This review contains spoilers
Played it through to the VOIDED ending and I'm really mixed on this one.
I got absolutely addicted to this and spent an entire Saturday playing it for 9+ hours .The depth of this game is really amazing and something special, this is a labrynth full of secrets and I know there's so much more in the game I haven't seen. If a puzzle room seems suspisciously easy its probably because there's something hidden there, if there's an out of place looking object it probably has some sort of purpose. It was really cool to see objects I noticed looking suspiscious getting mentioned in hints on how to get secrets later on and going "oh, so that's what that is there for". You also unlock more story as you find secrets and progress so the entire experience just feels immensely rewarding.
I normally don't have an interest in puzzle games but ZeroRanger is one of my all time favorite games and this is the only other game by that dev, so I wanted to pick this up. The one thing that makes ZR hard to recommend to people is that there is an ending that just deletes your save when you fail - I will defend that part of ZR because the game is very short and getting to the end after you've already done it once takes less than an hour. Well, Void Stranger feels like it was entirely built on that idea. Unlike ZR this is not a short game either, this game is a whopping gauntlet of 255 floors, some of them are easy but some could take you ages depending on how good you are at puzzles. There is no "undo" button on puzzles, you either have to reset the game or die on purpose anytime you make a mistake, which will happen a LOT. You also can't go up one level to previous floors and there's no level select feature - you can find shortcuts and skip through floors though. But if you miss something in a floor, you are SoL unless you restart the game or can find a secret path back to that floor.
So while the concept and design is awesome I question whether it was the best decision to apply the ideas they used to a sokoban game. The lack of undo button and level select is necessary for the game to work for reasons that would require me to spoil the entire progression of the game to explain, but when the thing gating my progression is this endless gauntlet of often difficult puzzles it got frustrating very quickly, and having to redo the same puzzles so many times made me feel like the game did not respect my time.
I got absolutely addicted to this and spent an entire Saturday playing it for 9+ hours .The depth of this game is really amazing and something special, this is a labrynth full of secrets and I know there's so much more in the game I haven't seen. If a puzzle room seems suspisciously easy its probably because there's something hidden there, if there's an out of place looking object it probably has some sort of purpose. It was really cool to see objects I noticed looking suspiscious getting mentioned in hints on how to get secrets later on and going "oh, so that's what that is there for". You also unlock more story as you find secrets and progress so the entire experience just feels immensely rewarding.
I normally don't have an interest in puzzle games but ZeroRanger is one of my all time favorite games and this is the only other game by that dev, so I wanted to pick this up. The one thing that makes ZR hard to recommend to people is that there is an ending that just deletes your save when you fail - I will defend that part of ZR because the game is very short and getting to the end after you've already done it once takes less than an hour. Well, Void Stranger feels like it was entirely built on that idea. Unlike ZR this is not a short game either, this game is a whopping gauntlet of 255 floors, some of them are easy but some could take you ages depending on how good you are at puzzles. There is no "undo" button on puzzles, you either have to reset the game or die on purpose anytime you make a mistake, which will happen a LOT. You also can't go up one level to previous floors and there's no level select feature - you can find shortcuts and skip through floors though. But if you miss something in a floor, you are SoL unless you restart the game or can find a secret path back to that floor.
So while the concept and design is awesome I question whether it was the best decision to apply the ideas they used to a sokoban game. The lack of undo button and level select is necessary for the game to work for reasons that would require me to spoil the entire progression of the game to explain, but when the thing gating my progression is this endless gauntlet of often difficult puzzles it got frustrating very quickly, and having to redo the same puzzles so many times made me feel like the game did not respect my time.