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.