Grab your space suit and join your fellow cadets on an adventure to discover the mysteries of the cosmos!
Vine Worlds is the sequel to Vine Realms, created for the Vinesauce Is Hope 2021 charity drive for the Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation. As with the last game, it is composed of largely legally-distinct references to streamers, characters, events, and memes from the almost the entirety of the Vinesauce group.
The game remains akin to a "talking simulator" like its predecessor, with no real overarching story, with more focus on its cardboard cutout characters and environments. However, unlike Vine Realms, Vine Worlds is more linear progression, with every world beyond the first two unlockable by emotes. This is done under the premise of fixing the Heart of the Galaxy, a space station in charge of discovering new planets and bringing hope to the galaxy, primarily through collecting emotes (streamer-centric or otherwise) and avatars by finding them hidden in different areas and speaking to NPCs. Emotes are taken directly from the streamers' Twitch channels. Avatars are based on the many NPC characters that can be spoken to throughout the game.
The game was developed by the Vinesauce is Hope 2021 team, lead by Narry and GreatSphynx, with art and designs contributed by multiple community artists as well as submissions from the Vinesauce community at large.
As with Vine Realms, Vine Worlds is filled to the brim with Shout-Outs and references to Vinesauce as a whole, but also to the streamers that appeared as guests to the charity, such as RubberRoss.
The game is available on itch.io for free. You can download it here.
Tropes present in Vine Worlds:
- Absurdly Cool City: Oxidar City, a futuristic city surrounded by crystal encased inside a giant dome.
- After the End: The city of Knowhere was once a buzzing metropolis on its planet before being destroyed by an entity a long time ago and was abandoned until the Slimes claimed the ruins as their new home.
- All There in the Manual: The Vinesauce is Hope 2021 Magazine contains tidbits of trivia for every streamer's character as well as specific tidbits of lore present in the game, such as the bounties on V-Dub and A-Dub and the identity of the cosmic demon CR-P0H.
- Art Shift: Chatyots (and to a lesser degree, Frens) come in many different styles, largely because they were submissions from the Vinesauce community at large.
- Ascended Glitch: A dev emote was placed in an out of bounds area largely because it was found out you could jump off an invisible border onto it.
- A bug in the physics allows a player to catapult themselves into the air if they jump on a moving "pogoda sphere", the glitch itself was left in for possible speed run maneuvers and as a viable way to get into the dev room.
- Parodied with the Shrimp Lady, who is the only NPC given its own physics, and thus could be pushed around by the player, even into the scenery.
- Baby Talk: All the seal scientists in Pacifica speak this way, though one is currently creating a cure for it so they can all finally understand what the other is saying.
- Back for the Finale: Outer Wildwood, is considered the game's final level, and as such brings back loads of NPCs from every previous world to hang out in it.
- Beneath the Earth: The Mysterious Cave is hidden beneath the surface of the Desert Sphere, ultimately leading to The Fren Zone, which is not actually acknowledged in the UI.
- Bioluminescence Is Cool: The general flora give off a bright glow in the Floating Island of the planet Pacifica, which is an area that is always set at near night.
- Blob Monster: The slimes return from Vine Realms, having been transported from the Swamp to the ruined city of Knowhere.
- Broken Masquerade: Because the setting is literally in space, the grey aliens from the last game no longer bother to hide their identities, and NPCs from the previous game acknowledge their existence.
- Cast of Expies: Apart from being based on real people, characters which they created, or chatyots, practically every other character is based on an existing character.
- Continuity Lock-Out: For a lot of players and even the streamers, there is little to no obvious context for the existence of Nutt Putt and Drippy or their importance because it's often forgotten they both started as ARG characters for the Vinesauce Charity years before Vine Realms.
- Crack in the Sky: The Desert Sphere has its planetary dome broken through before the player gets there, with a prominent hole in the sky slowly sucking out the inside of the desert into space, much to the dismay of some of the residents.
- Curse Cut Short: V-Dub consistently gets his comments deleted at least once by an offscreen Vinebot.
- Darker and Edgier: The game is overall less universally family friendly than Vine Realms, having mild cursing and more explicit (but still fairly time) references. If the first game could be considered solidly PG, this one would be on the lighter end of PG-13.
- The Dreaded: While you never meet them, several characters on multiple planets allude to the actions of a cosmic demon destroying civilizations with a baseball. The massive baseball is found next to the entrance for the Mysterious Cave, with a label reading "Edritch League Baseball".
- Exposed Extraterrestrials: The gray aliens from the previous game roam around and don't wear clothes, except the one who dresses like a skater. Subverted by Gnorts, who consistently is shown wearing underwear.
- Expy: Cyggy Starburst and Mai-Kyuu are based on David Bowie (specifically Ziggy Stardust) and Hatsune Miku respectively.
- Floating Continent: The Floating Island of Pacifica, which is set in perpetual night.
- The Grays: Reused from the previous game, with Gnorts now among them.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All:
- Parodied with Xenokin, life forms that can be found throughout the game that Fred is looking for, but there is no actual mechanic that has anything to do with them.
- Also the central mechanic of the game, collecting emotes from the various areas of the game. Collecting enough unlocks actions for the player to perform and some of the skins.
- Hero of Another Story: All the streamers are technically on their own missions while the player is visiting locations. Special mention to Dorb who apparently killed a couple of blood gods before the player visits Knowhere.
- Hub World: The Heart of the Galaxy, a space station which carries transports to the six main locations in the game: The ruined Knowhere Metro, the planet Pacifica, the VSS Tums ship, the planet Oxidar, the planet Desert Sphere, and Outer Wildwood. However when you start the game, only two teleports remain active. The player must collect emote to power the other teleporters with the requisite "emote juice" to get them running again. The space station also contains a variety of mini-games and a capsule toy gift shop.
- Improbable Weapon User: Someone or something has been devastating planets with baseballs, either leveling entire cities or breaking planetary domes.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Some characters mention "possibly" having met the player before, since some but not all will have played Vine Realms. The player may also have not played Vine Realms prior to playing Vine Worlds, so being vague avoids the player becoming Remember the New Guy?.
- Loot Boxes: The Gacha mechanic, in which collecting "EXP" (Exposure Points) scattered throughout the world lets you redeem them in a capsule machine in Morshu's Paradise in the hub world. Every capsule contains a "Thing" that can be applied on the player avatar's hand, chest, and head. Hundreds of cosmetics are available to get, all of them submitted by members of the community.
- Mythology Gag:
- Several returning characters including the Happy Emote Salesshroom and Toarist make mention of having possibly met the player already, having potentially met the player if they also played Vine Realms.
- Papa Douk's has the same layout with the addition of two new rooms just to add references to things that have happened between the release of both games.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Several characters from Star Trek are parodied on the VSS Tums as Lieutenant Woof, Po Brien, Doc Photonic, and Commander Deets.
- Admiral Lou is straight up just Captain Lou Albano as a space man.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Two NPCs, Sleepybot and Moodybot, are fully rendered as 3D models rather than as cardboard cutouts. There is no real reason provided for it other than them being robots, despite the fact other robots are not rendered this way.
- Perpetual Smiler: Almost all chatyots and Frens are depicted with a smile on their face, and more often than not in their dialogue. :)
- Pocket Dimension: Both The Anomaly and Fren Zone are considered realms that exist outside space and time, but are actually leaking into our reality, allowing exploration.
- Polluted Wasteland: Everything outside of Oxidar City is a rusted wasteland in a continuous metallic sandstorm. According to the magazine, this is from all the decaying mining factories that once hollowed the planet of its resources long ago.
- Reference Overdosed: It would probably be impossible to actually count all of the references without going over the developers' work logs. Years of gaming from a dozen Vinesauce members, as well as associated streamers who are not technically part of the group, makes this inevitable.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: Vinebots are periodically seen throughout the game as stand-ins for the charity's event moderators. While they are tasked to assist the players, they are more often than not tending to their own affairs.
- Sequence Breaking: The final world teleport takes 69 emotes to unlock, a little more than a third of all collectable emotes. Depending on how dedicated a player is in collecting them, they could unlock it entirely through collecting every emote in the first 3 worlds and be able to skip Oxidar and Desert Sphere entirely.
- Sequel Escalation: The game introduces even more emotes, even more characters, and more to explore than Vine Realms. In addition to that, the introduction to the gacha system and the mini-game area in the Hub World, where previously it only served as window dressing at the beginning of the previous game.
- Single-Biome Planet: Desert Sphere is mostly a desert outside of one or two locations, meanwhile the Oxidar surface is a rusted wasteland covered in iron dust.
- Surprisingly Creepy Moment: After the VSS Tums, a lighthearted, largely Star Trek-inspired area comes The Anomaly, a reality warping borg-like temple in a cosmic pocket dimension full of eldritch-looking chatyots, almost all of which speak in ominous prose.
- Underwater Base: The Pacifica Lab, deliberately designed as a reference to Subnautica.
- Villain of Another Story: V-Dub starts off his introduction proclaiming he would kidnap Gnorts from the VSS Tums to roam the galaxy, after which you occasionally meet them on the run in other worlds, wanted for various offscreen space crimes such as bootlegging Mountain Dew and scalping trading cards.
