Scratching beneath the inky surface of Void Stranger reveals a very tight mechanical puzzler with a minimalist game boy art style, mashed up with an anime story, a surreal world, and obtuse meta elements. I can see how people might find this combination charming but it just didn't work for me.

It's difficult to really talk about the game without spoiling it as it goes out of its way to be secretive about its mechanics and premise. It takes the stance that difficulty is synonymous with just not telling you how anything works so the design comes off as being more arbitrary than punishing. There is a lot more depth to the game but all hidden behind vast quantities of tedious puzzle grind so I hope you enjoy that core game loop.

Under the veneer of mystery is a reasonable and challenging sokoban-style puzzler. You can remove and place blocks but only from/to a space directly in front of you. The rigid movement makes facing the right way a challenge of navigating the tight spaces and doing things in the right order. This is complicated by gaps, blocks with different mechanics, obstacles, and enemies that wander the stage. Despite being mechanically sterile the puzzles are serviceable but repetitive and lack a 'fun' element preventing me from really engaging with the game beyond the surface level.

The other half of the game involves its setting and story which are drip fed throughout. While I'll avoid getting into details, both the story and main character feel uninspired at first glance. While I understand the game ends up going into a lot of depth I just wasn't hooked by the story breadcrumbs or the core game loop so I had no motivation to even finish the first playthrough.

Whether this game captures the nuances it's trying to emulate will come down to player preference. I was taken in by the trailer but I felt like it's attempts to be dark and mysterious just feel obvious and predictable. The hints at larger layers of puzzle and the mechanics you'll obviously need to get there struck me as tedious and boring - spoiling the game for myself revealed this hunch to be completely right. If you aren't hooked by the core loop and story in the first few hours, the next 40 aren't worth the effort.

As much as I love this game to death. Something isn't right, multiple times throughout my playthrough I felt like the game just wouldn't end.

There are just SO many puzzles here, and don't get me wrong, they aren't bad puzzles, sometimes they are hard puzzles, but they aren't bad puzzles, but, I assume that, because I was so curious and engaged with the plot I legit didn't have enough patience to go through them one at a time. I just HAD to see what was lying beyond them, and having to go through so many of them in succession really soured the experience. It almost feels like having such a good and detailed storyline is a detriment to the game, because it competes so fiercily with its other design elements. This game is better experienced one puzzle at a time, but hell if that would've settled well with past me and their interest in the plot.

Its weird, I'm not sure what I'm talking about here, because I feel such a weird way about this game. Again I love it to death, but I can't just ignore how dead inside I felt at certain points.

I'm absolutely going to play whatever Erasure cooks next tho. And I absolutely recommend this game to anyone who has enough self control to take their time with the game.

This is unfortunately a drop, after finishing the first 'void' pass. I guess it would be more interesting if I actually enjoyed sokoban more than passingly, but I was getting more and more annoyed by the puzzles and restarting just killed my motivation for it.

I'm still curious to see what the story and metagaming things end up doing, so I'll probably watch a full playthrough of it just to see that.

If anything, the music and presentation are really good, so hopefully I'll see more on that on a playthrough.

O jogo é lindo, a trilha é maravilhosa, eu acho o núcleo de gameplay dele extremamente entediante.

É um daqueles jogos que pede DEMAIS de você, não basta ter um monte de coisas interessantes pra você descobrir, você precisa mergulhar e aceitar todas as etapas que ele requer pra chegar nelas, e por um tempo a minha curiosidade foi o suficiente pra me levar. Mas depois de ver os créditos pela primeira vez e descobrir que agora eu preciso de mais sei lá quantas horas de sokoban ainda mais difícil, eu só aceitei que minha frustração estava maior que a diversão.

Esse jogo realmente não é pra todo mundo e no momento me sinto no grupo que ficou de fora. Quem sabe em um outro momento.

There’s so much that I love here. The puzzle designs, the soundtrack, the writing, the art style. But more so than with other Metroidbrainia games, I’m a little torn with how the secrets are asking to be discovered in Void Stranger.

There would be times that I would have an idea about something to check on or try, but the time investment to do so would often be significant. It sometimes felt set up at odds with encouraging experimentation, and led to me reach to look things up online so I didn’t burn on out on the game too quickly.

However I can concede to any arguments that streamlining things could definitely make secrets too easy to stumble upon, or not encourage players to pay attention enough during their regular gameplay. This is a nascent genre and seems like an incredibly difficult balancing act to pull off.

With that caveat, I’m really glad I stuck with this game. It has a lot to offer if you give it some time and effort.

Jordan Helm of Hardcore Gamer wrote that "Void Stranger is a triumph and easily the year's most engrossing gaming experience". Whatever your word of choice is - engrossing, captivating, compelling, gripping, riveting - I completely agree, having spent the last 1.5 weeks obsessing not only over the sokoban-style puzzles but the seemingly endless number of layers you peel back, as you (the player) gain mastery over the game - yet even then, System Erasure throws another curveball at you that is both fascinating to experience and stimulating when you solve it. The only fault I could find is that it is ruthlessly unforgiving at points, without much "quality of life" features you would expect in modern puzzle games, but would appreciate having the more you play. Perhaps that is just a dishonest perception from myself with a fear of failure, but here's the only "spoiler" I'll write in this review: the game is always trying to teach you, and sometimes failure is the lesson. (But again, it would really be appreciated to have some of those QOL things for the absolute endgame content so you can experience all of the game once you have solved nearly everything.) Oh - and the music is simply fantastic and makes the significant amount of time deliberating your next move worth it.

This game is an incredible feat by a studio comprised of merely two people from Finland, whose previous shmup game is not my style, but makes it plainly obvious just how much love and time they dedicate to the particular genre they are working on. Void Stranger is a tremendous achievement and deserves to be experienced with as little prior knowledge going in as possible.

Me resulta raro ponerle cinco estrellas a un juego que no he podido terminar y que he acabado viendo en Youtube (los sokoban se me dan de culo, que le voy a hacer), pero es que se lo merece. Los primeros minutos me volaron la cabeza, y la historia ha estado a la altura hasta el final.

La única queja que tengo (que no resta nota al juego porque no deja de ser una opinión muy influenciada por lo mal que se me da) es que el género sokoban no casa del todo bien con el secretismo que rodea a todo el paquete. En juegos como Tunic, la busqueda de secretos que lleva al final verdadero del juego se puede hacer a tu ritmo, sabiendo que todo está a tu disposición para que lo vayas desgranando poquito a poco y sin añadir frustración. En Void Stranger un paso en falso significa perder horas de juego: no hay botón de deshacer, ni ningún tipo de pista que te guíe por habitaciones que ya te has pasado anteriormente, teniendo que volver a resolverlo todo otra vez. Entiendo que es parte del encanto del juego y que primero vino el sokoban y luego la historia (la propia creadora lo explica así), pero lejos de motivarme, esto me hizo tirar la toalla. Habiendo visto el resto de la historia y de los secretos, me alegro de haberlo dejado de jugar para verlo en vídeo, porque viendo los requisitos para llegar al final sé que me habría amargado la experiencia.

Y vaya experiencia. Que locura de historia, de OST, de gráficos. Si merece la pena quedarse hasta el final, desde luego es por todo eso. Único e irrepetible como ninguno, es una de esas historias que tengo claro que recordaré para siempre.

Me llevo eso y la lección de que un "videojuego"... puede ser solo "video" y no pasa nada... (mejor me voy yendo ya).

Puzzle isn't really my type of genre for a video game. Well I played millions of JRPG, but I'm more focused on the story & characters. But it is a breath of fresh air playing this type of game while paying attention to the lore? There's an actual lore & story in this game? Of course I'm interested.

Yes it's tedious, I can't even playing this game without a guide & watching YouTube video (I know, I sucked). Even after 19 hours of gameplay I still know nothing about the story & just keep focusing on that tiresome puzzles, because turns out, it has multiple storyline. But as I keep playing, time goes really fast. The story was indeed very interesting & well written, probably too good for this type of game. I could dig with the story, but it's still a bit confusing since it's dealing with some philosophical stuff. Imagine you've already got irritated by an annoying puzzles & still have to interpret the lore of this game, 100% I would recommend everybody to play this game.

The light of the stars…

Our memories make it…

Endless.