While Bioshock is an obvious and notable inspiration for Vaporum’s aesthetic and story, as a dungeon-crawler Legend of Grimrock and Operencia: The Stolen Sun feel like much closer points of comparison. Especially the latter, since Vaporum can’t quite measure up to Grimrock (but what can?).
Vaporum is dark. And I mean that in every sense. On the literal side, the tower is dark and it’s difficult to see more than a square ahead of you. Grimrock had torches that increased visibility while Operencia was just generally bright. On the figurative side, while Grimrock had no dialogue you still played as a party, whose members were there for each other and worked as a team. Additionally the enemies were monsters, which showed that the dungeon had an actual ecosystem. Operencia was a standard fantasy adventure with plenty of plot and dialogue, and in fact the party banter is the best part of the game. In Vaporum, you’re alone. You’re just one guy, no party, and the enemies you face are all robots. There’s no other sign of life, breath of fresh air, or light in the darkness.
It’s isolating and unnerving.
Fatbot Games nailed the atmosphere, with flickering lights and creaks in the distance always keeping you on edge. Was that an enemy that just got triggered, or your head playing tricks on you? There are no jump-scares or much beyond what I’ve described, so while it is a bit spooky, I wouldn’t classify Vaporum as a horror game.
As a dungeon crawler, the gameplay is largely divided into combat and puzzles. There’s no backtracking, and while the levels do have some non-linearity I wouldn’t classify exploration as a major part of the game. At the very least it’s not open-world like Grimrock II.
The puzzles are… okay. There’s a fair number of them. None are particularly impressive, but there is enough variety that they never feel stale or rote. Although there are some “Guide Dang It” moments, where the solution felt arbitrary or it was difficult to see exactly how items would interact. (Also, some pressure plates can be triggered by dropping an item on them and some can’t, and it’s impossible to know which type a pressure plate is until you actually try. This can make some puzzles annoying because you might spend time and effort solving it on the assumption that you could throw or leave an item on a pressure plate only to discover you can’t and need to return to square one, all because the game is ineffective at conveying this particular piece of information.)
Reflecting on my experience, a large reason the puzzles didn’t particularly resonate with me is the ludonarrative dissonance present throughout the level design. Vaporum feels like a video game. Operencia isn’t realistically designed, but the castle level in Operencia feels like a facsimile of a castle, and the tomb level feels like a facsimile of a tomb; the nominal setting informs the level design. Vaporum’s water station feels like a video game level, and its research lab feels like a video game level, and its dormitory feels like a video game level. They aren’t bad video game levels, but they’re just an arbitrary mess of combat and puzzle rooms, not a facility where people would actually work and play and live. So the puzzles in Vaporum feel like that: puzzles in a video game because these kinds of video games have puzzles, not a natural obstacle within the world. (I’m leaving Grimrock out of this paragraph because it does have video game-y level design, but it’s also an adventure dungeon within the world, so it gets a pass.)
The way secrets were designed also wasn't particularly engaging for me. The game tells you how many secrets are on each level, which is a nice balance between making the secrets secret and making sure the player doesn't waste their time looking for something that doesn't exist. But most secrets are just pressing a hidden button to open a secret door, which is basically the plainest design you can have for this sort of thing, and the pixel-hunting for secret buttons is compounded by how visually dark the game is. One of the few elements of Grimrock that I was not overly ebullient about was the fact that there was a limited tileset, so there were only about three different spots on a wall a "hidden" button could be, which made the process of searching for them feel rote and artificial. But every (or nearly all, at least) hidden button in Vaporum is unique. I want to commend the developers for putting in the time and effort to make all the hidden buttons, rather than just making a few and calling it a day, but now that I've actually experienced it, having to fully scour every wall throughout the entire game is exhausting. This isn't the first time I've discovered a gap between what I thought I wanted and what I actually wanted. (I'll also admit that I used a guide to 100% the secrets.)
Combat in Vaporum takes place within the grid (like Grimrock), and operates in real time… kind of. (We’ll come back to that.) You have two hands, and can quickly swap between two equipment load-outs. There are also “gadgets,” which essentially serve as magic. So there are a few different weapon options—single-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, shields, and ranged weapons—and some subdivision within those, which provides a decent amount of build variety.
Upgrades are known as “circuits,” and each has five ranks. Each rank in a circuit provides an additive bonus (for instance, one circuit increases your damage with bladed weapons, another reduces your gadget cooldown time, and another increases your health), and each circuit has a special bonus at rank 3 and then a choice between two capstone bonuses at rank 5. So the upgrade system feels a lot like Grimrock’s. It’s a straightforward system that provides variety without fake or meaningless choices, although the inability to re-spec is a bit unfortunate. Also, some ranks are gated by level, so your first two circuits will need to be ranked simultaneously, and I would have preferred to focus on circuits one at a time, but that’s admittedly a minor issue. In a typical playthrough you should be able to max out three circuits.
You encounter enemies on the grid, with a cooldown for your gadgets and weapon attacks, so, like Grimrock, the bread and butter of combat involves luring an enemy to a 2x2 grid and constantly strafing it so you can safely attack its side. This feels like a deliberate design choice. Some enemies have side attacks—which means the lack of a side attack on any enemy is intentional. Rather than give every enemy a side attack, there are various ways enemies can deal with 2x2 dancing. For instance, some enemies can quickly side-step, while others can attack all adjacent squares at once. Rather than shutting down 2x2 dancing in a way that just makes it take longer, Vaporum leans in and forces you to switch up your moves.
A lot of enemies have attacks that come out quickly, and 2x2 dancing quickly goes out the window when multiple enemies are involved (and Vaporum has plenty of multi-enemy encounters), so reflexes, positional awareness, and enemy management become critical. And, of course, enemies have their special abilities to counter 2x2 dancing even when you can’t use that strategy, so as you might imagine, combat in Vaporum can get very frenetic very quickly. Remember how I said Vaporum’s combat was “sort of” real-time? There’s a “time-stop” mode where time only progresses when your character is doing something, like in Superhot. This turns Vaporum into a pseudo-turn based system, and almost lets you approach combat like a puzzle. Having time to plan out movement and attack patterns creates strategic depth in encounters that would likely otherwise just devolve into enemies chaotically swarming you. Time-stop mode is also an easy toggle, so for single enemies you can still 2x2 dance in peace.
The health management system is a bit iffy. At the beginning of the game, the only way to heal is to use a repair kit consumable (which are limited in number) or to level up. As a result, avoiding damage is vital (and it is significantly easier to avoid damage in stop-time than real time). However, you eventually obtain a gadget that can heal you—and energy (which is used for gadgets) regenerates automatically. So Vaporum has an inflection point where it switches from extremely limited healing to unlimited healing, and I’m not sure either system is particularly compelling, since the former can soft-lock you if you perform too poorly and the latter requires you to sit around doing nothing, which is boring.
Vaporum is a nice little dungeon-crawler. It's not amazing, but it does its job. It nails an unnerving, isolating atmosphere, clearly had lots of attention poured into enemy design, provides several viable combat builds, and makes a solid effort with its puzzles. It's certainly not dethroning Grimrock, but if you're looking for more dungeon crawlers to play it's a solid package.
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