Floor renovation game for the WonderSwan. Welcome to Void-Lana, borne from the disappearance of La-Mulana...

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This puzzle game does some REALLY cool things and has a lot of personality. But it breaks a few genre norms which for me make the world not that enjoyable to traverse. The resulting uncertainty also requires a lot of faith from the player. Still, play blind if possible.

I also wish the game had internal tools for taking notes and pictures ala. La-Mulana 2, to stay a fully self-contained experience. Trying to be meta and encourage external tools (e.g. screenshots) isn't something I see as a positive.

The core puzzle solving experience is quite fun and can get very challenging.

Void Stranger's visual themes are distinct from ZeroRanger and the soundtrack has a lot of variety. I think you can see the growth of the dev team in both.

...Don't ask how I know.
(played without external spoilers)

at first i was a bit put off by some of the design decisions - i'm a big fan of "hard puzzle games" (stephen's sausage roll, anything by draknek, etc.), as such, i've been spoiled by quality-of-life features like infinite undo and instant resets. this game doesn't have those, to the detriment of the initial experience - you have to trust that SE are doing something very deliberate here. as it turns out, they are.

to my surprise, i actually see recognize a lot of shmup DNA in the overarching design. this is a puzzle game with a risk/reward mechanic, with multiple loops and esoteric clear conditions. you don't just beat the game by solving all the puzzles, in fact, solving all the puzzles isn't even necessary to beat the game. there is so much lurking beneath the surface that i don't think anyone could confidently mark the game as "completed," but the superficial experience is strong enough that you don't need to go down the rabbit hole to have a good time.

this is the zeroranger of sokoban.

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(vague, minor spoiler below)

an addendum of warning: like zeroranger, this game also has the "deletes your save file" gimmick at certain point(s). in that game, it wove into the narrative and systems of the game in a way that, to me, enhanced the experience, and crucially, the consequences were basically negligible. i'll defend it in ZR, but i'm not here for it this time. back up your save. it's not worth it.

Pretty lukewarm on this, which is unfortunate since Zeroranger is one of my favourite games and I was looking forward to this quite a bit. It definitely has retained some of the strong points of that game, not least the music, which is just as amazing (at least in the levels) and is honestly worth playing the game for by itself, but it’s also brought along some of the weaknesses and exacerbated them. It was clear in Zeroranger that Project Erasure like to indulge in “anime” tropes, which I thought was acceptable there because of the connection between Super Sentai and STGs, and the generally lighthearted tone of Zeroranger also allowed them to indulge in a bit of cheesy anime stuff without really detracting from the overall effect of the game. I don’t think that applies here, the immediate tone of the game is thick and tense, the mechanics engender deliberate, thoughtful movements, and this immediately clashes when you are presented with the corny theatrics of the first dream sequence, full of anime-esque character tropes and pop-culture references and (i’m sorry to be this mean) genuinely terrible writing, littered with colloquialisms and slang expressions and a super schlocky plot with unbelievably saccharine piano pieces playing in the background. It shows its hand far too early and a lot of the intrigue and general interest in where things were going completely evaporated for me from that point. In hindsight I appreciate how minimalist Zeroranger was with its story.

How is Void Stranger as a sokoban then? It’s ok, pretty good, I wasn’t amazed with the solutions and I rarely felt like I had to get truly creative to solve things until a lot later and even then it was rarely satisfying. It’s probably unfair to compare this to Stephen’s Sausage Roll since that’s probably the best sokoban I’ve ever played but almost every puzzle in that game required me to expand my perception of what was possible within the mechanics, which this isn’t nearly as good at. I’m also apprehensive about the lives system of the game. Having extra lives be earned by solving difficult optional puzzles is an excellent idea for a puzzle-roguelike! But when you run out of lives you can either restart from the beginning of the game or accept receiving a narrative “punishment” in exchange for infinite lives and neither of these are interesting. It’s uninteresting to repeat puzzles you already know the solution of, and the “void” mode feels poorly considered: Pretty much all of the tension diffuses when you’re given infinite lives and you never get a rewind ability or a quick-reset ability, so it’s kind of a worst of both worlds situation where you lose the tension of limited lives but don’t get the quality of life options that other infinite-attempt sokoban games give you, which gets annoying in the more complex levels. Sokobans are notoriously persnickety; solutions can often be ruined by one single move being out of order, which is especially relevant in this game as there are a lot of enemy movement cycles to take into account, so losing one of your limited lives and/or having to re-do an entire solution because of something very small can really get frustrating and adds up to that feeling of trial-and-error. Theoretically, everything here is deterministic, so it should be possible to calculate the solution without even moving or risking anything, but in practice I feel it's not common to play this way (I certainly don’t).

The big appeal for a lot of people will be the secrets, which I’m sure will be gradually discovered by the playerbase in weeks to come, and I’m sure some of them will be interesting. Personally, I really don’t care about that stuff, I feel like discovering cryptic secrets without online help is just an exercise in a lot of trial-and-error which is only enjoyed by a certain subset of players that I am not in and I would rather have interesting things presented to me in a structured way (which Zeroranger is excellent at, ironically).

To be honest I should really play more of this but I'm 6 hours in and not really enjoying it. I took a peek at some people further than me and it seems to just be more of what I don't like: More bad anime-esque story, more loops and repetition, so I think I'm just gonna give it up.

Taken at face value, Void Stranger is a ~6-hour sokoban-style puzzle game. And I'd say it's a pretty good one: the central mechanic provides a lot of flexibility in an otherwise perfection-demanding genre; new mechanics are introduced at a constant pace; most levels have optional secondary challenges so you can choose your difficulty somewhat; story cutscenes provide natural breaks between chapters and keep the pace up; and the soundtrack is every bit as good as its predecessor ZeroRanger's. On these qualities alone, I would comfortably consider it worth its asking price.

If all you're looking for is a recommendation, you've got it and you can stop reading. If you want a full review with some minor spoilers and some major snobbery on my part, read on.

ZeroRanger won my heart by being an uncompromising mechanical exploration of a theme: enlightenment. If I were to task Void Stranger with being the same thing, I'd have to call its central theme... "faith". The game is packed with secrets, and if you want to see everything it has to offer, you'll sooner or later run into mechanics that feel too punishing, puzzles that feel impossible, or goals that seem designed to waste your time. I didn't preface this with a review of the surface level alone as a cutesy way of delaying the spoiler content; I did it because I want to stress that the base game is worth playing on its own, and you venture past it at your own peril.

But here is where a little faith pays dividends. Whatever its reputation, Void Stranger's secrets are not actually all that arcane (well, the ones that matter, anyway). An open mind, an open eye, and the mere assumption that there's a lesson hiding in every bit of weirdness you see on your journey is usually all you need to progress. I won't pretend I was perfect at this, or that I didn't end up wasting tons of time because I didn't get something; but what struck me is that every time I did figure out what I'd been missing, I immediately remembered the moment that was supposed to have taught me it.

I don't want to say that anyone who dropped this has a skill issue, or that I'm cooler for my willingness to commit more of my precious life-hours to a video game than they are. I put more faith into it than they did, but that's not a good or bad thing. People put their faith into all kinds of stupid stuff. Still. I don't regret it for a moment.

Place your faith. Embrace the Void.

(and play zeroranger too dammit)

Oh, how deep the rabbit hole goes. Even by the standard of the modern indie puzzle game that is a bit up it's own arse, the depths of Void Stranger's mysteries and secrets are inscruitable and seemingly endless. A full, complete 4-6 hour playthrough of the game where one comes to what seems like a mastery of it's mechanics and rules can also be one that leaves one basically having scratched the surface. I sincerely doubt anyo play of VS will ever see everything it has to offer, and that's kind of amazing. It's an insane strength for the game to have - it really feels like wandering the halls of an abyss you can never really fully see the end of, constantly coming across things that clearly all add up but feel alien and shocking all the same.

It's a game that commands attention. System erasure clearly have a knack for this stuff - amazing music, stark visuals and presentation, huge dedication to tiny moments of unique gamelay, brilliant music - just like Zeroranger, void stranger feels important and major.

In Zeroranger, that presence never really fades. I have a lot of problems with the game, mostly that it's just not a very good shooting game outside of it's major bosses and it ends up feeling a bit too much like cho ren sha x Radiant silvergun fanfiction than it's own thing, but it's relentless pacing, lightness on dialogue and text and exceptional ending sequences pushes it thorugh.

With VS, that presence feels more like a veneer that chips away the more I look.

The real issue is hat I just think the core gameplay is quite poor. I can't say im a sokoban savant but this can't be as good as it gets. I don't think the puzzle structure is that great for one - the difficulty veers absolutely all over the place and gimmicks are largely consigned to their own puzzle "block" - but also I just dont think the core mechanic is very good. The block-sucking staff is neat and occasionally leads to some very creative possibilities but I think more than not it leads to puzzles which are a bit inelegant. You'll spend minutes slowly using the one tedius 3-block technique to cross gaps just to fuck up one input and need to do it again, there's lots of puzzles where the solution feels drawn out even when it's obvious what to do,, and for me at least, i rarely felt accomplished for finding a solution in it. The mechanics are generally the sort of thing that sounds really cool but ultimately ends up more tedius than anythign else.

But maybe the bigger deal is the story. Awesome presentation and framing aside, there's absolute zero meat on the bones which sucks considering it must have 100 times the dialogue of zeroranger, a game who's characters I care a hundred times more about when almost the entirety of their characterisation is in actions and funny cute artwork and boss fights and stuff. I was really ready for a more involved, wordy slower story but it feels like a story from a different dev, its just a complete nothingburger. Thanks to it being a puzzle game with wildly varying difficulty too, the razor sharp pacing of ZR is left well behind and you can concievably go for hours without finding anything of note if you're bad enough.

And that's really what weighs on me. As boundless as VS's depths are, the hooks that drag me into that stuff are not there. I'm reminded, if anything, of the Witness - and VS is nowhere near that bad, but there is just an whiff of that kinda pretentiousness coming through here as a result of the story being so weak - which is more on the presentation being so good, granted.

So yes, it is a marvellous, deep rabbit hole, but I kinda just don't care. I really wish i did.

Few games warrant more than a single playthrough, let alone the 15+ I put into Void Stranger. While the time required for these is shortened to extreme lengths after only a couple, Void Stranger excels in tying its themes of repetitions and cycles into a gameplay loop of uncovering the secrets of the Void—more often than not in front of the player's face the entire time—while delving into a greater narrative at hand, whose power is built into its intentional melodrama and required piecing together of its disparate sequencing. No puzzle game since The Witness and Baba is You has reached a depth in experience and discovery that System Erasure have developed here, and it is by no small margin (despite my love for Resident Evil 4) that Void Stranger is (until Alan Wake II's release) 2023's game of the year.

Completed.
Playtime: 100 Hours

Insane puzzle game.

I refuse to elaborate why, because this game shines in the mystery of discovering and enjoying everything it has to offer on your own, in every possible aspect the game can offer.

It's not a game for everyone, but, if you are a kind of player who cares about creative and unique games made with heart to play, you'll find a special game here and a special work of art too.Kino.
Must play.

Very hard game, be careful.

Good luck if you want to enter into the void.

The adventure of life never ends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrT1Q422liE

It is very difficult to say anything meaningful about Void Stranger without completely spoiling the experience.

I can at least give you this: Void Stranger does many incredible things that only video games can, and it does them more adeptly than anything else I have ever played.

It is among the very best of its medium.

In a month of playing Baldur's Gate, Armored Core 6, and whatever else, this MissingNo-core puzzler held my attention the most. It was brought to my attention by a post on /v/ that simply read "Puzzlekino or Voidslop?" and for whatever reason I bought it without investigating further.

I don't feel much of a desire to write an in-depth review here, so just know that the puzzle gameplay remains intriguing all the way through to the end, the game's score is fantastic, and the "more than meets the eye" subversive elements of the game are hidden well enough to not undercut themselves in a pitfall so many would-be-clever devs fall into. A game well worth playing.

Puzzlekino.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

Void Stranger is a 2D sokoban-style puzzle game. But maybe it isn't? But it is, right? Maybe the real puzzle all along is the puzzle of the game itself? Only the Void can answer that...

This game does a lot of things that I've only seen a few other games attempt, and it pulls them off dangerously well. It's an almost euphoric feeling to solve the seemingly unsolvable after hours of theory-crafting and coming to a greater mechanical understanding. Which isn't for everyone, but it IS for me - wow.

Absolutely play blind, and reach for the limits of your faith.

I shrieked when I learned the ZeroRanger team had a new game, and it's been out for three days, and I managed to learn nothing about it. It's so rare to be surprised like that, to just hear "hey the people behind that shit you loved did it again." Hey! They did it again!

The appeal of ZeroRanger wasn't rawly as a shootemup, though it was a good one of those. Rather, the appeal was in the edges of it, in how it expressed ideas and concepts, how it subverted those concepts, and what it expected of you in return. They have done it again, and in a completely different way than last time. Must play.

Never before have I cared about a puzzle game, but Void Stranger had that special something to make it click for me. The story that unfolds over the first two "routes" is truly affecting, a beautiful tale of devotion spanning worlds that accomplishes so very much with so very little. You are only shown fragments, brief snippets of moments both pivotal and mundane, left to mull them over as you descend ever further into The Void, solving sokoban screen after sokoban screen. And somehow I cannot imagine a more effective means of conveying the story; sparse as the text may be, every word counts, and these routes achieve lofty emotional heights.

The subsequent routes are less inspired, veering into more well-trodden ground, but they too have moments of brilliance. Despite generally negative experience with the puzzle genre in the past, I found myself enraptured enough with Void Stranger to explore its every crevice and see all that it had to offer. That I found myself so engrossed with a game of a genre I previously had not cared for says to me that there is something noteworthy about Void Stranger, that it transcends the limits of its world. Any reservations I might have about it are surely trifling in the face of that understanding.

As an aside, many elements of Void Stranger's narrative are quite similar to Labyrinth of Galleria; I can recommend VS to fans of Galleria, and vice versa.

Easily the best puzzle game I've ever played, it's not even close.

The sound design and OST are beautiful. The intro left a really strong impression, the sound that plays when you pick up the staff sets an ominous tone for the rest of the game as hype music slowly kicks in to egg you on.

The story is intriguing and the characters are a lot of fun. The story itself feels like another puzzle to put together, even after finishing I feel like I barely understand how it fits together. The dialogue can be a little stiff sometimes, not sure if that's just a translation issue though.

The game is absolutely loaded with content. I got about 40 hours out of it and I feel like there's still plenty of things I haven't discovered. The game is filled to the brim with secrets. My friends and I kept accidentally spoiling eachother, it's so easy to stumble onto some crazy shit.

Oh and I guess the puzzles are cool too.

The puzzles+OST are good but I am not patient or observant enough (I am diagnosed with ADHD lmao), for the secret hunting so I didn't enjoy that aspect and had to look up things which soured the experience for me. I didn't enjoy the repetitive nature of the game either.

I liked the story in NG, NG+, NG++, but the true ending raises more questions than answers, and the story in general didn't feel very integrated with the gameplay depending on how you played, whereas ZeroRanger did that perfectly.

In my opinion, the bullshit parts of ZeroRanger (like the save deleting at the end) are amplified in this game. Keep your save backed up at all times, just in case a mistake sets your progress back by a lot. Also note down things and take screenshots.

It's probably a 10/10 for the very niche group of people that:
1) enjoy puzzles
2) aren't impulsive and/or inattentive
3) are very good at thinking out of the box
4) can tolerate or even like repeating the same levels
5) enjoy anime tropes

But anyone else is probably going to have a very mixed experience with some high highs and some miserable lows

EDIT: Raised the score bc I can't get it out of my head