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

cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/28095114

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.

Look this is simple: There is no legitimate need to use AI to do anything, let alone anything you take seriously and/or you’d want to charge money for.

So if you’re not just being a paid shill then why kill your reputation by attaching your name and company to ANY amount of sloppy shit?

Just don’t do it.

at the very least don’t use it for the the most visibly apparent components of a game. Having it stub out scaffolding for underlying systems in the code is one thing, using it for visual assets is just dumb

This just shifts the problem to a new location. Don’t use it for art, or scaffolding, or code, or concepts, or anything a person gets paid to do or a different person expects a human touch from.

AI is a fine search engine, it doesn’t need to eat the world.

It sucks as a search engine. When I’m searching for something, I want factual, correct results, not a hallucinated answer which is backed up by none of its sources.

When I click through search results, I’m reading, evaluating the sources, and synthesizing the information into something which I am reasonably satisfied is true enough. I don’t feel comfortable handing that cognitive task off to a machine. The machine’s job is to help me find the sources, not tell me what the truth is.

Having a machine that tells you what is true is the most dystopian shit ever, and it would’ve sounded completely insane only 5 years ago.

You seem to be describing an answer engine, which isn’t what I said. It’s really no worse than the last five or so years of Google if you just want links to a topic that you can go and read yourself. It’s fine at that, it’s not good.

Yeah, I was talking about the Gemini blurb at the top of Google search results.