whitemithrandir
Erudite
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2004
- Messages
- 1,116
I'm one of those people who impulsively pick up games on steam based on screenshots, and after playing one such purchase, The Void, I feel compelled to tell you gentlefolks about it with the following heartfelt review of the game. The Void, in so far as design and innovation is concerned, is truly a very, very unique game and represents the sort of creativity that the gaming industry at large has apparently long abandoned.
Firstly, it's not a particularly *good* game. There are some gameplay mechanics that are deeply, deeply broken and a few other unforgivable quirks that show a distinct lack of polish (or a distiinct surplus of vodka for the design team). But the faults, though there, are completely overshadowed by the things that the game does right. Orginiality and style can forgive an awful lot, and The Void has these two qualities in droves.
I'm not even sure if I can tag a genre on to The Void. The best I can do is survival-horror-RTS-First-Person-RPG, with elements of turn-based gameplay. Many games claim to put the player into a completely alien world where he must use his wits to survive, but few of these games actually follow up on that claim. Games like Silent Hill and Dead Space and even Penumbra puts the player into a world with rules and physics that behave in a logical fashion. For example, bullets tend to travel in a straight line, gravity tends to suck things down, and so on and so forth. Such mundane trivialities are not for The Void. The Void truly and utterly dumps you into a completely alien world, bids you "good luck", and then watches gleefully as you bumble into one death after another.
The world of The Void has intricate rules - many of these are very vital to your survival, but no one will tell you these rules. You, the player, have to figure them out and piece together the clues gained through completely inane dialogue and heaps upon heaps of trials and errors. Most such games will include some background in the manual. Not The Void. In fact, The Void's manual is completely fucking useless (probably because it's poorly translated from Russian). It's filled with either obvious common sense (W A S D to move) or completely inexplicable drivel (a comprehensive list of glyphs). The Void is not an easy game. In addition to exploring the world, like many adventure games have you do, The Void requires that you also explore the game's mechanics, or lose horribly.
Now then, on to the premise. Believe it or not, it's actually difficult to describe the premise without spoiling vital gameplay hints, but I'll try my best. You've died and gone to The Void, which is pretty much your own little pocket plane of purgatory. The first thing you'll find is that the void is utterly bland and colorless. Color in The Void is the source of life, and the most precious commodity in the game. If you lose your color in The Void, you suffer oblivion. You store color inside one of your hearts. You start out with one such heart, and as you progress through the game, you'll gain additional hearts. Color that's injected into your heart will slowly leak out overtime into your palette, and you can only use color in your palette that's been transformed by your heart. If your heart(s) run dry of color, you lose.
You use color for everything in this game. You can cast "spells" by dipping your cursor in a particular color and drawing glyphs on the screen. You can attack enemies by doing the same and "flicking" your color drenched cursor at enemies. You can drop blobs of color on the ground to distract enemies you don't want to engage, or to lure other denizens of The Void to you so you can suck up their color. The possibilities are endless, but the amount of color in the world is not.
Color, as you'll find out, is pretty scarce, and since you're bleeding color every second you're in the game, it behooves you to gain color as fast as you can. There are several ways of doing this. You can pick up weeds of various colors dotted around the world, mine colors with glyphs, suck them out from the corpses of your enemies, or grow them on trees. In early game, you'll learn to rely on starting "gardens" of colors. Whenever you see a dead tree, you can "donate" some of your precious color to revive it back to life. After that, the tree will give back a small percentage of your donated color back to you every turn. The more color you give, the more you receive, but it's easy to give too much too quickly, and end up losing the game.
There are also characters in the game in the form of two factions - the brothers and the sisters. These are the keepers of The Void, and its citizens. The two factions have a fairly complex and inscrutible relationship, but the gist of it boils down to which faction you want to align yourself with. It's not much of a choice, though, seeing as how the Sisters are hot, nubile, and often naked girls, and the Brothers are hulking mechanical beasts with blades jutting from their flesh. Anyway, the goal of the game is to either liberate the sisters with color so they can take over The Void, or kill them all, so the Brothers can rule unopposed. There are supposedly more than two endings, though, so I'm guessing there's a middle ground somewhere.
Visually, the game is absolutely STUNNING. The graphics aren't very intensive or hardcore, but the sparse use of color in a black and white world really brings out the contrast. Seeing a dead tree blossom with fiery color is one of the most impressive graphical feats I've seen in a game. Suffice to say, the visuals are adequate for the gameplay, and the art direction is phenonmenal.
Now then, like I said before, there are some fundamental gameplay issues that are hard to overlook. Glyph recognition is one of them. You'll have to draw the glyphs almost exactly as depicted, or the color you've spent drawing them is wasted to no effect. The faster you draw the glyph, the less color you consume, so maybe this is a balance decision, with more complex glyphs requiring more color, but it can get annoying very quickly. Another problem is the lack of a difficulty curve. There's only one difficulty, and it's smash-your-head-against-the-wall-nightmare-mode. It's fine if you enjoy a good challenge, which I do, but I can see how the learning curve might turn some people off. Another thing about the game is that there's a turn limit. Once the turn limit ends, the game ends, and the ending is determined by how you spent those turns. Once again, I see nothing wrong with this mechanic, but I can see how some people might grow to hate it. There literally could exist a point of no return in the game where you've expended so much resource so fast, that's it's impossible to continue the game (if you want a "good" ending) without completely restarting. And the worst part is, there's no way to tell you're in this fatal condition until there are only a few turns left in the game. So be prepared to do a good deal of save/loading.
But in the end, The Void is a fantastic game. Its selling point is innovation and uniqueness, and it does that very well. If you're looking for a breath of fresh air and an utterly alien yet beautiful world to immerse yourself, The Void is for you.
Firstly, it's not a particularly *good* game. There are some gameplay mechanics that are deeply, deeply broken and a few other unforgivable quirks that show a distinct lack of polish (or a distiinct surplus of vodka for the design team). But the faults, though there, are completely overshadowed by the things that the game does right. Orginiality and style can forgive an awful lot, and The Void has these two qualities in droves.
I'm not even sure if I can tag a genre on to The Void. The best I can do is survival-horror-RTS-First-Person-RPG, with elements of turn-based gameplay. Many games claim to put the player into a completely alien world where he must use his wits to survive, but few of these games actually follow up on that claim. Games like Silent Hill and Dead Space and even Penumbra puts the player into a world with rules and physics that behave in a logical fashion. For example, bullets tend to travel in a straight line, gravity tends to suck things down, and so on and so forth. Such mundane trivialities are not for The Void. The Void truly and utterly dumps you into a completely alien world, bids you "good luck", and then watches gleefully as you bumble into one death after another.
The world of The Void has intricate rules - many of these are very vital to your survival, but no one will tell you these rules. You, the player, have to figure them out and piece together the clues gained through completely inane dialogue and heaps upon heaps of trials and errors. Most such games will include some background in the manual. Not The Void. In fact, The Void's manual is completely fucking useless (probably because it's poorly translated from Russian). It's filled with either obvious common sense (W A S D to move) or completely inexplicable drivel (a comprehensive list of glyphs). The Void is not an easy game. In addition to exploring the world, like many adventure games have you do, The Void requires that you also explore the game's mechanics, or lose horribly.
Now then, on to the premise. Believe it or not, it's actually difficult to describe the premise without spoiling vital gameplay hints, but I'll try my best. You've died and gone to The Void, which is pretty much your own little pocket plane of purgatory. The first thing you'll find is that the void is utterly bland and colorless. Color in The Void is the source of life, and the most precious commodity in the game. If you lose your color in The Void, you suffer oblivion. You store color inside one of your hearts. You start out with one such heart, and as you progress through the game, you'll gain additional hearts. Color that's injected into your heart will slowly leak out overtime into your palette, and you can only use color in your palette that's been transformed by your heart. If your heart(s) run dry of color, you lose.
You use color for everything in this game. You can cast "spells" by dipping your cursor in a particular color and drawing glyphs on the screen. You can attack enemies by doing the same and "flicking" your color drenched cursor at enemies. You can drop blobs of color on the ground to distract enemies you don't want to engage, or to lure other denizens of The Void to you so you can suck up their color. The possibilities are endless, but the amount of color in the world is not.
Color, as you'll find out, is pretty scarce, and since you're bleeding color every second you're in the game, it behooves you to gain color as fast as you can. There are several ways of doing this. You can pick up weeds of various colors dotted around the world, mine colors with glyphs, suck them out from the corpses of your enemies, or grow them on trees. In early game, you'll learn to rely on starting "gardens" of colors. Whenever you see a dead tree, you can "donate" some of your precious color to revive it back to life. After that, the tree will give back a small percentage of your donated color back to you every turn. The more color you give, the more you receive, but it's easy to give too much too quickly, and end up losing the game.
There are also characters in the game in the form of two factions - the brothers and the sisters. These are the keepers of The Void, and its citizens. The two factions have a fairly complex and inscrutible relationship, but the gist of it boils down to which faction you want to align yourself with. It's not much of a choice, though, seeing as how the Sisters are hot, nubile, and often naked girls, and the Brothers are hulking mechanical beasts with blades jutting from their flesh. Anyway, the goal of the game is to either liberate the sisters with color so they can take over The Void, or kill them all, so the Brothers can rule unopposed. There are supposedly more than two endings, though, so I'm guessing there's a middle ground somewhere.
Visually, the game is absolutely STUNNING. The graphics aren't very intensive or hardcore, but the sparse use of color in a black and white world really brings out the contrast. Seeing a dead tree blossom with fiery color is one of the most impressive graphical feats I've seen in a game. Suffice to say, the visuals are adequate for the gameplay, and the art direction is phenonmenal.
Now then, like I said before, there are some fundamental gameplay issues that are hard to overlook. Glyph recognition is one of them. You'll have to draw the glyphs almost exactly as depicted, or the color you've spent drawing them is wasted to no effect. The faster you draw the glyph, the less color you consume, so maybe this is a balance decision, with more complex glyphs requiring more color, but it can get annoying very quickly. Another problem is the lack of a difficulty curve. There's only one difficulty, and it's smash-your-head-against-the-wall-nightmare-mode. It's fine if you enjoy a good challenge, which I do, but I can see how the learning curve might turn some people off. Another thing about the game is that there's a turn limit. Once the turn limit ends, the game ends, and the ending is determined by how you spent those turns. Once again, I see nothing wrong with this mechanic, but I can see how some people might grow to hate it. There literally could exist a point of no return in the game where you've expended so much resource so fast, that's it's impossible to continue the game (if you want a "good" ending) without completely restarting. And the worst part is, there's no way to tell you're in this fatal condition until there are only a few turns left in the game. So be prepared to do a good deal of save/loading.
But in the end, The Void is a fantastic game. Its selling point is innovation and uniqueness, and it does that very well. If you're looking for a breath of fresh air and an utterly alien yet beautiful world to immerse yourself, The Void is for you.