void stranger spoilers
I just about fucking cried when this game finally gave me a clear actionable hint, and then it was vague as hell on whether or not I’d actually completed it and we had to spend like an hour hashing out whether or not I’d actually broken all the seals
this is a logistically impressive puzzle, in that it definitely did give me all the information in lore, throughout an entire playthrough
but it revolves around remembering sixteen different tiny one-off pieces of dialogue across some twenty hours of gameplay across two weeks, which is a fucking absurd demand on someone’s brain. I was taking thorough screenshots and notes and I still missed a couple critical details
unfortunately, if you miss some tiny detail, the game’s only failure mode is “go find it. not sure where? back to floor one, dipshit! play the entire game again!”
I’m on loop SIX of this fucking game and if it demands another, I’m uninstalling it and removing it from my Steam library
void stranger spoilers
rue, leading me gently to a conclusion, excitedly awaiting my aha moment: “so you understand what this means now, right?”
me, irritated and despairing: “yes, but no part of this gets me any closer to my goal of beating the game. it’s just another god damned dead end and I wasted two more fucking hours getting here”
void stranger spoilers
the question I ask Rue most is “okay, can I actually do anything here”
is there any point to me scouring this screen for detail, or am I going to be wasting my time. if I leave, am I going to have to waste another half-hour manipulating the game to get back here because there’s something I missed.
void stranger spoilers
my absolute favorite is that my solution to one of the puzzles I looked at last night is
- wrong, based on literally a single line of dialogue in the entire third loop
- but the game lets you go through the entire super-hard process
- and if you do, it rewards you with a dumb joke and a softlock
void stranger spoilers
@gardevoir Watching both of your experiences with the game has been instructive, because I did one loop unspoiled, guessed at what was going on, looked it up, and bounced to watch others play through.
I love Void Stranger conceptually and am glad it exists. It's a game that wants desperately for you to learn its language. I love that, hate that, and wish they'd chosen to make the cost of failure cheap before discovering hidden fun stuff that makes it better.
void stranger spoilers
@Goldkin I will absolutely check these out! that sounds much, much more pleasant lmfao
void stranger spoilers
@Goldkin god yes you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head here
the cost of failure is so high! you can’t just go back, you have to [data expunged] and then [data expunged] just to get anywhere, and half the time even that still leaves you 20 floors to replay!
there are so many dead ends and it’s not even clear whether what you’re looking at is a dead end. just checking some whether some tiny detail changed and whether or not you’ve made any progress turns into a whole production of doing three different things just to get around
I really am glad it exists and I think my Steam review would be “you will probably love this game if you like La Mulana, but I utterly hated playing it. a cruel game with massive design flaws that loves wasting your time. Recommended”
void stranger spoilers
@gardevoir Once y'all finish it, if you both haven't tried the Colorgrave games yet, I sort of emphatically recommend them.
It's the same sort of layered mystery that wants you to learn its language, but: failure is much cheaper, the game trades self awareness for letting you take the secrets at your own pace, it's warmer and more vibrant instead of leaning on horror and liminality, and the lore is about as deep (gods, do they have a story to tell).