Instead of feeling like you’ve genuinely learned something and feel empowered by your own cool brain. Like I said earlier these range from boringly simple to staring at the screen for twenty minutes wondering if you should just go play Monster Hunter because that’s clearly more your speed MATTHEW! Like any bad puzzle when you finish them you feel relieved that it’s over and stupid that you didn’t figure it out sooner. Some of these puzzles are needed to progress the story and some are to get secret loot that buffs your character. In Vaporum I feel like I pressed the A key and that’s about it.Īs a grid-based dungeon-crawler, there are going to be puzzles to solve. When you dodge in Dark Souls and the enemies giant claw sweeps above you and the wooshing sound hits your ears you feel like you’ve actually accomplished something impressive. When you get to later monsters it’s all about pattern recognition which, as a Dark Souls fan, I’m pretty into but as I said there’s no weight to your actions. Image credit: Fatbot gamesĪll of the early monsters in the game can be beaten by just moving back and forth between two squares and each time they move over you attack and move again before they have a chance to attack you. You don’t feel like you’re taking a 20kg hammer and smacking someone about the bonce with it, you feel like you pressed left click and a slight crescent swipe hit the creature. You don’t feel like you’re dodging attacks you feel like you’re doing cheese strats. (Almost.) You move in a grid and your attacks are on cooldown. The combat is simplistic in a special way that almost makes Skyrim combat seem fun. The puzzles and combat varied from either horrendously easy and hairy pulling difficult, I practically got whiplash between encounters where I had my feet up on my desk and was taking it easy when all of a sudden I was faced with a monster I had never seen before, could not kill and was just supposed to figure out I needed to lock the creature in a room I’d seen ten minutes earlier. Moving on to the rest of the review, this game infuriated me. The areas you traverse are all very unique but still feel like they’re connected by this giant monolithic tower known as Arx Vaporum. Every monster and humanoid enemy seems pretty well-thought-out and realistic in their madness and decay. That’s not a typo, by the way, I have one positive thing to say about the game. To kick off the review I’ll list my positive.

So if you are a fan of grid-based dungeon crawlers and the original rogue then this game might just be what you’re looking for. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I am reviewing the game and I thought it tedious. This game is a hardcore puzzle-solving dungeon crawler with a very specific vibe that it’s going to cater to a very specific niche.īefore reviewing this game I wanted to check with big-time fans of games such as Legend of Grimrock, a game that heavily inspired Vaporum, thought of Vaporum and they all seemed to love it. To be candid about this game I found it incredibly dull, but that comes with the caveat that a lot of that comes from this kind of thing just not being for me.

Arx vaporum map