Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.
But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.
Idk to me it looks like they either couldn’t or just didn’t spend time finding someone to draw those cutscenes. The rest of the game in the trailer appears to have a lot of work put into it.
Is that not concerning to you?
I dont even know who ALIVE, Inc is besides that they are releasing this game and have some help from a publisher. What is the level of that support? I dont know. How many devs are in the studio? Again, I don’t know. Are they breezing by? Up to their eyeballs in stress? Does their publisher even help them get a cutscene artist like they should or did they tell the devs to use AI? We dont know. Judging by the content that is not AI, I’d say the devs can cook. So whose to say what happened here. But I doubt the intent was “lolz generated gayme and peepl buy”.
Does any of that actually matter? If they took on a project too big for their studio to do properly, it’s going to suck regardless of why they did it. If they were forced into it by a publisher or similar then I’ll have some sympathy for them, but I don’t pick games to play based on how sorry I feel for the devs
Go play the demo. I actually dont know why they did that cause the game itself is pretty good. So its hard to say. Usually if you can’t get someone to do this art thats what the publisher is for (for an example this is what Adult Swim did for Video Cult when they made Rain World) and they apparently have one.
They could’ve animated the cutscenes in-engine though.