The Promise of a Dungeon Crawler Revival

Zen Studios released Operencia: The Stolen Sun about a month ago, while Fatbot Games’ Vaporum has recently made its way to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. With that in mind, this OnlySP article looks at what makes these two games tick and how they push the dungeon-crawling sub-genre of RPGs forward, and then suggests that games like these may herald a powerful revival of the old-school dungeon crawler.

Here are a few sample paragraphs to get you started:

Immediately, Operencia and Vaporum are distinguished by their divergent settings. Though both are hand-crafted, rather than procedurally generated (like roguelikes), they each aim for an entirely different flavour.

Operencia takes place in a ‘traditional’ fantasy world of dragons, fairy tales, sly rogues, and sturdy knights. Although plenty about the game stands alone and borrows mythology from the central European home of Zen Studios, the magical forests and cursed castles are as snug as a warm pair of gloves for fantasy fans.

Visually, we see a midpoint between the very cartoony Fable series and the earthy epicness of The Elder Scrolls, reminiscent of Kingdoms of Amalur or countless MMOs. Tonally, Operencia goes for light humour mixed with enough lore to rival Dragon Age, all the better to evince a mysterious world that surely already has die-hard fans. Without spoilers, Operencia also opens up in ways that lovers of classic fantasy RPGs will certainly appreciate.

Vaporum is the polar opposite. As one might expect from the subtitle Steampunk Dungeon Crawler, no wizards or magical forests are to be found: instead, a clanky-dank world that draws heavily from BioShock and other science fiction stories about man’s reach exceeding his grasp (incidentally, OnlySP’s review mentioned briefly that the game is not really an example of the steampunk genre so much as it uses a steampunk aesthetic).