The void (2008)

The void (2008), developed by Ice-Pick Lodge, published by ND Games

I've seen people describing the Void with such words as "masterpiece", "gorgeous", "Mysterious", "bizarre" and "surreal". While I am willing to admit that some of those adjectives do fit, a masterpiece is not what I'd use. Essentially it is one of those "what the fuck am I even playing" kinds of things.

I know it's too late to warn you now, but there will be some crude language in this piece, just because of fuck this kind of shit. Honestly. Fuck this.

As a note, this isn't a proper review, as for a proper review I'd actually have to be able to play the game longer than half an hour before deciding that nope, this is definitely not a game for me. I'm all for mystery, but not when it's essentially a game with clunky, molasses-slow navigation, mixed with a gameplay system that is unnecessarily obscure to the point that it makes the end of the 90's web UI design look like a sensible approach to usability.

This is the main menu. You know there's something wrong with your menu design if you need tooltips to tell you what the buttons actually do. Back in the day, when the web was all new and cool, there was a phase where some people thought that it would be great to make website menus into symbols. It wasn't cool. It was stupid then and it's stupid now.

As far I could gather, you are dead. But in a void, where you are kind of alive, if you digest hearts that can store colour. A woman tells you this, advising you to fill with colour and then go to other chambers, where you can grow more colour and hearts and learn how to use glyphs by drawing them in the air with the mouse. And that, essentially was as far as I could manage to make myself play before the unnecessarily slow movement system and drawing coloured lines to the map in order to navigate made me say stop. This is not enjoyable at all. No matter how much the "sisters" show their naked breasts to me, this is not something I enjoy.

The aforementioned woman, that is to say, sister,  said, that there was something wicked coming to my way, but the hell I was going to actually play long enough to see if that was a worthwhile thing to wait. so I did what any sensible human would have done in my place and Youtube the game in order to see what the hell happens next.

From the YouTube videos, I learned that the brothers, who are apparently the baddies of the game, are some sort of mechanical human hybrid monsters and everyone wants colour as the colour in void means life. The video also hammered it further that the game does look gorgeous and it's constantly surreal or at least bizarre, but those weren't my issues. My issue is, that the gameplay just sucks. The movement is bad, the mouse-driven glyph drawing system is pretty much as it was in Arx Fatalis another game using the system, a nice idea but not really enjoyable way of doing magic.

This is your naked soul, void of colour except for the hearts. You fill the hears with the colour you harvest from the void. Ain't that nice. Oh, and if you run out of colour, you die.

So, like I said earlier, fuck this shit. I ain't going to spend my time on this, no matter how much the developers poured their hearts and souls and their feeble ambitions on this. Fuck this shit. Fuck this and the need to fill your hearts with colour and move slowly around in an artsy environment while eyeballs with wings fly in the fucking air like eyeballs with wings.

The Void does have nice visuals though. And the soundtrack is pretty decent. If you're interested in seeing mysterious and surreal soul sister's breasts, you can get the Void from GOG and Steam. But I wouldn't really recommend it unless you are into surreal games that are unnecessarily clunky technically. Besides what do I know, some think it's a masterpiece. Then again, it's on sale right now so you won't feel completely fucked over if you end up not liking this.

P.S.
After writing this I gave the Void a couple of minutes more and I noticed that the fastest way to move is to jump around. Really. Jumping around. But still, I didn't get very far.