November 19 is the day Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives. One studio looked at that date and concluded it was a perfectly good afternoon to release a 2D platformer whose hero is a rat-ish creature with one oversized hand and one tiny one.
That studio is Doinksoft, the in-house team at Devolver Digital. The game is Volvy’s Adventure: Reslimed, landing on PC on November 19 — yes, that one.
Almost every other publisher has kept a healthy distance from Rockstar's date, for reasons nobody needs spelled out. By the look of it, only two games are still holding their ground on it: a port of The Binding of Isaac, and this.
No, it isn’t a bit
The announcement pushes the gag so hard that it bears saying plainly: Volvy’s Adventure is a genuine video game, not something dreamed up as a marketing stunt. Silly, absolutely. But sincere.
Doinksoft designer Britt Brady took the idea to Devolver “well before” GTA 6 was part of the discussion, per a statement credited jointly to Brady and Devolver co-founder and marketing head Nigel Lowrie. The pitch turned up at Devolver HQ in physical form: an Analog Pocket, plus a custom Game Boy Color cartridge carrying a fully playable level.
As sales tactics go, that’s some way to do it. It also accounts for the shape the game took. Volvy’s Adventure began life as a GBC prototype and was first meant to be a small release for that system — a fun little object. The team judged it worthy of a bigger platform, ported it to PC, and has a modern console version lined up for later.
The date was a running joke first
Meanwhile, staff inside Devolver had been joking about putting out a game on GTA 6’s launch day. No specific title. Purely the concept.
Then the two halves collided. “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.
The way it all shook out delivered an unplanned punchline. Volvy’s embargo lifted at precisely the moment a stack of GTA 6 embargoes ran out, so the unveiling of a Game Boy Color platformer went public in the company of several hundred GTA headlines.
Neither Devolver nor Doinksoft is flinching. “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 serves as Devolver Digital’s official mascot — a creature designed to send up two targets simultaneously: mainstream mascot characters, and the corporate reflex of “bringing back” classic mascots whose popularity varied wildly.
Somewhere along the line the joke became the genuine article. Volvy has since appeared in a handful of Devolver-published titles, a run that quietly promoted him from mascot parody to actual mascot. No Mario. Not even a Gex, with that character’s odd pseudo-fame. But a mascot all the same.
What you’re playing
Reslimed is a retro-flavoured 2D platformer, and its developers describe it without cracking a smile.
“[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.
Strip away the vocabulary and the pitch reads clearly enough: keep off the ground.
Levels span four worlds. Volvy’s goal is rescuing his kidnapped friends. A wizard has let loose some slime. Beyond that the specifics blur quickly, and the blur feels intentional — the same shrug that produced the release date.
Brady and Lowrie closed their statement with what appears to be their sole regret in the whole affair: “If only we knew about the GTA 6 nudist colony so we could have put that in Volvy’s Adventure: Reslimed too.”