Vaporum

For me, Vaporum is to the grid-based dungeon crawler as Shadowrun: Dragonfall is to the tactical roleplaying game. I'm not claiming Vaporum to be a mind-blowing, incredible experience by any means, but it took a genre that I seriously disliked and made me enjoy a game of that genre. Perhaps it's too loyal to the genre? Not loyal enough? That's not really my concern. I'm mostly here to play games and get a net gain of enjoyment out of them if possible. My history with grid-based dungeon crawlers has been largely vacant and uninterested, with only a few minutes of some '90s first person Ultima game at the store, playing Stonekeep beginning to end (which was borderline child abuse when I was 12 years old at the time), and playing an hour or so of that Grimrock game, which I was disinterested in entirely.
For me, I need a game to either blow me away with its gameplay, or to pull me in with a setting, characters, and story that make me want to finish it. With the older games I'd played, I was entirely dissatisfied and avoided the genre entirely. Grimrock was just me dipping my toes in, finding the generic doesn't-matter-party-members-you-generate-yourself uninteresting, not really seeing any story that appealed, and the fantasy setting failing to reel me in...so I haven't touched the genre until Vaporum.
If you're a grid-based dungeon crawler fanatic, I probably can't help you because our desires and ideologies on what we want in a game likely differ. Perhaps I'll say something that might appeal or disgust you concerning the game, aiding you in your decision-making, but the most likely persons to benefit from this review are people who don't like the genre, or are largely wary of it in general.
Why do *I* - a person who doesn't like all those fantasy grid-based dungeon crawlers with party members who don't really matter - like Vaporum? Well, for starters, the setting is much more interesting to me. If fantasy is your thing, that's fine, but I *really* have to be blown away by a game to get into a fantasy setting. More modern and sci-fi games appeal to me, and although steampunk (i.e. Vaporum) is typically 1800s or so, steampunk gives a sci-fi/alternate history vibe that I find intriguing. It's not just that, though. The entire game takes place inside a steampunk tower, and each floor has its own sleek design and feel to it. People devoted to graphical fidelity can no doubt tell me why I'm "wrong," but art style is what I care more about than graphics. For example, I find Super Nintendo Final Fantasy VI (III in the U.S.) to be more visually appealing than the Playstation Final Fantasy VII graphics which were viewed as superior at the time.
The voice work in this game isn't spellbinding or haunting, per se, but it's also not "cringe." It gets the job done, and between the audio recordings and the written notes you find in the game, it actually does a pretty good job of building a set of characters in my mind (you never meet most of them). I don't want to "invoke" the name of BioShock because that's raising a heck of a bar, but I cannot deny that the effort was here in the audio recordings and notes I found. I just finished playing that "Control" game about a week ago, and although its lore and audio recordings were the most interesting things (to me) in the game, almost all of it felt "detached" from the characters you're learning about. Picking up notes from twenty different agents who never actually speak to you and who aren't relevant to anything at all in the plot just make a game "messier" and take the focus off of the "key" characters. With Vaporum, the vast majority of the notes and audio recordings build up these characters who make up the plot of the game, despite never meeting them. I thought it worked as well as I've seen outside of the BioShock or System Shock series.
I've seen a few folks who disliked Vaporum's story on the discussion board and reviews, but I thought it was pretty good. The ending was a bit vague and left me a bit confused as to what was going on (I'd still like to know), but it didn't ruin my victory. The story pacing - in my opinion - was done quite well in terms of how much information we're given and when it's given to us throughout Vaporum. It actually compelled me enough to finish the game. Keeping me interested in any one game can be tough, yet - despite working full-time - I still completed the game in under a week's time. I've quit "AAA games" that had far more money put into them than Vaporum because the plot didn't interest me or the characterization in the game dropped the ball. I loved Dishonored and immersive sims are my favorite genre, but I actually quit playing Dishonored 2 because the game felt (to me) devoid of characters that I cared about, and lacked sufficient development of those characters.
Oh, and this is character/story-related, but a huge plus for me in Vaporum as opposed to Stonekeep, Grimrock, and some other games of the genre, is having a sole player character rather than a group of one-dimensional characters, *especially* if the player creates them or they otherwise lack personalities/dialog, like in Grimrock. Moreover, the protagonist in Vaporum is important to the plot and there's a bit of mystery for just a little while in figuring out who he is. The plot twists in this game aren't the stuff of legends, but they worked for me and I was happy with them.
I usually don't bring up sound effects, and when I do, it's just "checking a box" essentially, because it's one of the things people list in reviews. With Vaporum, I actually loved the sound effects. The steampunk machinery rumbles in the background, the sounds from walking and stepping on pressure plates, and all the other machines you come across sounded great and (ironically) "fleshed out" the steampunk tower. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any games whose sound effects actually won me over this much except perhaps for Mario 64's meme-worthy "Woohoo!"s from Mario as he jumps repeatedly, or some of the clever stuff Chrono Trigger's developers did with the limited sounds they could make on the SNES.
The gameplay here was pretty enjoyable for me despite not being a fan of the genre. Grid-based movement is something that I can easily see being a "deal-breaker" for some gamers, though. For me, I didn't mind it, and it's a "game" in and of itself, figuring out how to move and keep yourself from getting hit while positioning yourself to deliver attacks and dodge out of the way a moment later. The game offers bashing weapons and bladed weapons, which have their own respective strengths, as well as guns, and "gadgets" which effectively serve as the magic system in the game. Better still, you can choose between several "rigs" which essentially serve as a "starting class" for your character, and each time you level up (I think I reached 15 or 16), you get a "Circuit" you can spend to get some nice upgrades on a list of skills to better modify your character.
I went with the gadget (magic) class and had quite a bit of fun with it. By the end of the game, like 90% or more of my combat was purely using gadgets rather than physical attacks of any kind. At the beginning, you'll have to use some non-gadgetry and it works well enough. The difficulty in the game is challenging on Normal but not too bad. There were some rough and intense fights, but nothing that ever made me consider rage-quitting. The developers clearly put a lot of effort into this game. I'm not an "A for effort" kinda guy because I'm pretty demanding when it comes to games, but I think that pointing out hard work is warranted when i see it.
The only thing I have negative to say about Vaporum are its incredibly obscure secrets. By the half-way point, I was using a walkthrough to find all of them. Aside from a small number of them, almost all of the secrets lack clues in notes or visible areas you can't get to, to encourage you to look for a hidden switch in the room.

Vaporum is a dungeon crawler. You know, like the ones Grandpa used to play. The ones he even had a pen and paper to draw something he called a "map" for. Because games back then were awful, just the way Grandpa liked them. And now they're back in style!
The story is...not that important. You must climb a tower. Why must you climb the tower? Because it's there. It's really not that important! The game looks and sounds great. And the steampunk setting, the sweaty cousin of the much cooler cyberpunk, is a good choice compared to the usual fantasy fare. There's also voice acting. It's a mixed bag, but there is voice acting. It is a fact.
So once you head inside the tower you get to choose your playstyle. I chose to play a bog-standard hammer man who eventually learns he can use a hammer in his other hand as well. It worked alright, but after a few hours I would've given anything for a more active spell gadget-oriented build. At least the game offers replayability.
Real-time combat can get hectic at times. Especially when the game has a habit of luring you into murder rooms and locking the doors behind you. Grandpa loved these. You can always switch the game to a pseudo turn-based mode at any point with the press of a button. It's mostly useful in timed puzzles, though. And what's a dungeon crawler without puzzles? The ones you must complete in order to advance are all pretty good and offer a decent challenge. Optional ones sometimes require a PhD in Sierra video game logic. There's enough variety in them to keep things fresh, and the items and upgrades you find as reward for doing them are worth it. Secrets, however, can be incredibly hard to find without resorting to a guide. Trying to find a hidden button on the wall in the dark gets old pretty fast.
I reached the end at around 15 hours, so the game definitely has some meat on its bones. It's a good game and even normal people can enjoy it. No pen or paper necessary. I'm really digging this nostalgia-necromancy times we're living in, so much so that I'm looking forward to playing the sequel one day.

If you're a fan of Grimrock, you're in the right place. While I have a million complaints, much of this game was very enjoyable. For someone who likes this genre, it's worth playing. I'd say this a good game with a million obvious problems that stop it from being great.
Puzzles:
Maybe the most obvious one is these designers clearly have no idea how to make a meaningful puzzle. For nearly every puzzle, the best strategy is to repeatedly bash your face against the wall until one of the available options solves it. Try this button first - nope, I guess this button; nope, next one, but which button is second?!
Close to none of them are about being clever, and instead get solved by guessing in what order something should be done. This leaves them painfully unsatisfying to solve and instead feeling like a waste of time. Other puzzles, like the slow and annoying box puzzles, are completely unsuited for the perspective you're given in this game and feel like a chore. They turn a gradeschool-level puzzle into slogging guess-and-check, or getting graph paper and drawing out every step for 20 minutes. There's also the classic "put codes in notes people just leave around for some reason" trope. Thanks a lot, doom 3.
Eighty percent of the puzzles in this game are truly a joke in regards to intelligent design. If you want puzzles that challenge your actual problem solving, you are in the wrong place. These puzzles are like work that allow you to progress to actual gameplay which is the fighting and character growth.
Combat/rpg mechanics:
Generally decent/good.
You'll enjoy putting skill points into expertise of your choice although they are all passive. Weapon upgrades, armor upgrades, etc. Some are a bit more interesting but not many. They're mostly a little bland, but it's still fun building up your character how you want to and seeing the growth. You also choose a suit at the beginning of the game that dictates what your character's strengths are. You can choose one that's more defensive, offensive, caster-oriented, and so on. This choice is permanent. They give passive bonuses to related attributes.
The combat is mostly what you would expect but not bad. The 1v1 square dancing that's always in these grid-based crawlers can get tiresome, but I've yet to see a game find a way to stop that from being tedious at times. You get two hands to hold guns, melee weapons and shields, plus a few pieces of armor for equipment bonuses. There's also a handful of trinket slots that let you cast different magics at the cost of regenerating energy. You only get one character which can make it feel like something is missing, but it isn't necessarily bad.
Energy, unfortunately, is pretty stupid. Never should the way forward in a game be to stand still for several minutes while you regenerate a resource. Energy regenerates itself, always. Now imagine you're starting to run low on supplies, or maybe you're totally stuck somewhere. Instead of refining your strategy, thinking of a new plan, or just playing better, your best bet is to walk away for 2 minutes until you have full energy. This is a bad system. People are passively forced into it either by wanting to be safe with their supplies, or because they're in trouble. This should never be a possible part of someone's strategy, yet the tools are here. Tell someone they don't have to wait around all you want to... it does not change the fact that to get ahead or make more fruitful progress, we get rewarded by wasting our time just like with most secrets.
Still the combat is fun enough. The enemies have aoe attacks, projectiles, etc, in a thought-out enough way that you at least have to play a bit of chess in your fights. I will say some enemies have so much hp that in cramped rooms there isn't really any room for strategy because you can't move enough.
Secrets:
There is once again nothing special going on here. Good secrets need to reward an attention to detail. Instead, what you usually get here is mindlessly staring at every surface looking for clickable spots. This can be passable, but only if something really stands out or makes a smart person realize it's time to check. Most of the secret clickable buttons are too close to being visually the same as something you see THOUSANDS OF in the game. You need to orchestrate a thinker down the right path more often. You need to make sure a person who pays attention might notice a secret, instead of rewarding people for wasting time waving their mouse over every wall.
The secrets basically boil down to finding a weird door/dead end that doesn't open, staring at walls until you find a button, or pushing a box and once again looking for a button because you see nothing there. The secret design too heavily promotes mindlessly waving the cursor over every wall more than it promotes paying attention. They are also sometimes just another version of the puzzles I was annoyed about above.
Writing/narration
Ranges from fine to terrible.
The story progression is enjoyable enough, but the voice acting and writing is not. The story is extremely predictable and done a thousand times. I won't spoil it, but you've heard it before. I will say listening to audio logs is fun even if you know where they're going and the acting is bad.
I am constantly put off by the way the main character and audio logs speak to make sure you understand the story or that the thing you just picked up is for a puzzle. Assume people have a brain instead of forcing the main character, who is alone, to tell me the thing with a broken handle might need a new handle. The same problem happens with the characters' narration/storytelling. Assume people have brains instead of making characters act like they aren't even real people, saying things out loud nobody would ever say. If you give puzzle hints by breaking this rule, there's an issue at hand.
In short:
This team needs to make a ton of improvements for their next game. But they're on the right path towards creating really awesome dungeon crawlers. I do like the game in general, but too many things are just silly to get a serious commendation out of me.

I admit it. I used a lot of sleazy tactics to weasel my way through Legend of Grimrock. It was utterly reprehensible. I'm ashamed of myself. For those of you who did likewise, this game is our just reward.
They've beefed up their anti-sleaze defenses quite a bit here in what I can only assume is a deliberate effort to stop scumbags like me. You can forget about pulling monsters back to a gate one by one and then opening and closing the gate to avoid damage when the doors slam shut and lock you in a small room.
Remember the good old run-around-a-2x2-square-so-they-can't-hit-you routine? It still kind of works, but it's a lot harder to pull off when you're in the aforementioned small room with two or more monsters who can do things like spit acid on the floor and drop AOE attacks. Get a little lazy and before you know it they trap you in a corner and it's over. F9.
While the punishment may be well-deserved, that doesn't make it any less of a drag. There's a general formula to this game which goes: enter room --> door closes --> fight monsters --> door opens. You can see it coming, and after a while it evokes only a sigh of resignation as each new ordeal, much the same as the last, draws near.
There's not much variety or progression to the enemies and they can absorb a ton of damage, which made the battles a real grind; and that was with a more dps-oriented character, too. Not to mention, I was playing a rifle spec because I had big plans that involved running away a lot, and it turns out that ammo can be pretty scarce until the very end. So much of the time I had to switch to some lousy melee weapon I barely knew how to use just to conserve bullets. No respec-ing, either.
Even the environments are kind of dreary and monotonous, although technically speaking it does look really good for an indie. Maybe that comes with the territory in these steampunk sort of worlds; but it doesn't seem like they explored the potential of the environment very enthusiastically. I mean, it's a big tower on the ocean, yet they never take advantage of this dramatic location. Once the doors slam shut, you could be anywhere. Would have been nice if they showed you a little more variety as you went along to liven things up.
Don't mean to come down too hard on this game. It's not so bad; and to be fair Legend of Grimrock had some of the same issues. There's a story, too, by the way. I put off mentioning it because (just between you and me) I wasn't really paying attention to the logs you find until they actually started to seem important later in the game, and at that point I wasn't going to go back and read them all to catch up. The part I did see near the end seemed ok, though.
Maybe I'm just bitter because they shut down my slimeball combat tactics. Can't they just unlock the doors and free me to be the man I was meant to be?
Come on, give me a little breathing room and four contiguous tiles and I'll take on the world!
You can find more indie game reviews at oddlittlegames.com or visit my curator page. Thanks, and enjoy!

I don't actually remember ever playing a dungeon crawler before... However, this game was definitely worth it, and I believe that both newcomers and old school fans of the genre might agree.
It's not a long game, if you don't find it necessary to check every bolt and screw for a button, though I think you will enjoy it more if you do like looking for secrets. I found the story captivating enough and the setting interesting, and I would like to see more of the outside world and learn more about its politics. If you are familiar with the genre, you have the option to disable both the automap and manual saving.
It is the kind of game that I finish and instantly want more. I should feel quite lucky having played this game now, as a prequel is scheduled for release the day after tomorrow - yay!

Pretty good dungeon crawler. (But it's not in the same league as LoG.)
Obviously the big pull with Vaporum is the steampunk element, and I'd argue it pulls that off quite well. There's a bit of eldritch lovecraftianism mixed in, which certainly doesn't hurt. The atmosphere is great, with good music, for the most part awesome voice acting, and just enough darkness mixed in.
The combat is fun and rewarding and with a bit of situational awareness and decently quick reflexes you can easily get through most fights without being slapped around like a combat dummy. There's also an abundance of bullets, so you can comfortably get through the whole game with just using guns without worrying about running out of ammo, which is pretty nice. Beyond guns the melee weapons do either slash or blunt damage, each having bonuses against one of the two types of enemies you'll fight, but with each type having its own separate talent tree, you should probably stick to just one. (There's only enough points to max out three and a half skill trees.)
Beyond weapons you also get gadgets, which are a pretty powerful addition to your arsenal, even if you're not speccing into them; also most of them are useful, so you'll find yourself using them often enough, which is exactly how auxiliary items should work in games.
The skill trees offer plenty of interesting options and you're pretty much forced to level up at least two at once, as each skill has a level requirement, which I don't find particularly pleasant, but it works here.
There's also a couple of puzzles and some secrets (some of which are very sneaky, but most of them are not too hard to find, once you know what to look for) sprinkled in, as you'd expect. Not nearly as much as LoG, but that's probably a good thing... (PSA: you can check the statistics before leaving each level to check if you've found them all so you don't have to backtrack later, if you're a completionist...)
The story is alright, nothing too exceptional, but not a poorly written snoozefest either. You slowly put together what happened as you progress, with notes left by previous inhabitants helping to paint the picture of how things got to where they are when you arrive... I would've liked if the game answered a bit more questions about the whole situation, but what we got is mostly fine. What exactly is fumiun? Does it really have some sort of consciousness? What is it's goal, given the plot twist at the end?

It's Grimrock Bioshock.
You only play a single character, and the passageways are a little more congested so square-dancing is harder, and the game relies more heavily on puzzles as part of main play rather than as a way to get neat optional secrets---but it's very much Grimrock 1 with a dystopian steam vibe.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The writing for the intro cutscene is a little iffy, but the voiceacting is generally good, and the game does wonders with sound design. Everything is rich and atmospheric, even if the enemy mobs are all a little samey.
Unfortunately, Vaporum is less forgiving than Grimrock. All pits are instadeath, and you can 100% lose progression-essential items down them, and stones are handed out very rarely, so be careful what you throw.
Healing is also a limited quantity, and depending on your build you can back yourself into no-win states.
There also seem to be right and wrong builds, and I'm not sure yet which of those dual-wielding is.
If you don't mind some frustration, and you're careful with your saves, and you're willing to consult a guide every so often, this is a pretty fun and polished dungeon-crawler.
However, if anything in this review sounded like an element you do not like, probably give this a miss or wait for deep sale.