Vault

ive only played the tutorial and some of the first mission so far, but i can already see the potential of this game!! definitely worth a try if you enjoy the whole "programming actions" style of game play. very reminiscent of games like iron lung and cave crawler, which are masterpieces of their own.

What if Duskers knew you had to pay rent? What if you had to explore a lost village with a roomba and zero information?! This game is drowning in style, in a way I haven't seen in a while. So read nothing more, pick them up and who knows where this will go

Vault is awesome! keveatscheese sent me a key for this one but I'd buy it even if he didn't. The game sets you up like it's a text based game then it tells ya to type in photo and then you realize that it's much more. I won't spoil anything, but look for radios in act 2. AWESOME GAME

Use a roomba with a camera and a scanner taped to it to explore a deserted island. It's controlled by simple console commands, like "move f/b/l/r", "rotate", "scan", "photo", "interact". Look for strange radio towers to unlock spawn points, rocks with sigils to unlock your way into The Cave and scraps to upgrade the drone. And maybe listen to some radio. Neat game, i enjoyed it. BUT: There are some Radio Towers that you will have to find on your own. The game doesn't automatically scan and show them to you (like with locks). And you have to be somewhat close to them for the scanner to pick them up (you can use an exploit to find their exact locations faster); Rotating the drone eats some battery, so i found it to be inefficient to rotate, instead just looking at the radar. This turned into a small problem; There are places of varying height. It took me two hours to realize some spawn points are on the high points of the map (hills, mountains) and you have to find some radio towers to unlock those spawn points. Didn't help that i rarely rotated the drone and had no idea there were cliffs ahead. If a mountain is blocking your path for some object you need to interact with - look for a tower nearby, it will give you a spawn point on the mountain; You have to interact with some locks and levers to beat the game, i think there are 7 of them. It shouldn't be hard to miss, but it took me some time to get close to them (the heights problem); There's just enough battery (max level upgrade) to find the last interactible onjects. It's weird that you can run out of battery even on max upgrade but the last spawn point usually have very linear paths to the last locks; There are bugs. The game plays in 800x600 screen (or something) and a sudden glitch made it stretch over my 16:9 monitor. This was not intended as it caused misalignments on the map. The music can also bug out, game over and menus music playing after you (re)start the game; During the final part of the game, pay attention to the red dots. Use the small hills around you as a map orientir. And know that there are 2 paths from the beach up to the main (middle) part of the island. Look near the west path for the escape. It's not shown on the map, i think (and even if it is i have some problems with the map). It took me WAAAY to much time to understand it. LIke, almost 2 hours of just running around the island; There are some additional lore notes but they feel absolutely useless even as flavor text. It's your cliche "Oh damn i woke up on the island, i dont remember how, i gotta leave" and "I've been hiding here but i can't take it anymore, everyone is dead, if this is what you wanted, i hope you're happy". Reading them felt very bland and uninspired; Also there are Radios you can interact with but they are just comedic easter eggs. All the radios have the same broadcast, so don't bother wasting your time activating them after you listened to the first one; It seems you have to beat the NG+ to get the true ending.......................... But yeah i enjoyed my time with this game. I liked the drone controlling loop (even though the radar has probably burned into my retina from how much i stared into it now). I think the rotation eating battery is probably a balancing thing, but it just made me never rotate my drone and only look at the radar. And because of that i missed out on some cool views on mysterious structures which sucks. And a small personal nitpick - i guess the island wasn't made with the players running around it as much as i did (almost 2 hours) in mind and it shows because of how barebones and out of place the points of interests look and feel. But again i had a really hard time with locating all the needed objects to escape, and i'm kinda afraid that other people might spend even more time on that last part of the game. I think i would personally make the place less foggy and/or add more details on the map for easier orienting. As of now, the map only has some very general orientirs, like a couple of hills and radio towers. Even after realizing what i needed to do, it still took me some time to properly locate myself and the objects on the map (i guess the stretched out window that mushed the pixels on the map didn't help either).

I haven't been able to put the time into this game yet, but the atmosphere and intrigue really drew me in. Working with limited tools to navigate a mysterious island is executed in a way that when your battery runs out you say, "Just one more run." I know I've barely scratched the surface with this game but I highly recommend it if you've played similar games before. If you haven't played this kind of game and you want to experience something new then this is also an awesome game!

Lots of potential here! Really valued the sounds, music, and art direction, but expected more story and varied gameplay for the time put in.