Let's talk about Void Stranger
Place your faith and embrace the Void.
In October of last year life was hitting me extra hard for a whole heap of different reasons that I won't be getting into right now. What I will be getting into, is how the Finnish duo over at System Erasure released their latest game at a time where I needed it the most.
If you're not already familiar with System Erasure, they're two guys from Finland who previously made the shmup/STG Zeroranger (that I will probably write about in the future).
And hoo-boy did they deliver one of the finest pieces of digital escapism that I've ever encountered.
Void Stranger is a sokoban-style game in which you use a magical rod to pick up and place tiles to solve puzzles. Sounds pretty basic, right? Well, it is and it isn't. The beauty of Void Stranger comes from its presentation, from the absolute fucking banger of a soundtrack composed by one of the two developers, eebrozgi, to the multidimensional narrative and superb pixel art.
Now, about the puzzle solving. It starts off pretty straightforward, as you'd expect from a typical sokoban game, but you will start noticing things that you can't figure out, so maybe you write them down (seriously, take notes. Lots of notes) in a text document, maybe you take screenshots and add them to that very same document. I got pretty carried away with this and when I had around two dozen A4 pages of barely coherent information that could easily be mistaken for someone's schizophrenic ramblings I switched to recording everything with OBS for posterity.
I can't exactly remember how many hours I had played when I thought I had seen everything the game had to offer, so out of curiosity I decided to join the official System Erasure Discord server to see what people thought of the game, and what they had discovered. What I discovered there just blew my mind. The community was absolutely amazing. Not only were they extremely careful when talking about the game, utilizing spoiler tags that would put most SCP contributors to shame, but they had threads within sub-channels of channels for specific "tiers" of spoiler progression.
And it was then I realized I had only scratched the surface of Void Stranger. Over the next following days I participated in the joint effort to unravel the secrets of the Void, and there's a lot of secrets. As I'm writing this I have played Void Stranger for 104 hours of my life, and about 80 of those were over the course of two weeks in October of 2023.
Now, do I recommend this game? Of course, I do! But maybe don't expect to like it as much as I do.
I feel as if it was a case of the stars aligning: dealing with loneliness, desperate for a distraction, working towards something attainable. And a lot of you probably won't hold the game in that same high esteem because of those factors.
I don't know. It's hard for me to explain exactly what I mean.
But it is an amazing game, so if you like puzzle games and/or unique games, give it a look.
It feels good to be able to say that in a year when expensive, banquet-style games like Baldur's Gate 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out it was a game that costs less than a pizza that was my favorite.
Pizza is comforting.
Thanks for reading!