A showcase of how far "fine, I'll do it myself" can take you.
To say that 'Voices of the Void' is inspired by Signal Simulator is an understatement. It IS Signal Simulator, down to basically every minute detail in terms of gameplay, except with much, much more layered on top.
Your goal is, of course, to capture and process signals from deep space and ship them off to other scientists for study. Each signal you capture and then submit will reward you with varying degrees of money depending on how much you processed the signal, limited by your current upgrades. Money will then in turn allow you to purchase more of the necessities (tapes, shipping containers, food) as well as many other useful tools or not so useful decorations for when you just want to make the place look nice, and of course can also be used to upgrade your stations equipment to better be able to capture signals.
In between this you have to keep your satellites calibrated, fix servers, complete daily server hash checks, clean up if you'd like, and in the most recent updates, manage your transforms to make sure you don't lose power.
And to top it all off, there are... things, that can happen to you. The dev clearly wants to avoid spoilers and I 100% understand why, so instead of explaining what can happen, I will simply mention how many of the patchnotes will simply say things such as "Added an entity" or something to that effect. If you've played Signal Simulator, you probably know that while there are some alien encounters to be had, they are VERY infrequent, and ultimately don't actually affect gameplay. Suffice to say, that is not the case in VotV. There ARE things out there, and you are not always safe from them, and unidentified creatures are not the only thing you can run into.
VotV is very much an itch.io horror game, not just literally but in essence, and if you've played many of them like I have you'll likely know what I mean. It's incredibly stylized and often goofy, but it plays its horror elements straight and the creators clearly care a lot about the project. That said, there are some clearly decisions that I can absolutely see pushing people away, even if they are ultimately not a huge deal.
Tape management is the first annoyance. Once you have your tiers all unlocked, you run into the headache of trying to churn out tier 3's as fast as possible, intermingled with the tier 1's and 2's that the game asks of you daily, despite them near universally just being worse quality in terms of data compared to tier 3's. It's a bit of a headscratcher, why they would want lower quality tapes from you when you already want to send them the higher quality versions, but whatever. Gameplay.
Second is navigation and exploration. Early on, you will have more time to explore since downloads and processing is much slower, but you will also have to spend most of that navigating from satellite to satellite, getting hashes or repairing servers, and to do so you really only have a compass and the map and radar inside your station. Even if you learn to general orientation of all of the satellites by heart, going between them will almost never make you pass areas of interest. Proper exploration is required, but you will need extensive equipment and by the time you have that you'll feel like you have less time to actually get around to it.
Finally, there are some fears for where the game appears to be headed. As mentioned, early game a lot of your time is eaten up by server repairs and daily tasks. This is still the case, but 2 new changes have added even more to that; a mountain of trash and grime in the base, and transformers. Transformers simply need to be pressed every once in awhile to keep the power on, but navigating to them is a lot more awkward than to satellites. With the trash, there is a TON of it, and to properly clean it all up you need to invest in a lot of trash bags (thankfully you can sell the filled bags back for profit) and then use a sponge to scrub away the dirt, but since many sections are out of reach, you can't properly clean the base for quite some time. So, a lot more to do at the start, and more busywork later into the game, when things were already pretty hectic if you didn't want to sacrifice efficiency. An expensive upgrade that lets you process multiple tapes or automatically send a captured signal to be processed would help greatly.
Aside from those gameplay aspects though, there's also presentation. I won't get too into this, but recently the PC got a new model. Now, I won't pretend like the old model was fitting, but this new one is imo too far in the opposite direction, and I think it's due to who the artist is. If you're terminally online enough and you saw the model, you might be able to deduce what I'm getting at; the new artist is a furry, and has what I would call an 'edgy' sense of design and artstyle. So, the new model feels somewhat out of place, looking like something I might expect from a Jhonen Vasquez project, but also comes across as made by someone who doesn't model/draw many humans. Now these aren't the end of the world; theoretically the model can be improved, or the overall presentation can be shifted a bit to be more in line with the vibes it gives off without changing much, but it's something I'm wary of because MANY furry artists have gotten involved in a project, their additions sticking out like a sore thumb, and eventually leading to the project turning into a furry project, as opposed to a project made by furries/some people including some furries, which tanks that atmosphere of the whole thing. And I'm especially wary, because even before this artists was properly brought on, the existence of 'Arirals' and 'Argemia' in particular was eyebrow raising due to it's existence in what was otherwise a pretty straight laced horror game. Furry adjacent, cutesy, waifu-bait designs are also not the end of the world, but it makes me really start to consider the consistency of the whole thing, especially now that recent updates has made those characters a lot easier to stumble upon, through things like posters, instead of being relegated to somewhat obscure easter eggs. I dunno. At the end of the day the devs get final say, but I would hate to see this game lose a lot of its merits because it turns from 'horror game where you process signals' to 'furry game with horror elements where you process signals'.
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Seems pretty cool, but I wasn't familiar with the genre and I found it hard to get used to the many controls and instructions. Might try again later with more time and patience.
Could've been in my top 5 horror games of all time. Unfortunately it doesn't commit to the sub-genres it aspires to emulate with the conviction and sincerity that they need. Still... A 4 out of 5 from me.