Void Stranger - Low Spoilers Thoughts

A game with a lot to like unfortunately stuck in the middle of a gelatinous blob in a hole somewhere

Void Stranger leaves me with deeply mixed feelings. There are several parts of the game I think are really good. But there are also several stretches that left me deeply frustrated, and both segments were threaded throughout the entire work in such a way that it's difficult to nail down a single core element that bothered me. In many ways what strikes me about Void Stranger is its sheer messiness, so clearly is the game a much smaller idea that grew into an elaborate masterwork far beyond the scope of its core. And while I can definitely understand individuals who love the game and think it's one of the greatest ever made, it really did wear on me to the point where even with assistance I felt like the game never quite fit together.

I'm speaking very generically, so let me go back to the beginning. Void Stranger is a sort of puzzle-game-cum-dungeon-crawler, like someone created a game entirely out of the incidental dungeon puzzles in a JRPG or a Zelda. The core gameplay revolves around a rod that allows you to grab and place floor tiles, which is a relatively interesting mechanic that's fun to get used to. Unlike a more focused puzzle game, though, Void Stranger chooses to only occasionally make levels focused on precise use of the mechanic and instead introduces a wide variety of alternative mechanics for the rod to help you solve: Managing turn-based enemies, basic sokoban puzzles, mimics that copy your movements, shadows that follow you, and so on. I found the puzzles to be mostly enjoyable, with a very strict caveat that I'll explain in the spoiler section at more length. Suffice to say solving new types of puzzles was one of my favorite elements of Void Stranger. The puzzle crawler is only part of the work, however. Surrounding it is a meta-narrative regarding the strange place in which you are solving the puzzles, and much of the game is spent unraveling what exactly this place is and how to interact with it. There is also, of course, a plotline unfolding about your protagonist's motives and backstory, and within those scenes the work often changes genre to convey concepts and vibes.

It's the meta-narrative that shapes the true nature of the game and attracts the most attention, because here is where the characters people most often discuss matter and the realm occupied by the majority of the game's more confusing meta-puzzles. One of Void Stranger's primary cores is that the world has many elements that you could always take advantage of but were not told about until a certain plot event. I like this sort of game design, it's a cute way to make concessions to people playing the first time while including a secret advantage for long-term players. But there's a lot of nuance to how such a mechanic is implemented, and Void Stranger chooses to go for telling you basically nothing at the outset and letting you discover everything as it happens. I think that this is very good for certain elements (the rod itself, triplication, brands, floor skipping) and very frustrating for others (the fact you can speak to various things, the way story scenes are triggered, how to traverse quickly, what actually needs to be done and what is unimportant.) Ultimately my biggest frustration lies in the ways wherein VS makes the player commit a pretty arbitrary amount of time depending on what you figure out and when.

VS's core game has about 200 floors, and there's no real indication of this the first time you're playing. It autosaves almost continuously, so at least it's easy to put the game down and pick it up again, but especially early on you will likely feel trapped at certain points because it's difficult or impossible to go backwards. This in turn makes it tough for you to review something you missed or try again from the beginning. If you discover you missed something important, it's no small feat to reset the run - there are ways to do it quickly, but it's not explained to you at all and I only learned about it after I completed the game. Making this worse, a lot of the puzzles and elements will reference previous floors that didn't seem to matter when you were last there. This means it's very possible you'll get to a floor and receive a hint about something that you had to be looking for 30 floors ago, leaving you with few options except to play through the whole run until you can go back and review them. And reviewing those floors often consists of basically screenshotting all of them just in case you need them, which can be very frustrating indeed depending on how you play. It makes Void Stranger into a sort of classical CRPG-like game where you're expected to have spreadsheets and documents and detailed records and what-have you open if you want to solve the puzzles without cheating, which is fun but not something the game directly conveys until you've made it a fair distance in.

Even worse, IMO, is the degree to which it's easy to get lost on a red herring trail. Because the core game is so big and time consuming, while being filled with all sorts of weird secrets and unique events that only occur under specific circumstances, hunting down the logic puzzle solutions can be quite tricky. There's so much space that doesn't matter, or turns out to matter but only for bonus collectibles, or that does matter but only in a specific runthrough with a specific character, that it's super easy to waste hours or even days pursuing an idea only to discover it won't be that'd be relevant for another 15 hours. This negative space in conjunction with the purposefully obfuscated nature of what you're supposed to be doing can cause frustration, especially when the game already takes a considerable amount of time to engage with in the first place. For instance, I received an extremely important plot item about 40 hours in, and wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do with it. In retrospect, there was actually a message earlier in the game regarding what this item was designed to do, but naively I figured that perhaps it would change the ending and so triggered it. Once you get here, the ending is not cancellable and forces you into a sequence that ties into another playthrough, which itself begins with an unskippable scene. Then, after I was able to control that playthrough, I had to restart the game entirely so that I could then go back and redo the actions needed to get that plot-important item again, which even with all my foreknowledge took me about 45 minutes. It can be a little annoying when just trying to figure out what to do with something ends up wasting you a whole-ass hour. That's not getting into the puzzle I totally misunderstood because I didn't yet know an important mechanic, which led me on a wild goose chase for 5 or 6 hours before being spoiled on it, I've heard others took even longer.

This might just be a personal thing, but I always feel like I'm in a bit of a bind with games like this. If I don't cheat I can end up wasting hours achieving literal nothing, searching spots pointlessly and agonizingly to see if anything's changed or secretly relevant. But if I cheat, then it feels like one of the core elements of the game has been completely disregarded. So I'm forced to make a trade-off between using my time as an adult wisely and engaging with the game as intended. I don't really think it's the game's fault per se, it's almost impossible to escape that sort of thing when you're making a Myst-like puzzler. But I do feel that as you combine Myst puzzles with a formulaic arcade game, the sheer time invested dealing with the arcade elements makes it more and more tiring to engage with the Myst puzzles. What really pissed me off was when I gave up and got help on a puzzle I could have figured out, since I thought it'd be one of the crazy ones that I'd never figure out in a million years. It really should have been easy for me to notice that one, but I spent so much time doing nothing with confusing puzzles previously and had spent hours on false starts looking into that one as well, that I ended up assuming that the solution to this one would similarly be incessantly difficult to comprehend. Yet it turned out to require simple observation of something I'd noticed a very long time ago and forgotten about, and just made me feel silly. If the game hadn't felt like as much of a time sink, I wouldn't have given up on that puzzle. That said, I did solve a puzzle at the very end of the game that used knowledge I'd already become aware of entirely on my own, and it felt VERY satisfying - I think it's notable that that was NOT one where I had to hunt around trying to figure out if any of the billion floor puzzles had anything to do with it!

Overall, that time issue hovering over the entire game created most of my troubles. I couldn't really estimate how long solving anything would actually take, even after I cut out transport time, and thus got more and more fed up with the experience as a whole. This made me start viewing the plot more and more critically, wanting more and more substantial payoffs for the time I'd spent. When I finally did get to the end of the game the conclusion was so lukewarm that I was annoyed for like, a whole day. In retrospect I don't even think it's all that bad, it's more just a finale that feels like it'd have been satisfying to reach in less than 20 hours, and I got there in 60.

Ultimately:

Thus I ended up feeling like a game full of elements I enjoy on their own played all of those components against each other, turning an experience comprised mostly of pieces I can vibe with in a vacuum into a pain in the ass. I did really enjoy a lot of what it was doing, but the messy and confused combination toppled over for me in the end. Zeroranger felt super focused and like it knew exactly how to use the elements it lifted to create a cohesive experience, Void Stranger felt like a bunch of independently interesting concepts bolted together into a junkpile Tower of Babel. I can see how people like it, I personally greatly enjoyed periods of playing it, but I'm constantly frustrated by how it feels like if they'd just spent a little bit more time editing and arranged the challenges differently it would have been much closer to an ideal Narf game.

One last thing: A totally personal pet peeve is that I really don't like "wasteful" game design that tosses in tons of systems and super-detailed art for things that don't matter. Void Stranger's core design conceit is almost specifically targeted to bother me in this regard. There's a faux RPG system used entirely for a few cutscenes, it's decent but I can't help but feel like the way it's implemented is incredibly dull. If anything it makes me wish they would just have made an RPG! There's a rhythm minigame coded for two missable cutscenes, I imagine it wasn't all that difficult to include, but in turn it also feels like it was pretty pointless to put in. There's a whole unlockable shmup that shows up later- well, I'll talk about that another time, but you get my point - the game sprawls out with all these fancy, super loved-on subgenre moments that are utilized for... set dressing. Pretty much just set dressing. I don't like feeling like a game is flaunting its wasted effort. The flamboyant set-piece style works fine in Zeroranger because that game is so focused and none of it feels like it pulls away from the core aspects. But here it just feels like showing off to show off, only occasionally being cool or dramatic as a plot point. I don't even think any of the individual scenes that do this are particularly bad, it's more just that in conjunction with the frustrations elsewhere it felt like core issues were ignored to toss in another omg cool RPG scene or whatever. I think this game really could have used an editor, which is a problem I often have with big name games that I think VS was trying to imitate.

Overall, despite how negative this review may seem, I'm just trying to get out an explanation of why I talk the way I do about the game. I do like Void Stranger in a lot of ways, but I spent a great deal of my time with the game upset and hoping it'd get better. More than anything I just wish the points where I was having a good time had been more of the game's core focus, and that the final plot had hit on various things I was excited for. The very first playthrough or so are honestly the shining example of the game's design for me and a big part of why I wish the meta puzzles's handling hadn't been such a pain... the core gameplay is really nice and reasonably paced! I loved Voided (if you know you know)! It's in reaching a bit too high that the problems start to arise. If you're interested in more detail on what exactly I like and what I didn't, check back for part 2 later where I talk about specific elements later on that I think were interesting!