Vaporum – Review

First person dungeon crawlers were never really my forte. While a couple have caught my eye in the past, generally there wasn’t enough to keep my intrigue going to suffer through a variety of traps and puzzles that I would have to endure. Vaporum on the other hand has been different.

Vaporum has you playing as an amnesic man who finds himself in the middle of the ocean next to a giant spire. The spire holds some advanced technologies which happen to include a group of robots and steam-powered mechs out to kill you for some reason. After some time exploring and getting used to the controls, the players will be able to choose how they will play the game with the choice of a variety of different Exo-suits.

While each suit has their own benefits and drawbacks, I chose the combat suit as it tended to best suit me and my playstyle. It became clear that I made the right choice after my first couple run-ins with a flying mechanical drone which was attempting to slice me up into little pieces. To defend myself, I was given a crowbar – which later escalated to a series of bladed and blunt objects, with muskets and rifles acting as a Range choice.

Combat in Vaporum is all about timing, as it’s easy to dodge and keep on the move to avoid attacks from the enemies, however the player cannot spam a series of different attacks in quick succession unless they dual-wield, so finding the right time to deliver that critical hit becomes very important.

Defeating the robots gave me Fumium, which acted like my experience points and gave me more power to open up circuits in my Exo-suit. These circuits open up a variety of skills and special attacks, even removes penalties in cases like dual-wielding. During my time with the game, I found that I was leveling up fairly quickly as I took on a variety of baddies. In turn, it made me almost cocky when it came to taking on too many bad guys at once, which became the reason I died most of the time.

Fighting things isn’t the only thing you’ll be doing in the game however, as various traps and puzzles await. They’re well placed and help pace the combat, but they’re fairly easy, with most requiring to push items, place an object on a platform, find a key or activate a point of interest.

This is also where a difference in console and PC version comes into play. Playing on consoles, interactable items can be used at the push of a button, while requires players to click on the item to open/inspect/push. The Inventory is on both are controlled in similar ways using a drag and drop menu system which looks much more easier to manage on PC. Still the console version does its best with the tools it’s given and becomes a non-issue.

One thing I couldn’t shake from was a sense of familiarity in my surroundings, and kept drawing comparisons to another “steampunk” like game, Bioshock. As you’re running through the tower it’s easy to see why, its dark, its full of things that want to kill you and the colour scheme are almost identical. The notes and audio recordings also help tell a similar story of things going wrong for the people working on the tower.

Despite that familiarity, the game still managed to pull me in with its design and pacing, keeping information coming at the right time and just giving you enough to make you think of theories of what could have happen in this giant isolated tower in the middle of the ocean in much of the same way that Rapture did.

I like to think that this is also because of how extremely impressive the audio design for the game is, with every cling and clank sounding amazing as you explore the halls. Voice Acting in an Indie game is normally hit and miss, but it feels like the cast that was brought in for the audio tapes brought their A game, even providing a performance that outshines most AAA games.

To put it lightly, Vaporum is a well-crafted RPG adventure for those looking for old-school dungeon crawling. The combat is fun, the scenery looks great and the sound design is the best we’ve seen in a long time. Even if you’re not a fan of the Dungeon Crawling genre, you’re likely to find something to like about Vaporum.