Thoughts on Vaingers

The Elegance of Friction?
It’s SO good. Everything from the base mechanics, modular upgrade system, map design, size, razor sharp.
It’s so strange but the element I thought worked the best out of everything was the map. Maps in metroidvannias are an often discussed topic in the genre, with Mark Brown speaking on lengths to the strengths of omitting information to the player to force them to engage with navigating the environment. My biggest hitch with the genre is the “GPS walk”. Walk the length of a room, check your map, move up a vertical corridor, check your map, like you’re following an objective marker that you've made in your head. It’s not the same thing as map awareness. It's tiring and horrible to watch as an observer, but players do it because it’s the path of least resistance for finding secrets, items, and the way to progress, myself included!

The team behind Vainger makes the INSANELY bold decision to lock checking your map to save point terminals, still making it accessible to check and find your heading, but FORCING the player to remember where they want to navigate to and making them learn the layout of the environment. It makes Save points very valuable to find on top of their module swapping functionality (more on that later). And just makes exploration more fun? It’s less like I'm following a GPS readout and more like I'm checking an actual map and having to make decisions on where to go based on limited information. It’s great.

Since access to the map is limited, the map itself is so well designed. You’ll often find yourself looking at the map with the thought process of “ah, take the Top exit, then keep moving until the room with 3 exits, and take the bottom one”. There's long stretches of rooms with 2 doors, making navigation intuitive through them, which loop back into multi-roomed branching paths. It's never particularly straightforward to get to any given map coordinate, which is great! It’s making the player think about the layout of the environment beyond the current room.

And that's not to downplay the design of the individual rooms, the central gravity flipping mechanic at first feels disorienting, and insane, to give to the player immediately as height is often a gate in a metroidvania, being unable to jump onto a ledge signals to the player that they need a double or high jump upgrade. And I think removing that temptation immediately has lead to some insanely interesting level layouts, when the player can walk on the ceiling you need better gates to keep them out of areas, and levels are designed for the player to flip gravity as commonly as they jump, at first it almost feels like a puzzle, but a few hours in you’ll be practically flying through obstacles, mastering the quirks of Vaingers movement felt amazing.

The Upgrades are super unique as well, individually you’ve likely seen all of them in another form in another game, bullets that phase through walls, a slam attack, the spin jump from metroid here being an electricity shield, but it’s the combination of, and critically the swapping of abilities that makes it feel so fresh. If you haven't played the game yourself, (first off please do, it’s worth the entire price of UFO 50 and then some) Ability upgrades work on a slot system, the Heat Module will give you 3 abilities split between your Gun, Body and Grav-pack, but only one can be used at a time, changeable at save points.

You can even slot multiple modules onto a single slot (potentially at the cost of overloading, though the game has a clever solution for that as well) to get combinations of abilities, Combining the Fire and Shock modules to get flaming bullets that phase through walls, I’d list more fun combinations but i’d hate to spoil the fun of exploring different loadouts! Getting 3 upgrades in 1 makes these modules insanely desirable, I was pogging, or whatever, every time I saw one of the fancy blue doors that hold the important upgrades.
I’ve written a ton about the design, abilities, etc, I would also like to mention the sprite work is gorgeous and the music fits perfectly. The biomech look isn't one I’m often super fond off but it’s employed in a weirdly charming way here, the R-Type Vainger has an incredibly memorable design with the praying mantis helmet and chitinous green armour, and the setting allows for some great tilemaps and enemy design-

Oh my god enemies. All of the enemies are really fun to fight?? Some react to your gravity flipping, others you’ll need to position around spikes or cleverly navigate to an advantageous position to take them out cleanly. They’re clearly obstacles but I never found them frustrating. If I died it’s usually because I got lazy with dodging or just running past them.

One omission i’m somewhat conflicted on was not labeling items or pickups on the map, it doesn't clutter the map screen and again, avoids more rote gps following because you’re inferring where certain pickups would be. BUT when you’re at 91% completion and have the entire map filled out it’s a bit of an ask for the player to infer where they should head to scoop up the remaining pickups for that 100%. (also I would have LOVED a speedrun cutscene reward ala metroid 1)
My singular piece of advice for the game would be when you see an upgrade you can’t retrieve or something interesting, write down the map coordinates for when you’ve got the upgrade that can tackle it, it’ll save you the indignity of looking up the completed map on steam later.

I was initially quite skeptical of Vainger, since, cmon it’s the metroidvania, of course it’ll be a crowd pleaser. And it’s one of the few games in the collection that I think would see success with a standalone release in the current Steam ecosystem, which isn't really a measure of quality, just player preference. Attatacks is not getting 10000 sales with a 3.99 price tag. I should be going to bat for the ephemeral, rare releases like Rail Heist that couldn't exist outside of a game jam or this wonderful collection. But Goddam it they won me over. Vainger is incredible, it’s designed in a way that makes me question what the hell everyone else is doing with the genre. Top 3 of the collection. Currently #1.