VINTAGE STORY Review for PC

Minecraft’s mod making community has been integral to its growth and widespread popularity. Mods like The Aether and modpacks like TerraFirmaCraft are renowned for their ability to provide transformative content to the game. But Vintage Story, by developer Anego Studios, isn’t a Minecraft modpack. It is a high-quality competitor in the same competing genre.

To not compare Vintage Story to Minecraft would be an insult to the developers’ history with the game. Saraty and Tyron both have origins in Minecraft mod development. Many might recognize Vintagecraft, a very popular Minecraft mod in 2015-2016. Vintagecraft was one of their many efforts to create a version of Minecraft that followed the vision they saw at its release. As Minecraft received more and more updates, that vision they saw strayed farther and farther from the reality Mojang provided. Vintage Story appears to be a culmination of their original vision.

Vintage Story is a block-based, sandbox survival game. It draws inspirations from Lovecraftian horror and emphasizes the player’s rigorous quest for survival amongst nature and temporal disturbances.

Vintage Story is a true survival game. Minecraft, though it claims to be one, is far too tame to be believable. Everything about Vintage Story has been built to emphasize the atmosphere of a survival experience. The visual aesthetic is rougher and more detailed. Being able to find food and quality nutrition is a real worry for the player. Injuries are far more dangerous, with healing taking much longer. Tech trees can’t be rushed through to get end-game equipment within the first few hours. I found crafting in particular to be surprisingly endearing. Making tools requires the player to manually carve the material into its shape, using similarly realistic systems for all levels of tool technology. You have to cast metals into their shapes with clay molds. These implementations create a deep well of immersion for the player.

Being immersed in a specific theme goes miles in creating a valuable gaming experience. With Minecraft, you’re encouraged to create your own aesthetic. But not all players have the skill, dedication, or knowledge needed to achieve that. Vintage Story presents a clear objective, while still leaving room for player creativity. The player will start out, crouched over a campfire and fending off any drifters that prowl nearby. Nearing the end of the tech tree, players have a windmill which they can attach to millstones and auto smithing-hammer systems. They’ll have wide pastures and large plantations. The player feels immersed in their progression, with all their tech feeling grounded in an easily digestible aesthetic. That being one of braving the brute force of nature.

Vintage Story is also quite impressive on a technical front. Their engine has been completely made from scratch. This does several things. Game performance, even on a low end computer, is incredibly high. My sorry excuse of a laptop ran it at speeds that I thought only existed in Narnia. There is built in modding support, made from Saraty and Tyron’s experience with the modding scene. They know that modding a game is integral to building a diverse community. With Minecraft, mod players have to wait months with every update in order to play their favorite content. Game updates in Vintage Story will hardly ever break mods since there is no reliance on 3rd party API’s.

But to me, Vintage Story’s biggest strengths are also some of its biggest weaknesses. Vintage Story’s focus on immersion, danger, and slower tech progression is derived from a niche community inside Modded Minecraft. Although I rate the gameplay highly, it’s not likely the wider gaming community would agree. To build an analogy, Minecraft is Skyrim, but Vintage Story is DarkSouls. An improvement I would suggest would be to combine Vintage Story’s guide book progression with NPC’s and quests. I was already impressed with the foresight to make the book, but delving into it can be a daunting matter. If the player was prompted through gameplay and were rewarded for learning and progressing, it could help solve some of the outsider intimidation that comes with the game. Minecraft never had an integrated guide, but it was safe enough to not need one in order to survive.

Vintage Story has a lot of potential. The developer’s have clearly learned from Minecraft’s mistakes and are pushing to create something better. Minecraft’s strength has always been in its nature as a blank canvas, but Vintage Story provides, up front, high quality gameplay, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for its future. 9/10