Vial of Infinity
Disclaimer:
This is my own thoughts about the game itself in a early stage of development. Nor have I been financially influenced by the creator of the game to provide a review. Many things with the game are subject to change. This is a review of the game at the time of June 1st of 2019.
Trapped in a lab of your own creation, being hunted down by your own creations with inflation based countermeasure. You and your party of various furs could surly handle such traps right? Within the ever expanding labs before you, we shall see.
Vial of Infinity is a inflation/ weight gain turn based RPG by the mind of Eggo21 who has been quite active in the game making scene. With various games like, Feed-A-Furry and Tribal Hunter having quite the library of games to work on. Though the reason I decided to focus on Vial of Infinity is two fold.One, I am bias and love me some turn based RPG’s. The second, even for a demo it feels fairly form complete and can be played for quite the fun afternoon.
Onto the game play itself, as stated before Vial of Infinity is a turn based RPG where you play various characters with different skills. Currently there are only 4 characters to play with but, the author has expressed interest in putting more characters into the game. Your objective throughout the game is to get to find out why your security systems were activated, who did it, and stay mostly uninflated along the way.
The Main Draw
Now for the main draw of the game, the inflation/weight gain aspect of the game. Before I brought up the various skills you can use for each character. Most of these skills can be used to inflate and fatten your foes. Though there are many support skills just as there are ‘attacking’ skills. As you progress down their ‘fullness’ you see each foe you fight in various states of inflation/weight gain. One of the biggest draws in my opinion is how cartoonish and fun most of expansions turn out for the foes and players.
Yep, all of the enemies in the game can be stuffed to your heart’s content, including bosses! From robo attack dogs, to mice interns that want to be top dog, in the lab, there is no shortage of people to inflate in this game! Though in that regard your party members can be inflated/fattened just as quickly. Each stage of expansion in this game giving a distinct, this dude is almost full not unlike Earthbound or Final Fantasy Mystic Quest; or, your about to lose yourself be careful with that!
Going back to enemies each one of the foes you fight get their own ending text crawls if they win against you. Which in turn gives you plenty of things to explore and find out for sure! And thankfully being able to save just about anywhere also helps for trying to experience all the game over screens without having to go back to the beginning of the game. However, there is only ONE save file, something I hope that is fixed in the future, so make sure you save carefully; thankfully a new game does not override the save file.
Gameplay
In regards to gameplay just like many RPG’s it is you against the either single foe or a group of enemies. The objective is to use various attacks and skills to stuff/inflate the other team. From Science, to magic, to even guns, you have quite a few ways to stuff and incapacitate your foes! Though a quick disclaimer about skills, there is a character you gain who has the ability to vore folks; though personally I was never able to figure out how that skill was supposed to work in game.
All four characters in the game have very distinct roles to fill with their own strengths and weaknesses. For example Mike the main character is strong against being fattening attacks but, has a weakness to being liquid (mainly Soda in this game) inflation. Mike can be used to air inflate, and soda inflate folks with his attacks. While at the same time he can scan various foes for their weakness, current status and so on. Oh and he is the first character in the game that can help ‘decompress’ your party giving him healer status.
Much of the inflation in this game takes place in battles. However, there are overworld traps that can inflate your sprite based characters. This in turn allows you to watch character portraits and battle sprites slowly inflate or fatten as the battle progresses. However, if all your characters are inflated/fattened its game over.
Also littered throughout the map are various other experiments that the MC and party can comment on. Though while the story bits of the game so far are fairly sparse what there is is fairly nice to go through. It is no Final Fantasy however, it’s not setting out to be that either. It feels like a fun fetish game, and is content is very in tune with that fact.
The game runs fairly well for a game maker 2 engine game. No slow downs between battle sequence to overworld and visa versa. The sprites move at a reasonable pace. The lab area is fairly large its not large enough to get lost in. Also taking a cue from games like Chrono Trigger and so on all the various enemies you fight can be seen on the map. The biggest difference is at the moment no one chases you. Making it your choice to fight or not. While the music of the game is a tad repetitive it does it’s job well enough to be a pleasant bop.
My biggest gripe, with the game itself is there is no sprint function making back tracking a chore. I could understand if later on if your characters were too inflated per say to run and but, hopefully this will be something for Eggo to fix later on in development.
Overall Vial of Infinity is a game that is shaping up to be quite the blast of a game. The author has expressed many wishes to not only add more areas to the game but, even more player characters. With a fairly simple combat system and varied player skills this game certainly has quite a lot of ways to experiment and play with the foes.
Considering how hard inflation games are to find nowadays, just try to google inflation games. Vials of Infinity is a great inflation and weight gain game that has potential to be one of the greats! If you would like to download this game for yourself you can, follow the link here to their itch page which also hosts the rest of their works . If you wish to follow the development of this game here is a handy thread on weight gaming.
