Vertegraz, Demo Review
'A junction box holds some tattered wires, still sparking with ancient charge.'
Without warning, you’re thrust back into awareness. The Priestess—acolyte of the dead god Vertegraz, who speaks through iron dreams—has dragged you from quiet obliteration with wires and religious fervor. The love of Vertegraz (and electricity from his nuclear core) gives you new life; The Priestess gives you your mission.
In the barren post-apocalyptic world of Vertegraz, machines have inherited the Earth. Humans are a distant memory, only half remembered by their robot offspring. The occasional photograph or statue all that’s left of the once mighty race of flesh and blood.
All existence in the world of Vertegraz revolves around the ‘corpse’ of a massive android with a missing leg, a hole in his chest, and a crane on his shoulder—the eponymous Vertegraz, whose immense body is a labyrinth to be explored by robots seeking knowledge, riches, and spiritual salvation.
Reminiscent of World of Horror, FTL, and Yahtzee Croshaw’s Lovecraftian roguelike The Consuming Shadow, the gameplay of Vertegraz consists of venturing deep into the immense corpse of a mechanical god in a series of semi-randomised text-based instances, each tasking the player with making a particular decision. Dice rolls behind the scenes—affected by stat upgrades purchased from the hub-town’s shopkeeper—determine the outcomes of those decisions. Health, currency, and charge serve as resources which must be managed in order to survive—trading each off against the others, to best suit the current situation.
Developed in a week as a proof of concept, the Vertegraz demo is only around 10 minutes long. Less of a demo and more a short vertical slice introducing the world and core gameplay loops. There aren’t many choices to make, and there doesn’t seem to be much use upgrading your two stats (strength and perception) beyond two points each. Still, there’s the kernel of something interesting here—a collection of simple but effective systems which, combined with interesting writing and world design, have the potential to make for an extremely interesting full release.
The game’s ‘drawn in Microsoft Paint’ aesthetic works surprisingly well—the unrefined jaggy edges of curved and angled lines create a surprisingly effective digital aesthetic—and the restricted colour palette, mostly black and shades of red, with the occasional pop of blue for detail, is striking, elevating the already impressive hand-drawn mechanical world. The robots themselves are interesting and unique—no longer connected to the species that created them in their image, they modify themselves, corrupting, altering and misusing their original forms, remaking themselves in their own strange images.
Though there’s not much content in the current 0.01 build of Vertegraz, there is a clear framework on which to hang more events, more stats, and a more developed hub town.
Allowing players to venture deeper and deeper into the corpse of the dead god as they accrue more upgrades is an inherently satisfying loop, and the decision to focus on ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book instances rather than more traditional combat encounters makes for a relatively unique approach to dungeon crawling.1
With more content and a cleaner, clearer UI—the current standard Renpy engine UI is the game’s biggest weaknesses2—the finished version of Vertegraz just might end up being something really worth playing.
Developing on this, a text-based metroidvania element, where certain upgrades are required to venture deeper into the Vertegraz’s body—forcing the player to make her avatar ever less human in order to progress the story—could gate progression in a way that adds a puzzle aspect to the game while also actively making the game’s themes a core part of the gameplay.
I wonder if Renpy—a game engine primarily used for visual novels—is the best way to program a game which will become increasingly reliant on stats, dice rolls, upgrades, and systems interacting with one another. There is a risk of bottlenecks and an engine notable for its ease of use suddenly becoming very difficult to work with when it has to be pushed beyond its limits with workarounds. Even in more simple visual novels, the engine has a tendency to crash when too many variables are forced to interact without all outcomes having been accounted for.