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.

"Saw the very first cutscene, before any gameplay, and how the generative AI they used couldn't even keep the main character's model consistent," reads the "most helpful" Steam review for Vapor World. "From the trailers the gameplay looked pretty fun [but] unfortunately I support people not robots. If the look you want to go for is beyond the scope you can achieve right now then I suggest you change it or wait until you can produce the art and style you want with people doing it."

That's pretty representative of the Steam reviews at the moment: Vapor World is currently sitting on 64 "mostly negative" reviews.

It's undoubtedly a disappointing result for Alive Inc, whose headcount is " about five " according to the studio. It's also possible the studio was blindsided by the backlash: this Pew Research Center survey places South Korea as the least AI sceptical nation among 25 countries surveyed, including the US, the UK, Australia and India.

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