Void Stranger has some interesting elements going for it. There’s a lot of content with its several hundred puzzles and some neat mechanics behind them that help the game avoid getting stale too quickly, while at the same time the uncomfortable atmosphere and relatively subdued story elements create a secondary motivation to continue and learn more. For the first several hours I enjoyed my time and had a lot of genuine investment in progressing further, figuring out some of the game’s more hidden elements, and just enjoying the vibe. But that was not to last. The further I progressed the less the game seemed to reward me with a continuation of the elements that initially made it good but instead started to veer off in stranger directions that undermined much of what I enjoyed earlier. I can definitely see why some people really love this game and spend so much time on it, but I just can’t bring myself to feel the same way when faced with all of its drawbacks.

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To start with the gameplay itself, Void Stranger is a mix of Sokoban-style puzzles that you progress through in a linear order and various hidden mechanics that you’ll gradually learn while playing which will unlock secrets, shortcuts, new mechanics, and other miscellaneous bonuses. The Sokoban puzzles are largely fine, though they definitely aim more for quantity than quality with the sheer number of them adding a lot of playtime which didn’t ultimately serve the more interesting aspects of the game. You have your basic grid-based movement involving walking around, pushing obstacles, avoiding enemies, and interacting with the floor using a rod which can pick up and move pieces of the environment elsewhere. There are some good puzzles here that can be really challenging, but most end up being pretty easy. The lack of an undo button is quite grating though as even the relatively easy puzzles might require a fair bit of forward planning or can be easy to softlock with one bad move.

The more interesting side of Void Stranger’s gameplay lies in its secrets. While you can progress normally by solving each puzzle and moving to the next floor, there are several areas where you can use some of the game’s more unconventional mechanics to unlock a secret route instead. Some of these secrets are extremely impactful (some of which even unlock new abilities which can circumvent many of the puzzles and are used for finding even more secrets elsewhere) though a lot are also just small bonuses or bits of lore which don't have that much going for them unless you’re extremely invested.

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On their own, the puzzles wouldn’t be enough to sustain Void Stranger all the way until the end. But combined with its story and lore the cult popularity it has begins to make much more sense. You start the game with very little information about anything; who you are, why you’re here, what the void is, etc. As you progress throughout the game you’ll reach levels which don’t contain any puzzles and instead just give you a spot to rest and get a flashback of what led you here. On your first run through the game you’ll get the general backstory behind what led your character to enter the void and go through everything, after which you’ll either get a bad ending (if you died without enough locusts to revive) or a continuation of the story with some major plot reveals and unlocking a pseudo hard mode with revamped puzzles and some more story content.

It's at this point where the game began to lose my interest. The new puzzles, while much harder, didn’t have anything new in terms of mechanics, just additional constraints on the puzzles I had already played. And with some of the secrets unlocked during the first route, it was possible to trivialize a large number of them. The Sokoban puzzles went from being a fine part of the game (though one I was hardly enthusiastic about) to one I outright dreaded doing more or but still pushed through for the story. And then topping it off even more there’s a 3rd route after the hard mode that does the exact same thing again but on one specific floor there’s a passage to a hidden area with extra difficult puzzles which unlocks a bit of story/lore which is almost completely irrelevant to everything else in the story.

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For much of the game’s early runtime the story is what pushed the experience from being one I tolerated to one I was actively interested in. However even this took a steep dive as the game progressed. You begin the game as Lady Grey, essentially an attendant to Princess Lily in some medieval Kingdom. After a bunch of crazy ♥♥♥♥ happens Lily sells her soul to the void to save Grey’s life, followed by Grey entering the void to try and rescue her in return. Cue the events of the game itself and once you reach the deepest layer you encounter those who rule over the void, they offer you the choice to bring a soul back with you, and reveal that Lily is pregnant and that since only one soul could be taken back Grey could only choose one or the other. She chooses the unborn child and raises it as her own after leaving the void with the intent to raise her to be strong so that she may one day enter the void and rescue her own mother. You the play the hard mode as the daughter, Lillie, and get background details about her life growing up, relationship with Grey, and other details that are important to her personal story but don’t really provide much in understanding the overarching story and lore of the void which is what was actually of interest to me.

And then you can go one of two ways. Either you play the 3rd route which doesn’t really give you any meaningful new info and barely any new puzzles (though they are the hardest in the game) or you find enough secrets to figure out how to get a very important item which unlocks the true ending. The true ending finally killed any interest I had in the game, finally ‘explaining’ the void with such a stupid result that it retroactively hurt the rest of the game while still not being comprehensive because you need to also know the lore from Zero Ranger, the other game made by the same devs.

In either case, the game takes forever to reach a natural endpoint, by which point it has long burnt through anything interesting it had going for it whether in terms of game mechanics or story. My enjoyment peaked around the end of the first route then gradually declined the rest of the way through until I was pretty thoroughly sick of it by the time the game was over.

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I can see why some people like this game, but it definitely fits the criteria of a cult classic where you have to be a very specific kind of person to enjoy it. And unfortunately I wasn’t the right target here. The best I can say is that I'd give Void Stranger a very conditional recommendation so long as you enjoy cryptic and often unclear puzzles, finding secrets, and care more about the vibes of a story than anything more concrete like direction or plot progression. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother playing.

“ ⠊⠀⠇⠕⠧⠑⠀⠽⠕⠥”
-Gray

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Void Stranger is one of those games that are so unique and inimitable you can’t help but be drawn to it.

Sokoban game with retro graphics that will put your brain to work in a lot more ways that you’ll think.

It’s a sokoban!
And if you don’t know what a Sokoban is, it’s a puzzle game where you push stuff around to solve stuff, often not limited by time where your movement is often both tile-based and advances you exactly one time for each input.

Void Stranger is no different, what is different is the level of out-of-the-box thinking that it will have you do.
Sure you can complete various parts of it by playing in a traditional way but the game asks you to delve deeper and be observant.

A woman makes her way though a strange mazelike structure in search for something that may be lying at the bottom of it.

And while that’s the first thing that you can gather from what you’re playing, the story itself is mostly told through flashbacks spaced by 30 or so puzzles each.
I say mostly because there is also an underlying plot you will discover if you do your homework and

How many times do we see something that may have a hidden meaning in a game and say to ourselves “Nah the developer/s certainly didn’t think about it this way” before dismissing it?

This game feels the total opposite of that feel, where everything out of the ordinary should be noted because it can be used someway.

I’m also a sucker for retro aesthetic, and here done well too not like the WAY too many games that try to emulate retro stuff by making things look ugly on purpose instead it’s achieved through limiting itself to a 4-color palette and a 224x144 pixel resolution, and boy did Eboshidori cook.

Puzzles are cool the first way around, but asking the player to go through them at least 5 times without adding anything new to them (except for one specific path that makes them unbearably hard) gets pretty boring quite fast.

The first 2/3 of the story while not being groundbreaking is incredibly well told, while the last third IS indeed groundbreaking but introduced into the plot in the worst way possible making it feel straight out of a completely different game which doesn’t mesh with what you’ve done for the past 30 hours.

The extra content from engaging with the game’s most esoteric stuff that permeates the whole experience reduces itself to just a few side-rooms and an optional dungeon when you finished almost everything else.

The game has a “true” end but getting there sometimes require such leaps in logic that the internet as a whole struggled for at least a month of bashing their collective heads through brick walls just to get there, so don’t be ashamed to use a guide if you’re at “that” part.

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Great game, lots of content, bogged down by a superfluous last act that introduces itself with no finesse and changes everything that has been established so cleverly up until that point and repeating already solved puzzles ad nauseum.

I originally played this the day it came out but hit my head against a wall in the later section of the game and only more than two years later decided to take another crack at it, and finally managed to do it.

Thoroughly recommended, great value for the price even if not on discount!

META