Vaporum

Wanted to wait till completing the game on the normal difficulty before writing.
Preface: Never played any grid based real time games in my life. Mostly shooters old and new and been slowing getting into in more JRPG's and turn based RPG's in general so take my criticism with that in mind.
What does it offer: A 8-10 hour ride with RPG perk building for your voiced character. Puzzles are try and error you will not get some of them unless you know their coming with a guide or this isn't your first crawler. Enemy models are recycled throughout the entirely of the game with the final acts having one new model which is reused 2 additional times but given "abilities". No new game plus or additional rewards for beating the game. Single ending that just ends the game without much additional Narrative closure.
Reasons to buy: Art design of levels and rare steampunk style story and setting. Lore of what happened and why everything went wrong are told through notes, environment and diary logs following similar trends as Bioshock storytelling. Combat is tight and challenge is welcome.
Reasons not to buy: Leveling takes a lot of grinding through and cannot pick more then 3 perk trees to complete, enemy ambushes and instant death traps and many puzzles are not explained via notes or context clues in area leave a frustrating and unfair experience sometimes.
Final thoughts: Good 8/10 with guide use. Advice for builds do as you please but put points into rifles, you'll thank me later with the knock back.

I bought this game because I was looking for another experience like the two Legend of Grimrock games (my first experiences with a grid based dungeon crawler). While this game doesn't reach the excellence of those games, it did scratch the itch. It has only a single character that you play as, which I honestly found easier because you don't have to balance all of the party members at the same time. It has a cool steampunk setting, and the story is decent, although the voice acting isn't great. I wish they had opted to not voice the protagonist, but that's a minor complaint.

The time has finally come to talk about this game. I’ve spent more than 60 hours and completed the game 3 times with a failed 4th+ run trying to get the last achievement. Feelings are mixed and tensions are high.
Firstly, the game is described as a dungeon crawler but it’s more of a dungeon crawler/puzzle game. It’s not a traditional dungeon crawler. It places more emphasis on puzzles and there are many notes to flesh out the story. There are also many secrets hidden (chests) that offer you better equipment or stat boosts. You control one character instead of a party. There are 4 classes, different weapons and magic (called gadgets here) to use. Your stats increase when you level up and you get one skill point to improve a skill from a list. The skill tree usually improves the effectiveness of a chosen class but you’re still given some room to experiment as well. There are 12 levels to clear with no fast travel. It took me over 20 hours to fully explore the areas and read all notes the first time. You can save anywhere whether quick, manual or even auto. The game has one unique gameplay mechanic, pausing everything with real-time gameplay. Normally you use the attack button and you see your hits carried out. Enemies also attack you and will kill you if you don’t do anything. Pausing at any moment gives you the time to think properly. Pausing is also used with certain puzzles to great effect.
This game is incredibly polished. There are no bugs I’ve experienced. It feels like a lot of thought went into creating and balancing it. It looks incredibly atmospheric and just plain gorgeous. Lighting and shadow is so impressive here. I love the steampunk style. The gameplay is very satisfying whether it’s the puzzles, fights or exploration. It is viable to try out different classes. I was also impressed by some of the notes, some are fully voiced with different characters. The devs basically executed the game perfectly in terms of implementing what they wanted to do.
The problems arise with certain design decisions, mainly the achievements and secrets. Some of the worst achievements involve grinding heavily, beating the game without a map, without saving manually/quickly and speedrunning the game within 90 minutes. Even though I managed to beat the game without a map & save, I don’t think it should have been an achievement. Beating the game on the highest difficulty (brutal) and in combination with receiving less than 3000 damage should have been enough. But the absolute worst one is the speedrunning achievement. Putting this in games designed specifically around speedrunning is one thing, short games that can work well like certain platformers is also a possibility, but putting it in a long game that’s best enjoyed by taking your time is just inconceivable. Not only that, speedrunning is incredibly niche. That audience doesn’t need an achievement to speedrun a game. What you’ve done is dragging the completionist community into it and ruining the game for them. I’ve wasted so many hours starting a new run multiple times. I always made it to level 8 and was always around 2 minutes behind compared to others. As for secrets, I normally love secrets as part of finding collectibles, but the way this game does it is mostly horrible. It’s turned into an extreme version of spot the difference. Often times you’re supposed to spot a tiny dot that could have been a dirt or part of the detailed environment. I would waste lots of time examining every wall and I’d still miss secrets. I lost my patience near the end and just decided to look them up. I also have minor issues with the last 2 puzzles (getting lost in the dark and getting out of a teleport maze). The puzzles are generally without obvious hints. You have to figure them out yourself by trying things and it worked for the most part. It just went too far here even with the hints provided. The hints for the teleport maze were too well hidden and could only be viewed from one angle.
It’s hard to recommend the game outright. I got it on sale for €3 and I got tons of hours out of it. There are moments where I absolutely enjoyed the game. But there are moments where I feel like the game is too punishing and it ruined the experience. The speedrunning achievement will haunt me for not getting it. The only reason I’m not giving a personal negative is because the sequel/prequel clearly has better achievements. I’ve also read the secrets are telegraphed better. It seems some of the feedback is already implemented. It shows growth and improvement. So I’m willing to let it slide once. I still caution completionists from playing this game though. Get it only if the issues mentioned don’t bother you.

Steampunk RPG heavily inspired/influenced by Legend of Grimrock, although it doesn´t reach the same level of quality as LOG does. The story is decent, often presented to the player in form of diary entries and voice messages. The graphics is decent. RPG skill trees as well. These are however the only things FatBot did better than Almost Human in LOG I.
Level design is average, secrets are very difficult to find - usually it´s some small, hard to spot button hidden in the shadows or in a corner of a wall part. The puzzles quite simple and not very fun. The worst part for me is the combat - the game feels like it was designed as an fps with a grid movement system thrown into it at the last minute. The enemies are quite tough and there´s a lot of them. There is a lot of closed arena fights too - in Serious Sam/Doom 2016 style, the player can´t leave the room until all enemies are dead. Sometimes these fights are accompanied by a metal music.... Overall I don´t think Fatbot fully understood how a proper dungeon crawler should have looked like.
6/10

Easily recommended to fans of dungeon crawlers, it holds its own against the best in the genre but suffers some of the same pitfalls such as occasionally relying too heavily on obscure puzzles to move forward. I would also recommend you check out Operencia, StarCrawlers, Infinite Adventures, Legend of Grimrock, Might and Magic X, Bard's Tale IV, Dungeon Travelers, Sakura Dungeon, or Etrian Odyssey.

+Visuals, environments
+Options, rebinding
+Voiced dialogue and main character
+Difficulty options
+Auto and manual saves
+Intuitive controls
+Choice of rig/class
+Variety of skills, weapons/armor
+Choices on level up
+Automap
+Gadgets
+Variety of builds
+Time slow/stop

-No character creation
-Some obscure puzzles block progress
-Frequent backtracking
-No minimap
-Interactables not always clear
-Items/keys need manual use, not detect inventory
-Many junk items, no selling/convert
-Leveling can feel slow
-Some instant death trap gimmicks
-Infrequent autosaves
-Some speed puzzles
-Unclear direction at times

This game is great. There is not exactly many Steampunk Dungeon Crawlers, but even considering Dungeon Crawler games globally this one is probably near top. I like the upgrade system, which offers numerous playstyles (tried Thauma and Tank, now will do Ninja build). Even on hardest difficulty (played as tank) the game is fair except maybe towards the end, where having 4 enemies at tail at all the time is just ridiculous (took like 2h to defeaf final element of this game on hardest difficulty with Tank build).

Pros:
- Leveling system: Enough rigs and enough skills (with just right amount of skill points) to try to play this game multiple times.
- Level design: I like the diversity of floors. This is what I didn't like much about first Legend of Grimrock, where it was all "stone corridors" and "different stone corridors" until the end, where it was "metal corridors".
- Enemy variety: Just enough enemy types and they differ enough to warrant different approach. Even Shock Spider and Acid Spider require different strategy, because Acid stays for some time on those 9 tiles.
- Puzzles: Could be more difficult, but otherwise okay, I liked the one with lamp in dark room, you know which one. ''Lockdown'' put too much puzzles in game IMHO, which reduces desire to replay the game as you already know the solution and it's just a padding afterwards.
- Story: Cliche Storm but oddly enticing.
- Voicing: I like this game is voiced. I like banter between party, for this reason I like Wizardry 8 a lot.

Cons:
- You need to pull item from inventory to use it, instead of just clicking on object it interacts with. I know that this was solved in "Lockdown".
- Can't reset skill distribution, but that's the one I can live with.
- Most secrets are accessed by super hidden buttons, some of which person virtually can't spot unless they already know they're there. ''Lockdown'' solves this better by making secret rooms partially visible and mostly accessible by solving extra puzzle than finding hidden switches.

I wonder how that Ninja Elemental Warrior build will go, anyway. ;-)

Its a great dungeon crawler. The timestop mechanic is amazing and allows me (a slow planner) to take my time for my moves while not slowing me down when I know what I want to do. The combat is very tactical and has a rythem even with timestop.

The overall length is just right, with a boss fight that tests everything you have learned in the game.

My only complaint is that the difficulty seems to be planned around you finding at least a few secrets, but most of the secrets are almost impossible to find if you don't know where to look. I recommend checking a guide for them if you feel that the difficulty is too great. The game also allows you to change the difficulty on the fly.