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A touch of AI is all it takes to trigger backlash, as a promising new indie falls afoul of slop skeptics (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [M] to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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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.

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[–] 13 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

Looking at the rest of the game, take out the GenAI cut scenes and draw them? I dont see how this can't be saved.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    There are two big issues that that doesn't fix:

    • Showing the trailer in this state very clearly implies that they don't really care about the game. Even if it really was only meant to be a placeholder, would you think highly of a game with obvious placeholder assets in its trailer? If it's not a placeholder, then they're passing off major things like what the protagonist looks like to the hallucination box

    • There are a lot of people who have ethical issues with AI, and just removing the stuff in the trailer is not going persuade anyone at all that the rest of the game isn't full of AI rubbish

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  • [–] 0 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    couldn't or just didn't spend time finding someone

    Is that not concerning to you?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    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".

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Apparently, they already did.

    There's a trace of surprise in the inevitable statement made by studio director Young Kim, who promised the AI-generated cutscenes would be replaced "by this weekend" (this has already happened).

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