UFO 50 Retrospective Part 29 - Vainger

Vainger is one of those games that, when you see it, and you see the scope and what it is they’re actually trying here, you go “ohhh shit”. Cause this is a metroidvania, and yes, we’ve had those already, sure. But it’s REALLY a metroidvania. It’s UFO Soft’s Metroid.

In Vainger you play as a doctor who is tied to a robot combat suit, the Vainger. You re-awaken after an incident to find that the station you work at has become overrun, and that you were betrayed. Now you must explore the station, piece together the story from logs, collect items to travel deeper, and defeat the evil at the core of the station.

The best way I can describe Vainger is it’s Metal Storm meets Metroid. Metroid Storm. You run and gun and jump, with crouching included even, and then you can ALSO flip gravity so you run and jump on the ceiling. It’s extremely fun and fluid, and a lot of the gameplay and challenge comes from well timed flips to platform in tricky ways.

Now, it IS a metroidvania, but it’s actually rather small, IMO. Porgy is maybe as small, but with Porgy, you travel much slower, and have to travel back over and over to the surface. In Vainger, there’s no such mechanic, so you can cover the entire station in only a few minutes. You could easily 100% this game in an hour and change. And in fact, I had to. This game has a glitch where it can eat your fucking power ups, which it did to me :) So I had to 100% it, again. This was very, very annoying, and honestly, I haven’t really forgiven it yet.

Another thing about Vainger is its powerup system. You find powers which allow you to explore deeper, like any Metroidvania, but then you must equip them to your grav system, your body, or your gun, each of which do different things. Having your items in different spots for different situations is important, and you need to backtrack sometimes to a save station to equip the right combo.

Vainger isn’t hard or anything, and while I’m very annoyed by it, I cannot deny it’s an extremely good metroidvania. It’s creative and cool and fun.

…now for some meta story. The buyout is fully complete, Gerry and his nephew Boby have left the company, and the rest of the team have to pick up the pieces and continue on. But it can’t be too hard, can it? …We’re already seeing some struggling. This game almost got cancelled due to arguments and problems within the company. Namely with its director, Chiffon Bola, who has been butting heads with the new management, especially Ian Spinzer, the new middle manager in the office. And them moving offices to a giant office across town isn’t helping. They’re a small team, they don’t NEED this giant new space, and the old space had so many memories. Now they’re seperated from the fun center, the burger joints. They’re seperated, and a bit isolated.

You can see Bola’s frustration with the situation as an easter egg in a hidden room in Vainger: Here’s a message, which makes no god damn sense…. unless you know who Ian Spinzer is.

8.5/10