Vagrus Firstus Impressionus

"I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air,

And wondered where I was and how I came,

When a cloaked form against a campfire’s glare

Rose and approached, and called me by my name."

 

H.P. Lovecraft - Fungi from Yuggoth XVII - A Memory

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Vagrus, that game that misspelled my name in the preorder credits, is one of the few things I've ever crowdfunded, so I fired it up wanting to like it. I did.

And I do.

I do like it. Moderately. Modestly. Meagerly. I just don't love it. I wish I could love it. Oh, Lost Pilgrims, let me help you to help me to love you!

And really, there's a lot to like. Especially a lot of writing. By which I mean there is a lot of writing, so you'd better like that sort of thing. While hardly epochal either in its world-building or individual encounters, Vagrus' mountains of text are obviously penned by a team steeped in roleplaying and fantasy literature, splitting the difference (as above) between indulgent clichés and refreshingly apt humor or drama growing naturally out of the world and characters you encounter.

 

Yes, this is fundamentally a spreadsheet game. You are the leader of a caravan in a post-apocalyptic Grome-ish fantasy setting (hey, Mad Max with dragons and magic wands, I got my wish!) and you must balance your ratio of pack beasts, longshore-elves and legionnaircenaries to ferry cargo and passengers across crumbled roads and monster-haunted deserts to the relative safety of towns, all while turning a profit and playing various factions and NPCs against each other. Trade goods are your least profitable but most reliable source of income, forming a reliable baseline to chasing the higher profit and adventure of fetch quests and story missions.

In both setting and mechanics, it shows the influence of any number of lauded RPG-adjacent titles like The Age of Decadence, Darkest Dungeon or Mount&Blade: Warband. Sadly, it falters a bit in implementation. AoD at its worst for instance was unsatisfyingly, gratuitously frustrating randomized combat (a system with zero room for error with non-zero randomized factors) but Vagrus does the same for your noncombat side as well, at least in the early game when you have no cash to spare. No amount of planning, no careful balancing will save you if a dice roll goes against you and a single worker abandons your caravan (slowing you down too much to reach the next town before your food/cash runs out) or if you find no randomized faction missions or passengers pointing in the direction you already need to travel. M&B:W in contrast featured even more randomization thanks to its FPS mechanics (catching a crossbow bolt to the face in combat meant the fight was instantly over) but dampened its impact, as no single combat was ever a Game Over scenario, but a manageable challenge to rebuild. Here though, failing your current quest or trade run, any trade run, just forces reload after reload, resulting in far more aggravating redundancy.

It also misses the point of variation in combat.

 

 

While large-scale combats pit your caravan's nameless redshirt guards in a simple numeric clash of portraits, quests (and optional whittling down of enemy forces) are handled through a 2D tactical companion combat with a forward and back row. Looks interesting at first, but at the moment it's both Vagrus' weakest point and where it painted itself into a corner. To wit: there are too few companions. Darkest Dungeon made 1-dimensional combat formations work by the huge amount of freedom available in group composition and ability combos. Vagrus sticks you with the same mooks, each with the same abilities, for combat after combat... after combat after combat after combat. You might say "hey, no biggie, we just need more content in the form of more companions" but because companions also give your caravan passive bonuses (and must be leveled up from your own experience points) it will prove very difficult to balance out their tactical availability with their necessary strategic scarcity and leveling costs. The only solutions I can see at the moment are diversifying companion ability pools via items or being allowed to bring a redshirt or two into tactical combat, which would only marginally ameliorate the drudgery and water down the whole concept.

There are other problems as well, like losing companions permanently if you fail their attitude mini-game, with the added issue of getting only vague hints as to their preferences (define "cruelty" in a survival-themed game, I Frostpunk-dare you) and this leads into the main issue. While most games are either overly-scripted or overly-randomized, Vagrus somehow manages both at once. For all their choose-your-own-adventure aspirations, Vagrus' developers obviously have a very, very strict idea of how you should play, and the slightest deviation from those invisible railroad tracks can cost you hours' worth of effort. You are not told, for instance, that herbalism can net you effortless cash in the starter town every visit. Or the location of merchants for special goods like sculptures. Or the difficulty or specific level/skill/army/companion/gear requirements of quests. For example, I have zero chances of winning that fight against the necromancer above, despite the fact I was sent there from the starter town after randomly recruiting one particular companion only weeks into my campaign and its location is within the general starting area.

 

Other nuisances might be solved numerically. The "crowded camps" morale debuff for instance is a ham-fisted means of punishing player success and kicks in at too low a threshold. Low-gross trade goods like mushrooms also need larger stack sizes and lax market glut softcaps if they're to ever be worth picking up, as they don't serve dual purpose in feeding your army like you could with grain/bread in M&B. More content (mook variety, rebalancing caravan utility gear, and especially more companions) will help greatly to flesh out Vagrus' options.

Still, being forced to backtrack three hours or reroll altogether because you visited town X by taking the right road in the wrong direction, triggering some fixed pop-up event when it breaks up your trade run... is bullshit. This is not an '80s arcade, you're not trying to get my spare quarters, "play again Y/N" is not a valid pop-up message, being punished to the point of a loss condition simply for not having played before does not reward either strategy or roleplay or any other player quality. To be fair, unlike Don't Starve and its mindlessly repetitive ilk, Vagrus is self-conscious of the distinction between surprises and "rocks fall, everyone dies" and does try to strike a balance via tavern rumors, but so far it has yet to balance out a reasonable risk chance and palpable losses against wasting the customer's time unnecessarily, as M&B or DD succeeded in doing. I will say that if you plan on playing it in its current state, at least cheat and look up companion recruitment spots, skills and abandonment conditions, as you'll need to plan your entire campaign around them.

On the bright side, Vagrus has plenty to work with: an engaging, richly detailed, more thoughtful fantasy world filled with interesting decisions, a multifaceted economic baseline encouraging forward thinking and an ambitious array of gameplay levels from tactical to strategic to managerial and roleplaying. I don't regret preordering, have already given the game its own tag here and have every intention of revisiting it... six or twelve months from now when it will have hopefully received more content/balance patches... and maybe will have spelled my name right in its credits!

Safe travels for now Vagri. I'm off to Bannerlord.