Vaporum

Vaporum’s tagline is “Steampunk Dungeon Crawler,” which is quite honest for exactly what the game is. This game takes a grid-styled dungeon crawler, throw

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Vaporum. The developers did a great job of updating a genre that has been buried by the sands of time. They took an old-school dungeon crawl, added a fresh coat of paint (no crappy 8-bit graphics here), dropped it into a fresh Steampunk setting, and added some modern mechanics while staying true to the genre. The story was well told, but it would have been better had it been as unique as the setting.

A surprisingly addictive dungeon crawler that will keep you entertained for many hours.

Eye of the Beholder on the SNES was my first CRPG. Venturing through the vast levels of Undermountain, tinkering with the unprecedented (at the time) number of classes and races available, the real-time combat against hordes of enemies, that game defined the genre. It showed me what video games could really do with the RPG genre, and I spent many a night slowly mapping my way towards the end. Vaporum is the latest in a long line of games to be built upon the pillars EotB set: exploration, cus...

Getting stranded in the middle of the ocean is never a good thing, as it usually is accompanied by a nice dose of amnesia to make thing more complicated. And if there's a mysterious structure dominating the landscape, what is a lost, amnesiac man to do? Explore! Welcome to Vaporum, a game that mixes elements of old-school, first-person dungeon crawlers with others that freshen the experience considerably.

As a full package, Vaporum is pretty great. A well polished and challenging dungeon crawler set within an exciting world. Although the controls can sometimes be a bit of a pain for the console editions, we see so few games in this genre today that the minor headaches are worth struggling through.

Vaporum is a throwback to an old-school genre, but it doesn't bring about a renaissance for the grid-based dungeon crawler on console.

Exploration and puzzle-solving feature heavily in most dungeon crawlers and, while you’ll spend a great deal of time roaming Vaporum’s corridors, the puzzles you solve to make progress are disappointingly low-rent. Former GameSpew writer Olivia noted that Vaporum’s puzzles present accessibility issues – but aside from that, they’re just not very interesting. Complex puzzles are far and few between, and for the most part you’re activating a button and racing to a door before it closes. On a joypad, “solving” these involves facing a wall (since even turning will cost you too much time) and side-...