marrow #13 | posted 13/09/2024
you may have heard about void stranger, the highly praised 2023 puzzle game. i have thoughts. review / trip report will have full spoilers but be structured chronologically (as in, i wrote this while playing). even if you care about those, the first run is "safe" to read. or you can jump straight to the end for a spoiler-free tl;dr.
this is a fairly long read. here's a table of contents if you leave and come back later.
or, how i'd review this game if it was a straightforward sokoban.
first i wanna say it looks really damn good (especially with a palette other than gray). the sprites are expressive, and the larger art from cutscenes and some other stuff is where the pixel work really shines. very nice soundtrack also. i like the whole presentation. the decision to add jiggle physics to the buxom npc on floor B030 was really strange though, the tits in this game did kinda flashbang me. lest you forget the game was made by two guys i suppose.
now, an introduction to how this game plays. you have a magical rod that can pick up any single tile from the map and then place it back down. perhaps unusually, there are no undos or resets: the only way to reset a level is to die. you can find chests containing locust icons that get consumed when you die. i'm pretty sure you can see where this is headed.
by the way, you can avoid a death by falling if you hit the button to go back to the tile you'd fall from, while early in the "stumbling" animation. do not forget this. the second falling related tip is that sometimes you have to do it on purpose, but no need to worry about this yet.
the first time you die (for good, after running out of locusts), a little round thing will appear and ask if you wanna continue playing. saying yes will make you voided and you won't die anymore, so you can make mistakes and still finish the game. it's pretty clear that you're intended to do this now and then come back for a 1cc as the "true ending". so far so good. familiar waters.
look. my first run was kinda rough. i started the game excited to unravel its secrets on my own. the B001 on the first level was scary because it implied at least a hundred levels, but i expected maybe 120 or so. well the game has 224 levels (though to be fair some are free) and by level 100 i was just dreading the possibility of playing through all that sokoban again (to break continuity for a sec, there are skips and shortcuts to learn about later, of course. but at this point i had the feeling i'd died and gone to some sort of sokoban purgatory — which turns out to be quite the irony). which is partly on me, of course. i like sokoban but i don't go out of my way to play it. and i cannot stress enough how much sokoban there is. and the reward for clearing a level is playing through another level again and again and again and dear god i was promised a fun and meta secret hunt if only i can endure this first straightforward playthrough.
well, is it at least a good couple hundred levels of sokoban? honestly i don't know. it's not a genre i'm very familiar with. i think the rod mechanic is fun, and i like the other gimmicks with statues and special tiles and all. i had to use a walkthrough extensively (btw this spreadsheet is the absolute best i've ever seen for direct instructions. the wiki also has a retro ascii walkthrough, which is lovely), as i expected from the beginning, but that's because i don't like getting frustrated by a puzzle and wanted to move on to the rest of the game.
that is to say, i liked the first run until i really really didn't. the ending somewhat implies this is the intended experience but i will not use this to praise the game. because we're coming up the next section of gameplay.
oh but first lemme talk about the story a bit. every 28 levels there's a birch. resting there will close the game and, when you boot back up, it plays a small story segment (cutscenes, with some brief gameplay sometimes). that's gray's backstory as lady in waiting for a princess. it's nice, though it has a heterosexuality jumpscare. you get a bit of a cliffhanger if you're voided, and in any case you and i both know that's not all there is to it.
in between that you also get some glimpses into the lords that made this dungeon, though you get more of those after getting an item. that was early in the next run for me, but you can get it super early if you figure out the B023 puzzle, and i recommend you do. more on that in a sec.
ooh boy. you'll notice this is not called "the second run". that's because this part consisted of a ton of short lived runs, by design. i'm gonna talk about the early secrets now, but i'll be vague. there's some tips here that might make your life a lot easier. up to you whether you bounce or not now. i don't think you need to, but skip ahead to the final thoughts if you want.
ok so i see gray's voided ending. it's pretty good honestly, and i'm smiling because it's over. the game closes, i open it back up. i go through the "onboarding" again, start a new run. i unlock the infinity brand. i don't really understand how to activate it and start a run without activating it. but i wanted to see what it does. i die, say no to the imp. it closes my game. i open it back up. activate the memory brand properly. play some levels. realize infinite locusts means i'm stuck with 200+ levels without being able to reset. find out you can die with the brand by doing the smiling statue thing and then dying. so i play until i find a statue to die. say no to the imp. it closes my game. i open it back up.
this was when i realized i was about to have a terrible time.
resetting a run "traditionally" (ie by dying) in this game is extremely tedious and slow, especially due to the auto closing. the fast way is by placing stairs in front of a specific statue (the black one with four eyes) and then going down them — something i had to look up because i didn't realize it through the one (1) time you do it at the very end. and in any case, it can be a fucking pain since you need to find the damn statue.
i messed up a lot during the busywork phase, and the frustration at the game resisting something as simple as resetting my run back to floor B001, which really soured what should have been a really fun experience of discovering the new items. i'll say, i think getting items directly is less interesting than finding secrets hidden in plain sight / through pure knowledge (like the thing with the smiling statues for example), but that's just personal preference and the items are very good. hope you like carving each of them twice each though.
so that's why i call this phase busywork.
well, but what about the secrets? the secrets (and their puzzles) are nice, though it became very tempting to look up things that felt like a hassle, such as the tail puzzle. in particular, the brand rooms felt more like unlocks. even if i didn't have screenshots from the first run, the brands always come before the "intended" brand room, and although it's possible to sequence break, i had no reason to at this point. i just needed to get to the room and find the sequence of steps to execute. and since i played unvoided i was definitely not willing to risk a needless death.
honestly this was the main thing about this phase. i was looking things up left and right because finding them out for myself would be a chore. i could seek out each of mon's later shortcut hints, but i could also uhhh not do that — speeding things up is the fucking point innit. getting to a floor just so i could learn a shortcut located three floors earlier is annoying. and it's a bit of a shame, i know. getting the chests and mementos is an additional puzzle, and it feels good to pull that off, but i was not about to get out of my way to do all that. i'm very much not a completionist.
i think this game really needed a good old fashioned manual. yes, tunic completely changed the game when it comes to meta puzzles. because i don't mind some obtuse puzzles here and there, but i don't think resetting the game is a puzzle yknow. i think my experience would have improved a lot had the readme.txt that comes with the game (or a hypothetical pdf manual) told me about things like preventing a fall and how to reset a run. it could be coy and cryptic but toss me a bone.
and look, i get it. they don't want you skipping ahead too soon. they want your first playthrough to be vanilla, before you can try to break the game, but i think that's a bit of a misplay when breaking the game is part of it. had the whole affair up to now been a little less tedious i'd probably have felt more inclined to put in the effort into solving stuff. i truly wish i did.
anyway IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPOILERS DEFINITELY JUMP TO THE FINAL THOUGHTS NOW.
this is where things got dangerous because i kinda entered the "no no the start is slow but it really gets good around season 3!" zone.
my unvoided plan was to head to B053 and get a big skip by entering one of the later brands here, but i couldn't figure out how to carve either, and found no guides online because god hates me personally. well, i had the wings and that made locust duping trivial, so i just went ahead and got all shortcuts i could and ran to the end (btw don't forget you can go back to higher floors; the useful skip here is taking the shortcut from B131 to B167, going to B168, getting 68 locusts, dying until you have 63 locusts and going to B163 to use that shortcut). there isn't much here other than the final backstory cutscene and ending, which was overall a little underwhelming, but i was excited to see what else the game had to offer now that it had no illusion to upkeep.
also. if you're reading this before finishing this route: don't skip the credits, it'll also skip the cutscene that serves as both ending to gray's route and the prologue of lillie's. i had to go look at it on the wiki (sorry i got impatient).
aka playing as lillie. uh wow they weren't lying this mode can hard. i immediately died on B003 because i may be stupid, and restarted with all burdens. and then i realized i had a choice: i could play normally so i could see her entire story, or i could use what i just learned and speedrun my way to the end. needless to say i was giving myself locusts and jumping in front of smilers as much as possible, so i only watched three of her cutscenes in-game, AND missed the lesbian escort quest -_-
and it's complicated. i like lillie! do i like her enough to replay her route all vanilla-like? hmm. well i can always come back and do it later.
cif's route is pretty brief, though i messed up and got a bit into busywork territory again — i should have routed things better maybe. played through twice because i wanted to get both the npc dialogue and their ending, which is cute. not much to say about this route tbh. technically this is the whole game / basic ending as well. meaning it's time to get deeper and see what all those hints at computers and meta stuff were really about.
well at least by this point the busywork is brief.
creating the true ending circumstances wasn't too bad, though it involved some going back and forth. of course my reward was more sokoban, but that's fine at this point because there wasn't much of it.
bee's boss fight frustrated me a lot though. the rng element without undos meant i need to play perfectly from scratch every time, with no way to make things consistent. the strat of standing in a single file pressing z is very helpful (this is in the miraheze walkthrough), but it still took me several attempts and a few joker moments. i think the bosses were overall a really fun touch and addition to the game, but they worked better within the sokoban framework — ie, the same action always wields the same results.
from there things really picked up though! cif's fight (rather surprisingly) wasn't too complicated and i really liked the real time aspects. but i think that's because i already knew the quick (and intended) kill, and i think i lucked out when going directly for it. same for the final boss segment. once again the retry cutscenes are unskippable, but it only took me three attempts.
overall i think the DIS route was the game at its best. and it kinda sucks that i had to go through so much frustration to get here. but while it pays off in terms of gameplay, i felt the story left something to be desired. i'll talk more about this in the final thoughts section because i think it's worth talking about where people who skipped spoilers will read it, but in short: the game's story is kinda mid imo.
ex mode is like free dlc, since it was added a few months after the game's release, which is why i went with coda instead of act v. i really liked that the puzzles were designed around the burdens, and of course by this point UI manips are free game. making full use of the tools like this makes for some really tasty puzzles.
not much else to say; i write the most when i'm complaining. i think this is a nice little bit of sokoban if you're craving more of that, but the story isn't particularly worth it. i played this for completion's sake.
so is void stranger good and did i like it. these are two separate questions.
did i like it? i had a rough start with it and things got really tedious at points. during the highest points i was having fun skipping around, during the lowest i had visions of myself killing people with hammers. it's a really frustrating game, and not in the way i expected (ie challenging sokoban — not that levels couldn't be difficult). now that it's over i think my final opinion is that i didn't like playing it.
is it good? hm for the most part, yeah. i think it's mechanically interesting. and this is where i'm gonna go on a short tangent before finishing the review.
i have a simple stance on spoilers: if a story can be ruined by knowing what happens in it, then it's not a very good story. when looking things up while playing, i saw the culture around this game is of spoiler tagging anything and everything. walls and walls of spoilered text as far as the eye can see. i didn't know anything before going into other than "puzzle game with meta puzzle aspects". i think that approach sucks.
i do not think you need to play void stranger blind at all. there are some mechanics where the whole point is realizing "wait you can do that??" but i don't see much of a point to not knowing anything at all.
void stranger is a sokoban game. this much is obvious from the page, but i really really mean it. gray's cutscenes sometimes play with turn based combat but there's no genre shift, save for the very very end of the true ending route (aka DIS route). the rod letting you manipulate the map is a nice twist to the formula, and you get items that make levels easier or even trivial, but you will be playing sokoban until the cows come home and you'll be replaying levels a lot as you go through the game with different characters (oh yeah, there are three characters). any bonus secrets and stuff you find are also within the sokoban framework, which makes the lack of undo pretty annoying.
there's no reward for playing nice from the start. you know this isn't a quaint little basic puzzle game so don't treat it as such. solve B023 before moving on. do not go down those stairs. can anyone hear me.
the game has meta aspects, but not necessarily how you'd think. you'll need to take screenshots and piece things together out of the game, but for the most part you're learning to navigate more efficiently and finding out how to get to the true ending. so it's in that spot where your knowledge as a player matters a lot, which is why people act all secretive. the story isn't very tied to the fact that it is a videogame.
if you like videogames as a medium, and this game's on your radar, you should go ahead and learn what the deal with it is. but don't actually play it unless spending over 20 hours on a sokoban game sounds like a great time (my full run, from start to true end, took me 20 hours and 49 minutes. i couldn't tell you how long i spent on EX because i played off steam). i myself would have enjoyed this a lot more if i were watching a friend play over discord, or a stream / let's play with commentary.
because the thing is, this game's a very clever sokoban that does a few things i enjoy as a videogame enjoyer (mainly skips that rely on knowledge and challenging preconceived ideas of how a game space works), that i think were worth witnessing. but it didn't feel very rewarding to play.
and playing is all there is. don't get me wrong, that's fine, it's a game, playing is part of story. but truly i found the story to be simply serviceable, and i wasn't expecting that. idk. it doesn't gel together very well, gray's backstory and the void lords and lillie. i didn't care! i finished the game with a feeling of unease. like oh... that really was all there was to it... ok...
in short: i can see the hype, i can see the appeal, but this game wasn't for me at all. i couldn't stop playing because i really wanted to see it through and see if it was actually brilliant in hindsight, but it was never not a 7/10 game to me. SAD. well there's a bunch more games in my to-play list.