Vaporum: Lockdown

Vaporum: Lockdown is a standalone spin-off of the 2017 game Vaporum, set in the same steampunk world full of steam, brass, and electricity, but with a new heroine and a different setting — the isolated military fortress Arx Vaporum, which she reaches after her ship wrecks off an unknown coast. The game belongs to the first-person dungeon-crawler genre with grid-based movement, where the player gradually explores narrow metal corridors, solves puzzles involving machines, levers, and pressure plates, and fights mechanical enemies and strange creatures in combat that plays out in real time rather than turns, with success depending mainly on proper positioning, dodging, and timing counterattacks.

The Slovak studio Fatbot Games mainly played with story and atmosphere here — Lockdown is darker and more claustrophobic than the first game, emphasizing a feeling of being trapped in a hostile, sealed-off environment with no escape, where the heroine gradually learns what actually happened at the fortress and why its corridors are full of dangerous machines. Game systems such as weapons mounted on the heroine's mechanical arms instead of regular hands, a skill tree, and upgrading gear through crafting from materials found in the fortress remain conceptually similar to the first game, but individual levels are designed more compactly and with less wandering, and the game places noticeably greater emphasis on environmental storytelling through found diaries, audio recordings, and notes scattered throughout the fortress.

Why play: Vaporum: Lockdown will delight fans of old-school dungeon crawlers and lovers of steampunk aesthetics who appreciate well-thought-out puzzles, the grim atmosphere of an isolated fortress, and tense fights against machines, and there's no need to worry about jumping in without knowing the first game, since the story works entirely on its own and explains all the necessary context as it goes.