Volume

Volume's gameplay has been designed by Bithell similar to the stealth elements of the Metal Gear Solid series. The game is presented in a top-down third-person view of the Volume simulation, showing a floor layout, Robert's avatar, and several guards and other antagonists that patrol the area. Several different variety of guards exist, each of which have different patterns of movement and how they respond to seeing the player character; such guards include archers that have a long range of vision, rogues that can see in a full circle around them, dogs that work by sense of smell and track the player by proximity, and automated turrets that react much faster than other guards. When spotted, the player has a short amount of time to attempt to break the line of sight and take cover, otherwise the simulation will restart, either fully or at the most recent checkpoint that the player has crossed.

Guards behave in established patterns, and the player can disrupt these by making noise, such as flushing a toilet, or purposely cross their line of sight to draw them away from a patrol route. The player is unable to kill these foes, but over the course of the story, gain an arsenal of tools to distract them and avoid detection; once the player has one or more such tools, they can create a loadout for their character to select which gadgets they wish to take into a level.

Volume's story is based on a modern take of the Robin Hood legend. Robert Locksley (voiced by Charlotte McDonnell) is a petty thief that finds a device called "Volume", which allows the user to simulate heists that is part of a secret military coup attempt. The device has an artificial intelligence built into it named Alan (Danny Wallace) that acts as "the Microsoft Office paperclip as a military training program", according to Bithell, and guides Robert on how to use the device. Robert decides to use the device to broadcast the simulations of high-profile crimes across the Internet in the same manner as Let's Play videos. Locksley eventually faces off against Guy of Gisbourne (Andy Serkis), re-envisioned for the game as the CEO of a company that has taken over the country of England and runs the nation as a corporatocracy.

It is hinted in-game that Volume is set in the same timeline as that of Thomas Was Alone, also developed by Mike Bithell, but set after the events of that game.

Bithell's inspiration for Volume was directly from his earlier enjoyment of playing the Metal Gear games since he was a teenager. Though several other stealth games have come out since then, Bithell felt the newer games lost the "purity" of the stealth experience that Metal Gear provided.

The user-generation aspects for Volume were inspired by The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 that was on the Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance disc, during which Metal Gear's game designer, Hideo Kojima, designed prototypes of levels in real-life using Lego bricks. Bithell designed the in-game level editor to work similar to Lego, allowing the player to snap-in predesigned elements onto new or existing levels, including the game's core levels. Bithell hopes that Volume would have an active user-community that will continue to evolve the game over many years, similar to that of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines where the player community has continued to work on improving the game five years after release.

Volume received mostly positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the Microsoft Windows version 78.40% based on 21 reviews and 80/100 based on 33 reviews and the PlayStation 4 version 71.67% based on 12 reviews and 71/100 based on 15 reviews.