It’s a fantastical post-post-apocalypse world where humans covered the world in a globe-spanning empire of magical technology, then fucked around and found out, destroying the entire surface world in an event called the World Rend. The remaining populace, living on the floating islands that occur naturally on this world, were once again at the mercy of the gods and their unfair contracts. Until a resistance built up and killed most of the gods in the God War, creating the Apostatic Union in its wake.
Things are bad, though. After killing all the gods, mortals must fend for themselves and tend to their own needs. There’s a famine and a plague going on in Hallowshire, the Clockwork King might be going mad, and the undead of the Endless Realm are literally decaying in mausoleums waiting for their interminable immortality to carry them to the end of all things. Wikkans conspire to restore the gods to their former glory, and an infamous pirate named Vela has found a map to something that could end the world – or restore it.
You are a prisoner recruited by the Apostatic Inquisition, tasked by a tortured High Confessor in a clockwork coffin to somehow stop Vela. This is an act of desperation: they literally kick you out the door without anything but the rags you’re wearing, hoping you’ll do something about it.
It’s just 20 bucks to dig into Vaporwave Vvardenfell. This game’s incredible. The aesthetic, the music, the PS1 style graphics are just nailed perfectly. All character progression is just exploration. You get some experience for finishing quests, but mostly you get it by finding these floating blue skulls called Delusions in hidden areas. Spend them to boost your stats. You can also equip items to boost them, upgrade weapons and armor, craft simple potions, etc.
At the end of the main quest you get an airship and it’s so fun to just zoom around the map. Reminds me of Skies of Arcadia. 10/10 would recommend
I’ve put some time into this one now and I think I like it a fair bit. At first I felt it was pretty simple and easy, almost shallow. But now I think that’s really working for it.
Like the combat is trivial and the puzzles are mostly very short. There is very little that is frustrating in this game. Even trekking back and forth across the islands is made pretty painless with the “gotta go fast” spell.
But what this enables is for you to just groove around plundering ruins and solving problems ten minutes at a time. I does feel like the complexity and difficulty has increased now that I’m onto my third area, but at this point I’ve become very efficient and running around picking up coins while I piece together the lore of this world.
It’s funny that this game has a lot of the same kind of bullshit that weighs down the ubisoft-style of open world games. What it does differently is that it doesn’t waste your fucking time and bury everything in a slick but needlessly complicated system of menus. You don’t gotta climb the map tower twenty times, you just walk up to something big and mark it on your map. You just get enough materials poking around that you usually have what you need to upgrade your stuff or whatever. And you don’t have to sit through animations or survival-style busywork buttons to do it.
All this enables a game that funnily lets you sink into the world by being relatively non-immersive in its gameplay. Nothing you’re doing is gonna be too complicated or cumbersome, so what you’re left with is thinking about all the weird stuff you’re seeing, wondering how you can get into the basement, pondering if anyone involved in this mess has the right idea about any of it. And that slaps!
Good game, might finish it.
Yeah, despite the simplicity I felt myself melting away into this world to the point where I really contemplated which of the two endings the game presents to you, genuinely not knowing which way things would go and ultimately being satisfied with what I picked.
I’d love to see more of this world and maybe play more games set in it. It’s fascinating.