Steam Week in Review: A touch of AI is all it takes to trigger backlash, as a promising new indie falls afoul of slop skeptics

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. According to MIT Technology Review, the South Korean government has overwhelmingly embraced AI. It even tried to roll out AI-powered school textbooks (which failed).

Half (or in some cases, slightly less) of those surveyed in the US, Italy, Australia and Brazil are “more concerned than excited” by AI use in daily life. In South Korea, those “more concerned than excited” by AI make up only 16 percent.

There’s a trace of surprise in the inevitable statement made by studio director Young Kim, who promised the AI-generated cutscenes would be replaced “by this weekend” (this has already happened).

“If someone asked me what I think about using AI, the honest answer is that I would have to think about it for a long time,” the director wrote. “The reason I chose AI was that I believed it could reach a level of expression our existing resources could not, and that it would let us focus more on the game itself, outside of story and cinematics.”

He continued: “That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big.”

The statement then hits upon a question that will be raised again and again in the coming months and years concerning creative work: if AI can do it better, why not? In this instance, it unambiguously could not: the cutscenes, and I’ve seen them, are quintessential slop, and compare very unfavourably to the in-game art. Young Kim says the studio originally composed the cutscenes in-engine, but later replaced them with AI. Somehow, his team didn’t detect this chasm.

“The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game’s story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands,” the statement goes on. “The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game’s complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings.”

Alive Inc joins a long list of studios who have reneged on AI use after extreme public backlash, including Larian Studios and Sandfall Interactive. Vapor World isn’t wholesale slop—the studio worked hard on the core game and it shows—but the outcry surrounding its launch does show that using generative AI to cut corners isn’t, for now, something audiences are willing to tolerate.

Top Steam games by revenue (August 11 – 18)

Overall a pretty unremarkable week for the top ten. Kingdom Hearts is there because Square Enix hosted a sale. Phantom Blade Zero pre-orders opened.

The top 11-20 part of the list is arguably more interesting: Mortal Shell 2 debuted at number 12, Wardogs pre-orders catapulted it to number 13 (though its current beta is apparently blowing up, with an all-time concurrent players peak of 105,774), and the Lord of the Rings: War in the North reissue has sold decently enough to help it reach number 17.

As for Wardogs: expect it to factor heavily into the charts in the coming weeks ahead of its September 11 release date.

Curiously, Star Wars Zero Company pre-orders debuted at number 24, way below Phantom Blade Zero and Wardogs pre-orders. Star Wars fatigue perhaps?

Last week’s Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

“If you Spam Punch the Dude in the start of the game you Can level your unarm to level 100.

10/10 Broken just like Morrowind”

Skybob, on The Lantern of the Laughless Saint, who I’m sure is also relentlessly bunnyhopping to increase Acrobatics.