The Vending Machine Review (PC)

It’s one thing to have a slender apparition of a suited man barreling towards you like a bat out of hell, but to have a vending machine floundering through the cracks of a contaminated corridor is ridiculous. But I’m all for giving indie horrors the benefit of the doubt. Chances are, the likes of The Vending Machine will eventually wind up becoming a meme—a small cog in an oversized wheel of fodder. Yet here I am, sneaking through the crags and crevices of a vacant building whilst searching for sinister machines to slot coins into. I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing, or even if I care about the consequences. But I’m here, and like a moth to a flame, or a snack to a quarter, I’m running the gauntlet like there’s nothing else in the world that matters. Weird ideas’ll do that to you.

The Vending Machine is a bit like Slender: The Eight Pages, except it doesn’t invite you to collect leftover doodles from an isolated woodland, but to insert coins into rogue confectionary machines whilst they actively stalk you and, well, ruthlessly hunt you down. But that’s about the brunt of this operation: a bizarre cat-and-mouse chase between an engineer and a trove of coin-operated vending machines. It’s a horror, mind you — but you can also see a hint of comedy in it. Not than this comes as much of a surprise, though.

To call The Vending Machine a commendable horror game just wouldn’t be right. It’s like a lot of textbook horrors: the breadth of the idea is more or less devoid of any substantial plot points or depth, yet it utilizes chase sequences and randomized jump scares to create a winning formula—a combination that is historically known for attracting attention.

Dime a Dozen

There isn’t a storyline for you to chisel away at in The Vending Machine. Instead, what you have is an open-ended corridor romper—a short journey that takes its fledgling snack enthusiasts on a bone-chilling trip through the underbelly of a sentient machine’s labyrinthine cortex. There are only the two objectives to complete: insert coins into the rogue machines’ mechanical orifices, and flee from the scene before said machines savagely butcher you. Again, like Slender, but with fewer pages, and more coins. But you get the idea: you essentially navigate a decrepit world and locate killer vending machines (and another foe who we’ll sink our teeth into shortly) whilst working to achieve a rather simple fetch quest.

When all’s said and done, it doesn’t matter if it’s a ghost that’s tailing your footsteps or a cardboard cutout of SpongeBob SquarePants. Like all horrors that lean on the traditional tropes of a chase-studded horror, the act of being actively hunted hits just the same as fleeing from the dark with an anomaly on your six. It just so happens that a vending machine, of all things, is the center of attention in this particular case. And it’s not a vending machine with grotesque features or expressions, either. It is, in short, a boring ol’ vending machine with legs. Or at least, I think it has legs.

A Legless Vendor

The Vending Machine is the sort of game that you would naturally grow tired of after an hour or two of play. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though for the sake of pointing out the elephant in the room, it isn’t the sort of game that gets better with age. With no real reason to continue beyond the climax or even chase any special endings, you could quite easily experience just about everything that it has to offer in the first fifteen minutes or so. And it doesn’t help, either, that the world that you spend your time in is mostly empty and devoid of any real architectural charm.

The process of maintaining the vending machines and tiptoeing through the inner chambers of the lair is a lot of fun, despite the lack of places for you to travel or objectives for you to participate in. I’ll admit, it isn’t the sort of experience that you could merrily romp through several times over, nor is it a game that teases you with the outlines of a second coming. But for a relatively small asking price, it does its job surprisingly well, which is a lot more than what most indie horrors can flaunt in this day and age.

The enemies here aren’t particularly frightening, though as I mentioned earlier, there is another foe who graces the table—a sickeningly “disfigured, screaming humanoid thingy.” Again, nothing particularly special, but at least it adds some extra character to an otherwise gimmicky concept.

With all of the above said, The Vending Machine still manages to conceive a fluid experience that doesn’t drag or sully its gameplay mechanics with any poor performance issues or technical glitches. Perhaps I was lucky with that. Or maybe I just didn’t spend long enough there.

Verdict

If you can ignore the fact that The Vending Machine is  mere canon fodder for an overpopulated mechanism, and is without the hallmark or USP of an original horror experience, then you shouldn’t find the act of nibbling through the bleak corridors of this bite-sized thrill fest to be a slog. As for whether or not it’s worth chucking cash into is another matter, and arguably one that is bound to attract different responses across a myriad of demographics, no doubt.

To put it in layman’s terms, The Vending Machine is an incredibly mediocre horror. Yet, in spite of all its shortcomings and lack of character, it’s also one that supplies enough cheap thrills and tender scares to make even the most experienced gamers quake in their boots for a short period of time. If you think that’s worth the time and effort, then you would be right to consider inserting your pocket change into this C-list corridor hopper the next time you’re looking for a quick bite to eat. If, however, you would rather spend your dimes on something with more depth and originality, then perhaps you ought to steer clear of The Vending Machine and opt for a meatier alternative.