Void Stranger

A game so large that it’s almost impossible to fit it all inside of your head. So it spills out. Into your screenshot folder, onto your notebook, into your conversations. It’s a game so completely full of things that a friend on Discord gave me a side quest to complete for them.

I’ll be upfront: I found the initial gameplay extremely unappealing. I do not like sliding block puzzle games. I found it frustrating and unintuitive and dumb that your character can’t turn around on the spot. But I do like FEZ. La Mulana-likes. Games which have gameplay which is just a vehicle for its true challenge: code-breaking and theorizing. Fez works so well because the gameplay gimmick, once you get used to it, is fairly simplistic. It has pleasant, thumb-rolling puzzle platformer mechanics so as to show you all the hidden pieces – the real challenge is putting it together.

Void Stranger shows no such pleasantries. Not only does it have all the insane, world-spanning mysteries of a fez-like, its moment-to-moment gameplay is just as tough too. This did, in fact, “filter” me, at first.

Which is why I’m so pleased to say that, for a majority of the game, you can cheat like a dirty bastard. You can crack these 225 some puzzle floors over your knee like a sheet of store-sign plywood. Provided you know how to do so. How this cheating looks like I won’t say, but it’s there, and it feels good to do it. That’s how I managed to get as far as I did. And when the strictness comes in later, well, I’m already 40 hours deep. Sheer momentum will carry you through it, though it’ll likely still break your brain.

If I have a complaint about this game, is that I don’t know if the story necessarily coalesces as it should. It’s a bit of a strange predicament; I think it might be the result of an overreach, a consequence of the game’s largeness. I think a lot of the story needs to be read metaphorically, but the gameplay is extremely left-brained, so one is inclined to try and find literal answers where not a lot are found. It does not surprise me that in the behind-the-scenes material, it’s revealed that only really the first 10 or so hours were planned as story content initially. Its ballooning scope means the inclusion of new themes which do not receive as much development as its first. That’s not to say the quality tapers off. The twists and turns are thrilling and will make you yell aloud, but looking back, I’m a little unclear as to what it wants to say as a whole, outside of its main theme.
Do keep in mind, just because it does not coalesce does not mean it’s not good. Messiness is interesting. I enjoy obliqueness. But I think SIGNALIS pulled off some similar narrative tricks off better.
I don’t know.
The fun thing is that Void Stranger’s true story is going to be told in Discord servers for years to come. Maybe one re-telling will convince me otherwise.

With all this said, Void Stranger became a complete obsession for me over the course of a week. I could not stop thinking about it. It’s such a singular vision from two people. It’s weird, it’s horny, it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s terrifying, it’s frustrating, it’s exciting. It knows exactly when to do a title drop like your favorite animes. If you’re like me – and odds are, by the sheer fact that you’re reading this, you are – you owe it to yourself to play it. And sink in deep.