Vintage Story is a new-found obsession of mine. If you’ve never heard of it, I totally understand: it’s a pretty niche Minecraft-like that isn’t currently available on Steam. you’re able to only purchase and download itfrom the game’s old-school website, and from the moment you click purchase and hit the download button, it feels like stepping two decades back in time.
The original Minecraft was also purchased this way, which gives Vintage Story its own sense of unique nostalgia.
Vintage Story is also worlds away from Microsoft’s corporate-codedMinecraftof today in many other ways. It possesses a steep, steep learning curve, and is less forgiving than Minecraft. The first thing you need to do is grab some flint from the ground, then knap that flint with another stone to form a flint knife. You do this voxel by voxel. Each individual fragment of flint must be knapped by your hand. It’s immersive, although I do understand why this might not be for everyone.
It’s definitely for me, though.
What Is Vintage Story? And Why Is It The Greatest Survival Game Ever Made?
Vintage Story is a voxel-based adventure survival game developed by a small team known as Anego Studios. It’s clearly inspired by Minecraft, and I’ve often thought, while getting accustomed to the game mechanics, that this is what Minecraft could have been if Mojang had gone down a different path. Somewhere along the way, Minecraft lost some of that magic.
I thought it might be to do with the genre, or that I was just getting older and voxel-based survival games were for kids; but Vintage Story blows that feeling completely out of the water.
Its characters speak with the notes of classical instruments (my character sounds like an Oboe), there are cosmic horrors that emerge from the void, merchants that roam the land, and the option to individually chisel blocks down to their 1x1 segments to get that perfect-looking chimney. This world is a delight to explore and always so wonderfully strange to behold.
As you progress, you move from the Stone Age, to the pottery age, to the iron, and later steel age, all while exploring further, mining deeper, and upgrading your gear. It’s a classic gameplay loop but infused with a level of detail that boggles the mind.
I just love how the pottery system works: you have to hand-form the molds on the floor of your little dirt hut, then fire them in a kiln. You can make ingot molds and fill them with molten copper - but be careful, verify to pick up the molds with a pair of wooden tongs or your character will take some damage.
Industry, Excellent Vibes, Oozing With Atmosphere
Don’t worry, though, you won’t be doing everything by hand forever - build a windmill and use it to pump the wheels of industry, with sophisticated metal manufacturing and food production. Even later on, you can harness the power of bizarre magic to enhance your world…I haven’t actually reached this point yet, but I’m getting close.
Vintage Story basically feels like a heavily-modded Minecraft with more sophisticated tech trees, more granular building options, and a more interesting world with snippets of lore here and there which provide you with some context as to what is going on.
And the vibes are absolutely immaculate.
The dirt hut is a first-night classic in these kinds of games, but it has never felt as cozy and as comfortable as in Vintage Story. For what it’s worth, there are like four or five different types of dirt blocks you may make, which means even your starting hut can resemble something more beautiful than Minecraft’s pile of rectangular brown sludge.
The vibes of Vintage Story are just amazing. The soundtrack is perfect and seems perfectly paced for the world you inhabit, the graphics (dappled sunlight, distant mountains), the lighting (flicker of torchlight), the sound design (the changing of rain patter when you walk underneath trees), and the fact you may lean items against walls to create a more natural layout for your home…
I’m not used to a game completely inhabiting my soul like this. Especially not survival games, which always just seem to be a chip off each other’s block. Vintage Story is heavily inspired by its contemporaries, but goes way beyond what you first expect as you take those tentative steps into the wilderness.
