PVKK's full title is literally too big for our website, and the devs say it's 'Space Invaders, but the cannon you fire is really complicated'
PVKK, or—if you're feeling ambitious—Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant, looks fascinating. A sort of Papers Please-like from the Dome Keeper team, it situates you at the controls of a giant planetary defence cannon fending off extraterrestrial invaders. PVKK seems set to scratch my itch both to twiddle with vast arrays of analogue buttons, and to melt into the faceless machinery of an authoritarian state as a cog in the apparatus of violence. Finally, developers are making videogames for me.
They're not making names for PC Gamer dot com, though. Attempting to write the full title in the headline for this piece led to our CMS just kind of, um, giving up: Rendering about 32 characters before taking its ball and going home. PVKK it is, then.
«It's Space Invaders, but the cannon you fire is really complicated,» says director René Habermann in a chat with PCG. Defending your planet—which is not the Earth—against invaders is a long and laborious business: There are clunky buttons to push, knobs to tweak, dials to adjust, all to find a firing solution that will hopefully blow your enemies out of the sky.
It all looks very tactile, which makes sense, because to hear Habermann tell it the entire concept for the game sprung out of a profound appreciation—or fetishism—for the satisfying thonk-thonk of lumbering, Cold War-era interfaces. «The original inspiration for the game came from a free sound effect of a button press that I found online… it sounded so satisfying that I thought, 'Okay, I need to make a game where I can use the sound file.'»
Combine that with Habermann's personal fascination with «cockpits or technology or trains, that all have a million small little knobs and levers» that have him feeling like «oh, yeah, I would love to like just flip a few switches,» and you get the impressive array of toggles and levers that make up your command module in PVKK. But there is another half of the game, too.
«I think Papers, Please was the game I mentioned the most when
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