Never before have I cared about a puzzle game, but Void Stranger had that special something to make it click for me. The story that unfolds over the first two "routes" is truly affecting, a beautiful tale of devotion spanning worlds that accomplishes so very much with so very little. You are only shown fragments, brief snippets of moments both pivotal and mundane, left to mull them over as you descend ever further into The Void, solving sokoban screen after sokoban screen. And somehow I cannot imagine a more effective means of conveying the story; sparse as the text may be, every word counts, and these routes achieve lofty emotional heights.

The subsequent routes are less inspired, veering into more well-trodden ground, but they too have moments of brilliance. Despite generally negative experience with the puzzle genre in the past, I found myself enraptured enough with Void Stranger to explore its every crevice and see all that it had to offer. That I found myself so engrossed with a game of a genre I previously had not cared for says to me that there is something noteworthy about Void Stranger, that it transcends the limits of its world. Any reservations I might have about it are surely trifling in the face of that understanding.

As an aside, many elements of Void Stranger's narrative are quite similar to Labyrinth of Galleria; I can recommend VS to fans of Galleria, and vice versa.