Void Stranger is a block pushing puzzle game where things start simple and mechanics get layered on top of each other, with obstacles, enemies and systems progressively making things more complex for you to solve each room. It’s also a game with mysterious secrets; layers of meta understandings that you have to gleam by yourself through logic and deduction in order to truly understand what is going on. Pushing everything forward is an intriguing story playing with various game genres that I wish I could’ve gone through. While I was capable of going through the normal block pushing levels, beating the game one time left me with more questions than answers and grander schemes I couldn’t make sense of, so I sadly had to drop it.
The core gameplay loop starts fairly simple; after jumping into a big hole, you get a rod that allows you to pick up tiles and move them around. This allows you to bridge gaps which is a thing you’ll be doing all the time. Pushing boulders is also something you do a lot of; either in order to get to secret treasures or to move on to the next floors. The first floors have few optional objectives, but when they do they are a bit out of the way and can be skipped. Mechanics get introduced very slowly, usually with a floor present to show you how enemies move before you encounter them for real. You start with seven HP, which is a bit of a joke because everything kills you instantly. You can revive if you have collected magical bugs, but once you run out you have to make a choice to eat a strange fruit (giving you infinite retries but altering your game state) or restart the game.
Some of these first stages already look strange; some of them have weird layouts blocked by enemies or the stairway descending to the next level and you wrack your brain thinking if you can do anything. I thought wrongly that I would get some kind of powerup in a new game plus and come back, but I was wrong; you usually can do something with the proper knowledge (which is a kind of new game plus powerup).
Every few floors, you’ll arrive at a spot to rest and get a flashback retelling the story of the main character and how she got there. I really enjoyed these, they utilized some light elements from other game genres like turn based RPGs or even rhythm to tell a story and this is used to great effect of spurring the player on to do more block pushing puzzles. These continue getting more difficult, with enemies that gain more complex patterns, floor tiles that break, floors that require you to kill all enemies or have a trail of shadow clones following you, and more.
After a while I got to the “end” of the game and unlocked a “special brand”, allowing me infinite revives without eating the void fruit. That was sadly the end of the guidance given to me by the game. I had to replay it and figure out its secrets, but I had discovered so little I couldn’t bring myself to redo the whole thing in hopes I could do something differently. I did learn a few tricks, such as the presence of special holes you can jump into, but that didn’t change the game enough. I ultimately looked at some walkthrough (something I never do) but just having the answers fed to me didn’t vibe well, so I just stopped.
Void Stranger is really interesting, touching and powerful. The puzzles are good and satisfying to solve and the narrative is also well executed. I just wish the meta progression and the whole “really learn how things work so you can solve the true mystery of the game” part had been more explicitly laid out and tracked so I would’ve had a chance to complete it all. A shame, but it’s just a testament of how good the game was.
