Vaporum

Vaporum is a dungeon crawler from 2017 by the Czech studio Fatbot Games, which puts the player in the role of a nameless character waking up on a beach in front of a huge, abandoned steam-powered tower in the middle of the ocean, into which they must venture to find out what happened to them. The game takes place in first-person perspective on a square grid, where the player moves room by room, solves mechanical puzzles involving levers, elevators, and pressure plates, collects equipment, and fights robots and other creatures using a system of weapons and implants that can be gradually upgraded and combined throughout the game according to one's own strategy.

The steampunk aesthetic of the tower, combining metal, steam, gears, and electrical devices, gives the game a distinctive and consistent visual style that clearly sets it apart from the typical fantasy setting of most dungeon crawlers. The puzzles require careful examination of the environment and searching for hidden switches and working with mechanisms, while the turn-based combat system relies on tactical movement across the grid, retreating, flanking the enemy, and correctly timing attacks and the use of special abilities.

Vaporum was received favorably as a carefully crafted, honest return to the classic style of dungeon crawlers, one whose atmosphere and design managed to appeal even to players outside the genre's narrow fanbase. Thanks to it, the studio Fatbot Games built a reputation as a creator of quality, atmospheric games with a distinctive visual signature of their own, and later built on that success with further installments set in the same world. The story of the tower and its mysterious owner is pieced together gradually by the player from diaries, notes, and found items, which gives even a purely mechanical game a sense of progress and discovery. The absence of any randomly generated environments also allowed the creators to carefully design each room so that both the puzzle and the combat within it made sense and built on the player's previous experience.

Why play it: Anyone looking for an honest, carefully designed dungeon crawler without randomly generated levels and with the captivating atmosphere of a steampunk tower will find a genre benchmark here.