Vessels is an interesting game that had the capacity to be something more but was still a good ride. You start out in an airlock with a voice talking to you and having to answer questions from your crew mates to avoid being killed. This was a great intro to the game and it has some great mechanics. You can die and get reborn, and in some cases that is needed to progress to get information to be able to succeed where you failed. My main issue with this is that the game is pretty linear. You have plenty of dialogue options but there is a pretty set path you are usually on. There are a couple different endings based on the few choices you had but I keep thinking of what the game could have done but didn’t or choices we didn’t have. As it is I enjoyed the story and kind of felt like it was a reverse of The Thing where we are playing the creature rather than the hero albeit less violent but still having to manipulate others to survive. I thought the characters were decent and would have liked to learn even more about them. The game has no map but there are enough signs as to where to go that I didn’t get lost. It would have been nice to have an objective list although it wasn’t the biggest deal. The puzzles in the game are more along the line of figuring out which dialogue you need to choose to advance. There are things you have to do when possessing characters but it’s usually spelled out pretty clear. I can’t say I loved the endings but they were decent enough. I suppose by the end I still had a few questions I would have like to seen explored. The graphics are pretty decent. They are more of a cell shaded style so the art direction mattered more than technical details and it was solid and had good use of colour.
I played Vessels on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any spelling errors or bugs. There are no graphics options at all. Alt-Tab worked. The game saves at the start of each act but if you quit any time before you have to start the act over. A manual save system would have been preferable. The performance was overall very good. There was the odd drop in frame rate but only for a second or so and the majority of the game ran at 60 FPS which was the cap that couldn’t be changed.
Game Engine: Unreal Engine
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 1.82 GB
Game version Played: 1.1
GPU Usage: 0-100 %
VRAM Usage: 913-1348 MB
CPU Usage: 5-9 %
RAM Usage: 3.7-4.4 GB
Frame Rate: 42-62 FPS
While there could have been more depth, Vessels was a solid game with a interesting premise and mechanics. I finished the game in ninety minutes and paid $7.56 CAD for it so I would say the value is very fair.
My Score: 7.5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 22.0.2 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Garuda Soaring White-tailed-eagle | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.17.5-zen1-2-zen | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz