It’s very strange that this game’s User Score is absolutely hammered down into the red-zone by 7 negative scores, none of which “reviews” provide any reason to support WHY they arrived at that conclusion. I guess that’s on Metacritic for allowing people to blast a game with a negative score without providing a single line of critique to back it up. Shame, because it made me avoid thisIt’s very strange that this game’s User Score is absolutely hammered down into the red-zone by 7 negative scores, none of which “reviews” provide any reason to support WHY they arrived at that conclusion. I guess that’s on Metacritic for allowing people to blast a game with a negative score without providing a single line of critique to back it up. Shame, because it made me avoid this game, thinking there must be something broken about it, until it was 4 years old (on PS4) and on sale for peanuts. Sorry, devs.
OK, review time… Vaporum is a “dungeon crawler” which means it’s all about nosing around labyrinthine levels in grid-based movement. Everything’s rendered in true 3D and you have a free look (and, yes, the camera’s Y-axis can be inverted unlike some I’ve played) so it doesn’t feel as static as old-school bitmap examples of the genre.
I’ve mostly been playing Japanese takes on this genre recently, which tend to switch to turn-based RPG-style battles, but this one’s real-time, which means you can get assaulted by a nastie while poking around in your inventory if you’re not careful. (yes, you can pause properly if real-life intrudes on your gaming.) It does, however, have a mode that you can switch to at any time where the world only moves when you do, so you can time things with clinical precision if you want. It’s actually necessary for some timed puzzles where you can’t spare the time for a false move.
The main difference between this game and the more stripped-down Japanese dungeon-crawlers is that it also has a mode where you bring up what basically amounts to a mouse-pointer to poke at bits of the scenery, push secret buttons, open cabinets, etc. Didn't realise how much I missed that extra layer of interaction until I got it back.
It’s also … whatever the PC equivalent of “NES-hard” is. There’s no hand-holding and it’ll leave you on your own to work out some fairly evil puzzles. For example, I was stumped for a while at a bit where you enter a small enclosed space and the door behind you and ahead of you both close, so there’s no escape, and a ticking timer begins giving you only a few seconds before all the floor tiles open as pits and drop you to your death. Turned out the solution was a hidden switch on the door that closes behind you. But once you get into the mindset of how the game “thinks,” make use of that time-freeze mode, realize you’ve only got so many options so it HAS to be something that you can do in that small room, then solving such puzzles are just a matter of narrowing down your options. Personally, I found I enjoyed not being treated like a moron for a change.
The game also has an auto-save function that you can use at any moment with a simple button combo, so cautious players can save-scum their way through most situations.
Just so it’s not all praise, there are a few things that I wasn’t so keen on, like the way turning counts as moving in the time-freeze mode, leading to some unintentionally amusing situations where you have to run past hazards with your ass to them because there isn’t time to turn :)
I’ve also been slightly spoilt by one of the Japanese dungeon-crawlers I played recently, which had an “auto-walk” function where you picked a spot on the level-map and the game auto-walked you there, pausing if you encountered any hazards. No auto-walk here, so you’re manually backtracking through labyrinths (with frequent checks of the map) if you want to get back to a specific spot.
It's also ridiculously dark by default, with no "calibrate your brightness" screen before beginning play. The opening bit is supposed to be fairly dark but it's not supposed to be so dark that you can't see a thing. So use that opening bit for calibration and bump up the gamma in the video options until you can just see where you are, and you'll be good for the rest of the game.
In summary, it’s a really good dungeon-crawler with some old-school difficulty, puzzles that require actual thought, and a general lack of handholding. If you’re up for that, then you’ll enjoy Vaporum. I’m only about halfway through the game, but I’ve already bought the follow-up prequel.… Expand
VaporumYour Score0 out of 10User Score
