Still playing Void Stranger. It's a fun puzzle game with some neat ideas but it's padded to heck and kind of wastes your time. The main problem is that you need to keep redoing the same puzzles over and over again. First you have limited lives and if you run out you need to either restart or enter an infinite live mode (Void mode) where you can't find the collectibles. Figuring out how to solve the puzzles and get the collectible is part of the fun. So for my first playthrough I didn't use Void mode at all (I did use it during hard mode after my second restart, because hard mode is really hard) opting to keep the tension of limited lives, but this meant that I played through large parts of the game 3-4 times until getting the first ending. This sucks because doing a puzzle you've already solved and know the answer to is just busywork, especially since eventually you can figure out how to unlock certain items that make the puzzles a joke (I did make sure I solved every puzzle and got the collectible without using them once), and going through rooms at that point is pure wasted time. Sure it only takes 10 seconds to get through most rooms, but there's over 200 floors and while there are shortcuts and ways to skip to different parts of the dungeon they aren't very convenient and you might not figure out some of them until you've played through the game many times. To make this worse is that there is actually quite a lot of stuff hidden throughout the game that you will need to come back to once you've gotten hints later on so you will find yourself going through the same puzzles over and over again trying to put the pieces of the meta puzzles together. I've skipped through the puzzles so many times at this point that I could do it in my sleep.
Also annoying is that while those items I mentioned before are a fantastic time saver, to use them you need to draw little symbols on a 6x6 grid before each run... twice... for each item. It's so annoying, especially since the game has the symbols you've unlocked sitting right there on the screen. JUST LET ME SELECT THE ONES I WANT AND LET ME MOVE ON ALREADY. Actually drawing it myself wasn't interesting in any way the first time and is just a pure waste of time at the 10th. Oh I also hate that the game closes itself whenever you rest at a tree. Like, I'm going to keep playing, stop making me boot up the game. It didn't add anything to the experience when One Shot did it and it doesn't add anything here.
Another problem is some of the meta puzzles are not all that good. Figuring out the brands and how to draw them on special floors itself is a fantastic idea and really reminds me of Tunic as an excellent way of hiding extra puzzles in the world that feels organic and makes you use the game mechanics in clever ways. However, two in particular are really BS. For all brands you are supposed to look at a mural and write down/screenshot what you see, but 3 of them are broken and require puzzle solving to figure out what is supposed to be shown. One is ok, and shows 1s and 0s in the broken area and that's simple enough to figure out, but the other two are nonsense. One shows you a different half of the image depending on what side of the mural you are looking at. I can't even describe how dumb and illogical this is. To be clear this is a 2D grid based game, and the mural is 2 grids wide. Every other mural in the game shows the exact same thing on both sides because why the heck wouldn't it?! Just look at this image It's shown in two different colors schemes for clarity's sake, I guess, but it would be one color if you were playing the game. It doesn't even make sense, if you look at the left side of the mural you see the entire mural but the hole is on the right, and if you look at the right side of the mural you see the entire mural but the hole is on the left. Why does the hole move depending on which side you examine?! I didn't even think to do this, because why would I?
The other problem mural doesn't sound that bad. You get some pretty decent hints about it. You get told something about a tail connecting the brand and a bunch of the levels you go through afterward have a tail running through them. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you are supposed to fit them together in some way. So I took a screenshot of all the levels in that area and sat down in paint to fit them together. An hour later I'm still trying to put them together because THEY DON'T ALL FIT TOGETHER. I know I'm on the right track because some of them clearly do fit, but I end up with big gaps, and I don't end up with enough together to really be sure I'm on the right track or not. So this is the solution. I'd like to say that if the hints were more clear I would definitely have figured it out, but honestly I'm not sure. Some of the parts I was sure I had pieced together and was sure had to be correct because they fit so well ended up being wrong. This definitely needed some additional design work to make sure that they only look right going together one way and some clearer hinting. Honestly I didn't even really get that I was supposed to be assembling them on a 6x6 grid, though I probably should have assumed that. I was just hoping that after I joined everything together something would make sense, because I wasn't sure how exactly how the images were going to reveal the brand. To make it worse, the solution is actually the inverse of what you need to enter, the sections with the snake depict the gaps in the floor. I spent probably 15 minutes trying to enter it until I finally figured that out. So yeah, bad puzzle.
The last thing I have to complain about is that I'm just really not that into the story. I don't like any of the characters, most of them are forgettable (which is bad because some puzzle solutions revolve around the Void Lords, but I have a lot of trouble keeping them straight) and some are just straight up unlikable. The princess in particular is just awful. She's so bad that even after going through 250 floors of puzzles and monsters specifically to save her, her guardian, Grey, decides to instead save her week old bastard fetus who's father was an insane murderer that tried to kill everyone she ever loved. WHY DOES GREY CHOOSE THE FETUS? Honestly, I just don't understand it in the slightest. And then she gets sent back to the modern day instead of her Medieval castle? I don't know. Also, it's kind of weird how 95% of the characters in the game are female. It's so skewed it feels like the author is either pushing an agenda or a fetish or something. The pixel art is also generally pretty nice, but some of the character expressions just look bad. Like a character will do a shocked face or something where the eyes suddenly become dots, and it just looks bad.
When I'm finding new content the game is definitely a lot of fun, and it has a lot of creativity and clever use of mechanics, but I don't think it's going to dethrone Baba Is You from my top spot of puzzle game that just keeps getting deeper and more clever the longer you play it. I still have a bunch of things to do, though, even after getting 3 endings, so I think I'm going to still be playing this for a while longer.
Also annoying is that while those items I mentioned before are a fantastic time saver, to use them you need to draw little symbols on a 6x6 grid before each run... twice... for each item. It's so annoying, especially since the game has the symbols you've unlocked sitting right there on the screen. JUST LET ME SELECT THE ONES I WANT AND LET ME MOVE ON ALREADY. Actually drawing it myself wasn't interesting in any way the first time and is just a pure waste of time at the 10th. Oh I also hate that the game closes itself whenever you rest at a tree. Like, I'm going to keep playing, stop making me boot up the game. It didn't add anything to the experience when One Shot did it and it doesn't add anything here.
Another problem is some of the meta puzzles are not all that good. Figuring out the brands and how to draw them on special floors itself is a fantastic idea and really reminds me of Tunic as an excellent way of hiding extra puzzles in the world that feels organic and makes you use the game mechanics in clever ways. However, two in particular are really BS. For all brands you are supposed to look at a mural and write down/screenshot what you see, but 3 of them are broken and require puzzle solving to figure out what is supposed to be shown. One is ok, and shows 1s and 0s in the broken area and that's simple enough to figure out, but the other two are nonsense. One shows you a different half of the image depending on what side of the mural you are looking at. I can't even describe how dumb and illogical this is. To be clear this is a 2D grid based game, and the mural is 2 grids wide. Every other mural in the game shows the exact same thing on both sides because why the heck wouldn't it?! Just look at this image It's shown in two different colors schemes for clarity's sake, I guess, but it would be one color if you were playing the game. It doesn't even make sense, if you look at the left side of the mural you see the entire mural but the hole is on the right, and if you look at the right side of the mural you see the entire mural but the hole is on the left. Why does the hole move depending on which side you examine?! I didn't even think to do this, because why would I?
The other problem mural doesn't sound that bad. You get some pretty decent hints about it. You get told something about a tail connecting the brand and a bunch of the levels you go through afterward have a tail running through them. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you are supposed to fit them together in some way. So I took a screenshot of all the levels in that area and sat down in paint to fit them together. An hour later I'm still trying to put them together because THEY DON'T ALL FIT TOGETHER. I know I'm on the right track because some of them clearly do fit, but I end up with big gaps, and I don't end up with enough together to really be sure I'm on the right track or not. So this is the solution. I'd like to say that if the hints were more clear I would definitely have figured it out, but honestly I'm not sure. Some of the parts I was sure I had pieced together and was sure had to be correct because they fit so well ended up being wrong. This definitely needed some additional design work to make sure that they only look right going together one way and some clearer hinting. Honestly I didn't even really get that I was supposed to be assembling them on a 6x6 grid, though I probably should have assumed that. I was just hoping that after I joined everything together something would make sense, because I wasn't sure how exactly how the images were going to reveal the brand. To make it worse, the solution is actually the inverse of what you need to enter, the sections with the snake depict the gaps in the floor. I spent probably 15 minutes trying to enter it until I finally figured that out. So yeah, bad puzzle.
The last thing I have to complain about is that I'm just really not that into the story. I don't like any of the characters, most of them are forgettable (which is bad because some puzzle solutions revolve around the Void Lords, but I have a lot of trouble keeping them straight) and some are just straight up unlikable. The princess in particular is just awful. She's so bad that even after going through 250 floors of puzzles and monsters specifically to save her, her guardian, Grey, decides to instead save her week old bastard fetus who's father was an insane murderer that tried to kill everyone she ever loved. WHY DOES GREY CHOOSE THE FETUS? Honestly, I just don't understand it in the slightest. And then she gets sent back to the modern day instead of her Medieval castle? I don't know. Also, it's kind of weird how 95% of the characters in the game are female. It's so skewed it feels like the author is either pushing an agenda or a fetish or something. The pixel art is also generally pretty nice, but some of the character expressions just look bad. Like a character will do a shocked face or something where the eyes suddenly become dots, and it just looks bad.
When I'm finding new content the game is definitely a lot of fun, and it has a lot of creativity and clever use of mechanics, but I don't think it's going to dethrone Baba Is You from my top spot of puzzle game that just keeps getting deeper and more clever the longer you play it. I still have a bunch of things to do, though, even after getting 3 endings, so I think I'm going to still be playing this for a while longer.
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