Play it, love it. dont be ashamed to use guides.
One of the best games of my life. also outragously hard.
Best shared with a friend, to spread the suffering (affectionate)

Void Stranger is the Dark Souls of when you go to the kitchen to get a drink, forget it on your way back, and then have to walk down 400,000 sets of stairs to pick it up again.

This review is going to be a bit more detailed than normal. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the game that require a little detail to properly explain and I figure a lot of people reading these reviews are not looking for a purchase recommendation anyway. Still, any meaningful discovery or plot surprise I'll try and put in a spoiler tag for those that haven't played this game.

The Good:

So let me start with the good, the puzzles. A sign of a good puzzle game is how well it can discover unique concepts and even principals out of its limited set of tools and enemies, and Void Stranger is quick to use its mechanic postulates to develop its block moving theorems. This game frequently digs into the fundamentals of its mechanics and forces you to learn every rule to proceed, and there are even a few cheeky, almost rom hacky puzzles scattered about such as that late puzzle where you need to use the chests to reposition the direction Lillie faces that really do test your knowledge of the game's rules. Great stuff. Now, not every puzzle is great mind you. There are too many puzzles that feel like the same ideas repackaged, and even the new concepts introduced in the very late game don't add as much variety as much as you might think, aside from maybe the upgraded void rod. The mid game in Lillie hard mode is probably the game's peak, before puzzle repetition sets in. That said, the sheer quantity of good puzzles makes me overlook this small issue a bit.

Additionally, what elevates this game to a broader audience isn't the individual room puzzles, but solving the larger mystery of the Void itself. And this is where the game reveals itself as more of a Metroidvania brimming with secrets to discover for the inquiring mind. Items will not just help you solve previous puzzles, they will recontextualize entire rooms, and the whole game itself becomes an elaborate, almost meta-puzzle that rewards those that fully understand the rules of the game. At its best the game makes you feel like someone pulling off some crazy arbitrary code execution through inputs alone, and it is a joy to appreciate the full implications of your powers.

Special note to the art direction as well. The uncanny horror from its limited pixels and palette is something I rarely see in pixel design. It's a rare pixel art game where the art is more than functional. I'm generally forgiving of pixel design in low cost games, but rarely do I think it looks good. For the most part it looks good here.

The Bad - Game Design Flaws:

Now, all of this would elevate the game to at least a minor indie classic. But it's hard not to overlook some design decisions that make the game at times intolerably frustrating. Void Stranger, in order to properly beat it, effectively requires a lot of repetition of previously cleared puzzles in order to solve the game's larger mysteries. For most people this becomes shockingly clear you're required to beat the game once with Gray without voiding out/dying without a locust to reach many of the harder puzzles. And I do think this is a little frustrating because exploring previously cleared puzzles is not very satisfying in of itself, but I can defend it a bit as there is a stressful, rogue-lite appeal to surviving until the end this way.

Or I would defend this anyway if not for the inclusion of Gor. You see this obstacle blocks the path to the stairs late in your run, and unless you have the void sword or achieve some other requirements you will have to warp. And warping consumes all your locusts which function as lives. So what can realistically happen is that you'll warp to a room with a puzzle mechanic you're not familiar with, die because you didn't know the rules, and then lose the whole run...again. Yes you can find the sword, but considering this is otherwise unnecessary until much later and regardless it will trivialize any remaining puzzles, it's I think a poorly balanced inclusion. And there are so many small moments like this where a lot of player time could have been saved by rethinking the implications of a few small design decisions. When people say the game does not respect their time, this is what I start thinking about.

The Bad - Writing:

The other issue is the writing. Good God the writing is bad. Never has there been a better example of media that mistakes lore for storytelling and literary references for depth, and rarely do I see characterization reduced so thoroughly to exposited motives and people yelling out their feelings. The story structure also does the game no favors as the scattered clips and contrived worldbuilding provide no weight to the choices of the characters, rendering contextual relationships effectively meaningless because the world itself is so poorly defined. As a result crudity and cliche fill the Void. Also, this is difficult to prove, but I feel like the game has the weird habit of fetishizing the very existence of female relationships, as if the act of being female somehow imbues magic or meaning to that relationship. It doesn't, it just comes off as a horny, cliched game with nothing to share except its indulgences and references.

Just to be clear, I am not saying there's anything wrong with sex appeal or a game with mostly female characters. Plenty of games can do both and still have something to say. What I am saying is that female characters and sex appeal do not by themselves imbue your story with any meaningful depth.

Overall:

I know I'm getting negative here, so I do want to stress that the game itself is still good. Many of the game's puzzles are wonderful and it is a joy to explore its world. So I still definitely recommend this. It's just this could have been great. Use a guide if you get frustrated by a roadblock and don't invest yourself too much in the writing if it annoys you like it does for me, and maybe you can get the best of the experience without suffering through the nonsense.