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.
There’s a fictional world in which these machine learning techniques are developed on submissions that are volunteered, rollout is socially and politically responsible, control and means of production are democratised, and development is guided by public interest.
Unfortunately we don’t live in that world and I think given the one we live in it’s actually completely reasonable to find the outputs repulsive.