Doomsday Vault from Flightless is a pleasant puzzle game that will keep your attention in short stints. Its simplicity will keep your interest, while its flexibility to come and go will keep the experience casual.
While you’re enjoying this beautiful and unseasonal hot weather outside, and probably not worrying about the climate of the world, Doomsday Vault is reminding us that we have a lot to think about when it comes to ensuring the world we live in is healthy for generations to come. I understand that this is just a game, but the message is sincere in its nature and simple in its structure. That said, this is not a site built for reminding you that doing your part to keep this world healthy is an obligation as a citizen of the planet Earth. It’s a site that reviews games and movies.
Let’s review this game.
But seriously, take care of the Earth and make conscious environmental-friendly choices.
Going green after being mean to the Earth
The Earth’s environment has run its course. People have presumedly died (not all of them, but most) and the only salvageable items of interest are some remaining plants and their seeds. You have to go through the rubble of the world to retrieve them in hopes of returning them to your vault where you can re-grow them and start to re-populate the world. Not an easy task to achieve, but nonetheless a task that must be done.
The story Doomsday Vault isn’t complicated in construction. The game lays it all out there and makes you feel a bit of isolation and urgency about the mission. This is a good narrative that is direct and puts the player in the mindset of accomplishing meaningful goals. It’s genius, really, as it puts only the amount of pressure on the player that the player conjures up on their own. For me, it feels like a story on par, yet in a shallower sense, like Wall-E, where there is enough cuteness to the world to keep it grounded, but enough seriousness in the environment and destruction all around to remind you of the task. It’s good and effective enough to add to the gameplay.
Again, nothing too profound in the narrative, but nonetheless effective.
As simple as the narrative
The very core of this game lies in a puzzle-driven gameplay design. You walk around in a suit and get around isometric puzzles to collect green fuel and find the remaining plants on Earth. It has very simple controls, though I wouldn’t recommend using the d-pad for anything – that should have been a menu selection instead of a secondary option for moving the character (it’s just awful to use in an isometric view). You move your character around with the thumbstick, switch back and forth with weapons and options using the B button, and hit A to execute whatever you choose. The environments are really the enemy of the game that look to impede your progress and occasionally kill you (though, that doesn’t last forever – you will get quickly returned once you perish). The crux of the gameplay simply lies with you collecting as many nutrient canisters as you can find and figuring out solutions for you to explore and go forward to the plants you’re after. Nothing complicated about the game’s intentions and how it functions whatsoever.
The gameplay design driving the entire experience is the puzzles. Because the game lies on an isometric view, the puzzles are difficult at times to see obvious solutions, which causes you to explore the game a bit more than maybe intended. It’s a view that goes together with puzzles, as you’re at times fighting to understand what you’re looking at and what your options for solutions might be. It is as if Professor William Farish was leading the design time and purposely wanted to confuse you to make the game a bit more of a challenge. Whatever the case might be in its design, the isometric view works to make the puzzles more complicated, which does cause the player to explore every option. You’re being forced to explore without even realizing it, and that’s a bit genius in its design.
Beyond the puzzles, if you are a completionist and needing to find everything in the game, that’s your second bit of motivation to keep playing it. Knowing that you might have found 75% of nutrients on a section of earth instead of 100% will push you to revisit it. You can go back and forth between sections and explore more of the land. The replay value, while finite because of the game size, is above middle-of-the-road. The game is quick enough and not too complicated on the puzzle side to emotionally allow you to convince yourself to quickly revisit incomplete stages. It’s a good design in that respect.
Outside of the puzzles and being a completionist, the game also gives you unlockables to customize your suit. While I’m not a huge fan of customization in games not called Skyrim, this is the third sprinkle of motivation to go back and complete everything. The customization is impressive when you consider you can change nearly every little bit of your suit, including choosing from a bevy of colors and patterns, but much like everything else in the game, it’s not incredibly complicated in its design.
Longevity
The only drawback to a game like this is that you’re probably going to complete it quickly – even fully completing it. It isn’t meant to be played for 60 hours, it’s meant to be on a mobile gaming device that is built for the casual gamer. That’s not a knock, but it will give you an idea of what the gameplay design was meant to play on. It works on the Nintendo Switch, which is essentially a big tablet with crap controls. Just know going into it that the $17.99 spent on this game isn’t going to get you a long adventure, and there are other games below that price point with more hours added to them, but it will certainly get you some consistent fun.
At the end of the day, the game is still a short adventure. If you’re okay with that and the price point, then you’ll find some entertainment waiting for you. For me, I think it could have had a bit more action to the design and maybe a bit more complication to its execution. Again, this is meant for a mobile experience, and by making it more than that you’re running the risk of ruining its gameplay design intentions.
Conclusion
Doomsday Vault from Flightless is a pleasant puzzle game that will keep your attention in short stints. Its simplicity will keep your interest, while its flexibility to come and go will keep the experience casual.
