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.
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.
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
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.
They could’ve animated the cutscenes in-engine though.