cross-posted from: https://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.
Tell me you don’t know Dune without telling me:
You haven’t the slightest clue what the BJ was about if you equate it with non-violent expression of opinions, denying indie devs a tool and call it mindless hate.
To catch you up, the premise as outlined by the Reverend Mother:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
The people using thinking machines that were targeted by the Butlerians weren’t indie devs, nor solo devs, nor other “small people”. It also wasn’t a harmless creative tool.
They were technocrats using it to enslave people.
I think it’s quite understandable that people would resent enslavement. That’s not mindless hate, that’s a quite natural desire to be free. You wouldn’t call abolitionists “mindless whip-haters” either, would you?
And the result wasn’t a few people speaking out against these users of thinking machines, but a century of bloody revolt until they had destroyed not just the AI, but also all other machines with even simple logical components.
The vast difference in both scale and nature between this criticism of a particular kind of thinking machine we don’t like (GenAI) being used in making programs for a thinking machine we do like (computers) and a slave revolt turned all-out war of annihilation against calculators makes this comparison just plain bizarre.
Tell me you know Watsonian Dune but don’t know Doylist Dune without telling me. To catch you up:
I was being satirical. And so was Frank Herbert. The Butlerian Jihad and resulting mentats and navigators, groomed from childhood by what are essentially cults and turned into things either barely resembling humans or not resembling humans at all, using endless amounts of drugs like spice and sapho juice along with other ghastly techniques because it was now morally wrong to use computers is a critique of overzealous revolutionary movements that turn into religions.
The Dune universe is a grotesque dystopian future. And the Butlerian Jihad forced humanity to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire. I see the same thing happening today with the current jihad against the machines bubbling up.