksoft, Devolver Digital’s in-house team. The game is Volvy’s Adventure: Reslimed, and it’s coming to PC on November 19. Yes, that November 19.
Nearly every other publisher has given Rockstar’s date a wide berth, for reasons that need no explaining. Two games are apparently still standing on it: a port of The Binding of Isaac, and this one.
No, it isn’t a bit
The announcement leans so far into the joke that it’s worth stating flatly: Volvy’s Adventure is a real video game, and it wasn’t cooked up as a marketing stunt. Silly, sure. But sincere.
Doinksoft designer Britt Brady pitched it to Devolver “well before” GTA 6 entered the conversation, according to a statement attributed jointly to Brady and Devolver co-founder and marketing head Nigel Lowrie. The pitch arrived at Devolver HQ as a physical package: an Analog Pocket and a custom Game Boy Color cartridge holding a fully playable level.
That’s a hell of a way to sell a game. It also explains the shape of the thing. Volvy’s Adventure was prototyped for GBC and originally planned as a small release for the system, a fun little object. The team decided it deserved a bigger platform, ported it to PC, and has a modern console release planned for later.
The date was a running joke first
Separately, inside Devolver, people had been kidding around about releasing a game on the same day as GTA 6. No particular game. Just the idea of it.
Then the two halves met. “As time went by and as it became clear that Volvy was destined to become a proper game, it felt inevitable that the world’s greatest gaming mascot should be the chosen one to face off with GTA 6,” Brady and Lowrie said.
There’s an accidental punchline in how this all landed. The embargo on Volvy’s news lifted at the same moment a pile of GTA 6 embargoes expired, which means the reveal of a Game Boy Color platformer went out into the world alongside several hundred GTA headlines.
Devolver and Doinksoft aren’t blinking. “There is no doubt GTA 6 will have the spotlight before, during and after November 19 but it’s not for everyone, or releasing on Steam the same day, so we figure there’s a bit of ‘counter-programming’ that may work in Volvy’s favor,” the pair said.
Who is Volvy, exactly
Volvy is Devolver Digital’s official mascot, a creature built to mock two things at once: mainstream mascot characters, and the corporate habit of trying to “bring back” classic mascots of wildly varying popularity.
The joke has curdled into the real thing. Volvy has now turned up in several Devolver-published games, which quietly converted him from a parody of a mascot into an actual mascot. Not a Mario. Not even a Gex, with that character’s strange pseudo-fame. But a mascot.
What you’re playing
Reslimed is a retro-style 2D platformer, and the developers describe it with a straight face.
“[Volvy] is centered entirely on kinetic force, chain reactions, dynamic combos, and intense destruction. His expansive moveset naturally keeps him airborne, chaining combos that keep him from ever needing to set foot on land. Volvy boasts a large, versatile toolkit mapped to minimal, highly intuitive inputs. The control scheme allows players to easily execute complex, momentum-based destructive sequences without ever having to fight the controls, prioritizing expression and continuous movement,” Lowrie and Brady said.
Underneath the vocabulary, the pitch is legible: don’t touch the ground.
There are four worlds’ worth of levels. Volvy is trying to rescue his kidnapped friends. A wizard has unleashed some slime. The details get hazy fast, and the haze feels deliberate, part of the same shrug that produced the release date.
Brady and Lowrie ended their statement with the only regret they seem to have about any of this: “If only we knew about the GTA 6 nudist colony so we could have put that in Volvy’s Adventure: Reslimed too.”
