Void Stranger

• Genre: Puzzle Adventure
• Time Played: 61 hours.
• Too Short/Long: Too long... buuuut also it might be my own fault. If you want to see all the game has to offer it's too long. If you're fine with missing some content, it's probably not.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I was originally disappointed that System Erasure's follow up to ZeroRanger was going to be a puzzle game, I am no longer disappointed.
• Why I played: It might have been a long time til I played this game if not made by the same people who did ZeroRanger, which is one of my most favorite games in recent years. It being a puzzle game, but having cute style pixel art with big character drawings, I would have likely added it to my wish list, maybe bought it on sale and maybe gotten around to it some day. As I do for most game fitting the description.
• Recommend to others: This is a weird one. This is probably one of the games I've liked and played the most, I will recommend the least. While I think it's a great game, I find it very hard to recommend to anyone who wouldn't play it with dedication and determination. Not only are some of the puzzles ridiculously hard, but some of the secrets are extremely secret and it's the type of game you have to dig and dig at just to get a morsel of a reward for your effort.

Void Stranger is a puzzle game where you progress through levels by moving the floor tiles to get to the exit. You're often navigating through an otherwise bottomless pit and often have to avoid or manipulate monsters positions as well. The game does a good job at playing with and introducing layers to those mechanics, but on the surface level it's a pretty straightforward puzzle game. It's everything around the floor-to-floor puzzles that make the game really stand out.

This is a game that the more I played, the more I had trouble putting it down. At first, I played a handful of levels just to check it out, went back to some other stuff. Played a handful more levels til I got stuck, went to some other stuff. Played a level at a time because they were so mentally taxing. Then it got me. I just couldn't stop playing regardless of the difficulty or frustration. I had to see it all and I needed more.

It shows in my play time too. I played 49 hours when the end-end-end credits told me. I went back to play another 10 hours to find all the secrets and missed lore or interactions. I went back another 2 hours after that to do the final run of the game so I could unlock a special condition for the final boss, so I could get an extra 20 seconds of a scene.

I replayed some of the same areas dozens and dozens of times, and sure, at some point when these areas are fully memorized, they're no longer puzzles, just part of the path from point A to point B, but it can certainly be taxing to go through the motions, over and over. That's what makes the game a tough sell. 

For some clarity. I realized a good portion of my playthrough I was really brute forcing my way through, which made things exceptionally difficult. There is essentially a "hard-mode", but you're supposed to have some items that make hard-mode slightly less hard(still much harder), but I didn't have any of these until after my first run of hard-mode, and hard-mode is only very technically able to be completed without these items. It's otherwise arguably the hardest challenge of the game. That is... until you get to the "final run". So maybe someone could have an easier and quicker time with the game than I did, but the fact that it can happen isn't something to dismiss.

That said, I loved it. I loved the style, theming, characters, the presentation of the story, the art. THE MUSIC. Like ZeroRanger before it, I just can't express enough how good the soundtrack is. Which is good, because you have to hear it a lot.

It's hard to really speak on the specifics of this game because it's one of those where "everything is a spoiler". I have never taken more screenshots of a game, both because I loved the art in many of the semi-static scenes, and because I needed to reference something later in the game. Even when I played MMO's and do character photo sessions, I don't think a single one had more screenshots than I took in this game, but I have carefully selected the screenshots to present here, even though there are dozens of others I'd rather share.