Cool to see you are still at it @Mnemogenic, don’t give up!
At this point I think I have done all of the story related stuff in the game, true ending included. According to the game stats it took me 60 hours to see everything, HLTB reports 52 hours so it checks out (I tend to leave the game idle sometimes so the extra time is probably that).
I think this game was really cool and I still think it’s my game of the year, but after having done everything there are some hard to miss faults that make me think this game is not for everyone except a couple of very specific type of players (players who are very into the cryptic stuff La Mulana style, or huge fans of this type of sokoban flavored puzzles).
Probably the biggest miss of this game is how the whole thing is structured leads to very unfortunate friction between both halves (the puzzles and the secrets). Obviously Void Stranger is a game that is best experienced blind, however, if you do that there are SO many things that can go wrong and that can potentially ruin your relationship with the game.
It all has to do with how the game handles punishment, and how hard you can screw yourself if you make certain (poor) choices at specific points. Since the secret layer of the game kind of requires this hands-off approach to design in order to make it feel authentic it all leads to this sense of trial and error. You never know which of the many obscure things you can do will be useful and at which point. When something you do strikes gold is one of the best feelings I’ve ever got with a game, Void Stranger has some of my favorite secrets of all time in videogames in general. However, when something you do happens to be wrong it can send your whole playthrough off-rails. If you had a good idea at the wrong place, doing it and not receiving feedback can easily make you think that the idea itself was not correct, when in truth you were just slightly off the mark. The whole VOID and locust system puts a pressure on the player that can easily lead to waste hours of progress just because you made one single mistake at an unfortunate part of the game.
A couple of examples on how wrong can things go are:
Details
I saw a streamer find their way to [spoiler]255 with 00 locusts. On that last floor you are supposed to open a hole and fall through, an action that has previously been established as something that kills you. Since this person was at 00 lives, they didn't want to risk the whole playthrough on a bad move at the very end, so they started looking for another way out. That's when they found out the walking over the status bar thing and they started messing around with that. They did a couple of experiments that were unsuccessful and finally they ended up taking the HP tile, the ONLY thing that KILLS YOU in a floor that has no enemies and that is designed to be harmless in order to push you to take the leap of faith and fall through.[/spoiler] This person had, fortunately, found [spoiler]the wings and the sword[/spoiler] so at least they had some weight lifted off their shoulders, but this can easily happen in your first or second playthrough after several hours and it feels very wrong.>! I’ve faced similar situations like finding certain ultra hard puzzles before having the intended items while also being VOID forcing me to push through an extremely taxing challenge I didn’t want to take, as I already knew it looked like an end-game content that wasn’t intended to the point I was at, just to find a black statue so I could restart and escape that place. One of my friends didn’t find the extra items on either of their Gray playthroughs and did two full 8 hour runs with only the staff to find out that their reward was another mode with even harder puzzles. They didn’t want to do that so they were presented with the choice of either wiping their entire save and losing all their progress, or pushing through some of the more hellish puzzles in the whole game. Of course, they didn’t know that if they chose to restart, they would uncover the secret password mechanic that would allow them to resume their hard playthrough at any time but how could they know? The game doesn’t hint that that’s a thing in any capacity. Luckily for them I had already found out and could tell them, removing the burden to a degree.
Which brings me to another point: the fact that the game is best experienced blind is ultimately not true. The opposite isn’t true either, having everything spoiled by a walkthrough also ruins the experience. This game sits at a very uncomfortable and hard to justify spot in the sense that, in truth, it’s best experienced with the help of a friend that has previously played the game and that is somehow able to gently push you towards the correct path without diminishing the sense of wonder and realization when you manage to figure stuff out. And this thread is a good example with @Mnemogenic, which could have easily been banging their head against the wall, possibly even dropping the game, if someone (I admit it was me) hadn’t intervened offering hints to help them be on track.
It’s a hard to reconcile truth, because you absolutely need the game to feel inescrutable and opaque in order to make the mystery layer work, but in so many ways that’s also the seed of destruction that can make so many people hate the experience. I really I don’t know how it could have been made better, so in the end it’s a matter of reconciling with the fact that what makes this game special is also potentially its worst aspect.
Finally, this is more of a me problem, but I wish the game didn’t lean so heavily into the tile based puzzles. As someone who would have previously described themselves as sokoban neutral, the hardest challenges of this game have made me develop a hate for this kind of design I honestly was not expecting. It takes things so far and for so long (that hard playthrough was torture) but at the same time I was so invested in all the other aspects that it became straight up painful. At the end of the true-this-time-for-real ending route I was so frustrated with the puzzles that I kept repeating aloud “please game I get it with the damn tiles stop pushing me back”. But as I say, this comes from someone who didn’t previously have feelings for this kind of puzzle flavor. I can easily see the opposite happening if this type of thing happens to be right your alley.
So, in summary, the 60 hours I put into this game felt ultimately worthwile, but definitely not perfect. Void Stranger is a very special game that almost isn’t, and that comes with huge caveats that can make or break the whole experience depending on what you value or don’t, what level is your patience at, and even how lucky or unfortunate your playthrough ends up being. It has this arbitrary aspect as its core that is hard to justify. It’s a 10/10 with extremely 3/10 moments, so make that what you will!