Post Void is frustratingly close to being great. Incredible art style, madcap speed and gameplay loop with fantastic base kinesthetic design, and a awesome surreal tone. I like it. It's quite fun, its weird, its fast paced and the presentation is top drawer. Its over with in 10 minutes for a complete run, which I also think is great. Proper rush of blood to the head sort of thing.

Yet, it annoys me. It's a very, very good game that annoys me that it makes what I feel are such blatant errors that prevent it from being great, and those errors claw in on me more and more the more i play.

Maybe the most obvious of these is the weird verticality in the level design from the midpoint onwards. I understand the game is meant to be disorienting, but the verticality becomes increasingly annoying and will occasionally just kill the pace when you find yourself a bit lost. It's a game that's already too easy to turn yourself around in if you spin too much in a fight - and it's annoying. I really barely understand why this game needs a jump button at all, it feels antithetical to everything else going on and muddles the cool "hotel floor" feeling of the levels.

Maybe my biggest issue though is the music. I think it sucks. Compared to such extremely surreal atmosphere the main, and only theme sounds like something i'd hear on Nickelodeon and the main guitar sounds awful, and there only being one theme gets incredibly repetitive on repeat runs. I am aware that there is a semi-official soundtrack on spotify full of music that the devs couldn't license. This game has a publisher now and has sold somewhere in the region hundreds of thousands - please license like, three of these tracks, they're actually good. The soundtrck of post void feels like its almost integral to the experience and right now it takes away from it in my books.

Oh, and there's remarkably half-baked roguelike mechanics that add absolutely nothing.

And the thing is, aside from that, I think the game is basically spot-on. Super fast, intense shooting with incredible visuals thats over in a flash. Which makes the cracks in such garish wallpaper stand out.

Its also worth mentioning this game's pathetic excuse for an accessibiity mode which is more of hazard than anything else. I'm fully in favour of using flashing screen effects as an artistic thing (I am your local Recca enjoyer after all), but having a mode thats meant to be better for photosensitive players and then having it fail to eliminate 95% of the game's extreme flashing effects is very poor form.

Reviewed on Jun 29, 2022


Comments