WARP ZONE Game Club - Void Stranger

clubs
43

@Mnemogenic Well, that depends on what did you find out while poking around. There are several mechanic shifting items that recontextualize the whole game, at least one big “quest” to follow through, a hidden ending and probably more stuff I’m not remembering right now. You can do all that with Gray and in fact I recommend it, since she doesn’t get the harder puzzles.

Either way least one playthrough with Lillie is important, since she gives the continuation to the main story. So you’re not wasting your time with that. Although I massively advise to get those items I mentioned and doing the playthrough with them, because otherwise it becomes hell difficulty wise very quickly. FYI, the tree floors are always each 28 floors, so 28, 56, 84, 112, etc. in case you want to keep it in mind to skip ahead while also getting all the story bits.

The most important thing are the stone tablets. All of the tablets are solvable, even the ones that appear broken. There is always a puzzle or a way to find the pattern. Each separated “area” of the dungeon counts as a Void Lord domain, and in said domain there is a always a 6x6 room that guarantees that you can input the respective tablet. Although there are patterns that are solvable in different domains, and that in fact is also a very important tool to warp around the tower.

So in summary, if you didn’t do all the tablets before jumping to Lillie, I advise you to lose on purpose, then surrender at the continue screen and go play with Gray again. You’ll get a special glyph same as the infinity locust to skip ahead to Lillie when you want.

44

@JoJoestar Thanks! I’ll try to keep going, because I really do want to see how this story plays out. And it sounds like I won’t exactly be doing these tile puzzles with this ruleset for 20 more hours, so that’s a relief.

I wasn’t able to figure out much while poking around, actually. The only thing I ever found in that B# void was something that killed me. I’ve never really been able to get much from being able to walk on the bottom of the screen either. It made a few puzzles easier, but moving the numbers around hasn’t done anything that exciting.

I wish I knew I could restart as Gray, because, unfortunately:

I'm already void as Lillie, so I assume I'm stuck. If there's any other way out, I would love to know. I ate the fruit because I died on the first floor and I didn't want to keep dealing with the opening scene to stay alive. I didn't know it would give me more options.

Is there a better way to skip around besides the statues? With what I know, they don’t save that much time. I’m usually only skipping a handful of floors at a time. Even if I trade the locust number for the floor number, that’s never seemed to get me all that much.

45

Oh man, you sure have missed a lot!

You 100% can reset, so don’t worry. At the end of your VOID playthrough after going through the song, the game “teaches” you a new mechanic, although it’s easy to miss the first time. Whenever you see one of the 4 eyed statues, if you put the exit directly below, it “heals” your VOID status at the cost of resetting you on B001.

Here’s an example.

So now it’s a matter of finding one of the statues, putting the exit where it goes and resetting. Then killing yourself so you can surrender and play again with Gray.

About the status bar: the two main things are reaching B# and the number manipulation. You can exchange your HP value (as long as you’re not VOID), the number of locusts and the two last digits of the floor, enabling you to essentially teleport around the dungeon and giving you extra locusts. You may have missed this because playing with infinite locusts activated is, after all, one less number to play with. And FYI, there’s absolutely more stuff on the B# other than the thing chasing you around, but it may be better if you return there later after doing the tablets.

Speaking of that, can’t stress it enough, do the tablets! As you realized the one in B023 is “free”, just remove the exit then fall down!

46

Yeah, I kinda ended up here by accident lmao. I was on a run where I thought I would just collect as many crystals as I could while I had infinite locusts and then I would start doing tablets and stuff in the next run, but one thing led to another and now I’m here.

I just learned the four eyed statue thing because there’s a Lillie floor that just has that set up and if you don’t know to fix it, then it just does what it does. They did some game design to me! I absolutely missed that during the song, and I sat through the song twice so I really have no excuse there. So yeah I died and gave up. I also did push through and got to B23 and did the thing! Feeling like I’ve got some momentum again. Next step is going back to Gray and doing more tablets.

47

I don’t need help this time! I just wanted to report my progress. A lot has happened! Right now I am just gathering data.

Big ol’ spoilers

Details I have begun doing the tablets. So far, I have the cube, the wings, and the sword. The wings and the sword do so much to remove some of the friction I was feeling. I feel like I could run the whole place in like an hour now. I did another tablet room that seemed to be empty but had a picross puzzle in the corner. I've found two of these picross so far. Not sure what they are for yet. I have been keeping an eye out for rooms of their shape, but that's sort of a backburner thing right now.

Being able to talk to the boulders (eggs?) is so interesting. They’ve got stories! I now know the trick to get three locusts from a chest. I’ve noticed that every (most?) void lords have three letter names. I don’t really know what that might mean yet, though I’m having thoughts.

I made it to the bottom again, and this time there was a small platform with the obvious setup that would bring me back to life on floor one. I was curious where the stairs would take me, so I moved them away and went down into this white void place. I found a big lady missing part of her head. A boulder at the start told me this place wasn’t what I was looking for, and it kinda seems like they were right, for now at least. But cool!

I’ve also started running into the guy (is he a void lord? I feel like some rock talked about him) who buys your locusts and gives you hints for shortcuts. The first one was “three leeches roam, etc.”; haven’t figured that one out yet. The other was behind the chest on floor 7, which I did use. That was where I got the other picross. If these shortcuts all take you to the tablet room of that area, that will be very nice.

I also ended up at the start or near the start of the post-end area. I walked through the brand input screen; I’m sure there’s something cool to do with that. And I also saw and took a screenshot of every letter in the presumed cypher. I have an inkling that this is a part of how you solve the broken tablets. Although, maybe not, maybe you just turn on those monitors somehow.

I have reached the notebook portion of this game, so far just to keep track of shortcuts and tablets I’ve solved. I also wrote down the cypher in a grid notebook, because that seemed like it would be fun to see in a year. It’ll be really funny if it’s useless.

48

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!

49

This game, as with myhouse.wad, I’ve basically taken the beat my head against the wall until I’m out if ideas, then just look it up approach and I’m glad I did. In this game’s case I found a helpfully timestamped vod of someone who played through on youtube so that I could get hints to the specific stuff I was stuck on without getting too spoiled, and that helped.

I also messed around enough with the shortcut system that by the time I got to the hard mode I was able to quickly skip basically all of it. I’m now nearing the “real” end at around what’s looking like 40 hours, planning to save a no item hard mode playthrough for somewhere down the line.

Some of the puzzles at this point do feel a bit exhausting, but I’m blaming a lot of that on my playing faster than I’d like to so that I can help people out when they get stuck as I’ve been recommending this game so I want to be able to give the kind of gentle hints that @JoJoestar is talking about. If I actually let the game close without immediately reopening it whenever it did that as I was on the first few days of playing I’m sure I’d have more patience.

For reference, and in case someone has any better ideas, fastest way I know of to go through the game from a new save (obviously spoilers):

Head to level 7 and take the shortcut behind the stairs, then head to the tree on 28. Trees are every 28 floors and there’s a locus eater statue helpfully on floor 29, which means you can ui manip to 28 locusts at the tree, die once, go to floor 29, skip to the tree at 56, ui manip to floor 7, run to floor 28, die until you have 55 locusts, skip to the third tree, then the fourth tree, at which point the hundreds place is now in play and it gets a little harder, but you can do similar stuff to skip from there.

Alternatively, inputting a brand anywhere warps you to the room associated with that brand, usually these are only possible in their corresponding room, but the room on floor 53 (use the room 29 statue to warp directly there in 5 min max from a new run) is made of glass so you can input the brand from 179 there and skip about 150 floors.

super late game double spoilers

There’s also a way to input the brand from floor 223 in the very first 6x6 room if you have certain things unlocked, don’t ask how I know.

50

Also, late game spoilers on an early game room because it annoyed the shit out of me until I min maxed it:

Quickest way through the maggot room if you have wings is push the bottom wall once, stab the first maggot then run past the rest at the bottom, you have exactly enough time.

51

lol This person’s playthrough was super useful to me as well! Interesting to note than even more than the gameplay videos themselves, they have uploaded several imgur albums with a lot of useful screenshots and materials, such as some of the alphabet, picross and all the tablet screenshots solved (check the video descriptions for the different albums).

There’s another path I also found useful using the floor 7 -> 23 shortcut, then going through floors normally until B037 which also has another skip that conveniently leaves you at B053, which happens to be one of the most flexible 6x6 rooms in which you can warp to several places by using the different brands, as you were saying.

52

@JoJoestar I know of that one but it seems harder to get through 28-37 than 7-28. Maybe I’m wrong though, this would be a heck of a game to watch a speedrun race of even if that would be spoiler city for a broad audience haha

53

Very exciting moment when I found MON WAS HERE and realized I could learn how to read.

54

Finished. What a fucking video game.

Now to sink my teeth into this (end of the end of the end of the end of the end of the game spoilers) standalone shoot em up game you get at the end because what the hell doesn’t this game have in it.

55

@TracyDMcGrath Now you can open that spoiler! :P

56

@JoJoestar not only that but the shmup’s title is a Shinobu Yagawa reference! Game had me right in its crosshairs haha

57

Void Stranger[/spoiler] = 0stranger = [spoiler]Zero st-Ranger

And this folks is what we call galaxy brains.

58

Finally got back to it and finished my first run! Then I started on the second, and already too much has happened to even talk about. I’ll be back to unspoiler all this text if I ever hit a dead end, but for now I cannot stop making monumental discoveries by complete accident lol.

59

I have reached a point where I’m kind of intimidated by the game. There’s a lot left to do and doing it is going to take a little while and a lot of thought for me. It kind of feels like I have a project to work on. I didn’t even play the game yesterday but I spent about a half hour looking at screenshots.

I think I have gotten past the “wow there’s all this stuff!” stage to the “okay but what do I actually do with all this stuff?” stage.

What I don’t want to do is lose my patience and overly cheat my way through. I’ve already used that very helpful playthrough that was linked, but when I did I accidently discovered something else, which isn’t ideal. So, I want to pace myself so I reach for that as little as possible.

60

This game, and myhouse.wad also, definitely present an arg like experience at times where you often stand at a cross roads of, do I beat my head against a wall for a bit longer and really get everything out of discovering the way forward, or do I look it up as soon as I start getting frustrated and kill some of the magic but also prevent myself from growing resentful of the game?

I’m definitely in the latter camp, but I can only wonder at how much better certain things would have worked for me had I happened upon them myself.

61

Two things I definitely don’t blame anyone looking elsewhere are the Eus and Cif brands. Shortcuts are something else you’re not missing a ton of you don’t find them by yourself. Other than that everything comes pretty naturally if you try each brand at least once.

62

Something I’m experiencing a lot in this game is having the right idea but executing on it in a slightly wrong way.

Example:

The tablet that is broken in the area with the men who copy your movements (I haven’t memorized all the lord names yet). I figured the brand was mirrored, because you have to work with one of those dudes in the brand room. The piece of information I didn’t have and had to look up, is that you can see both sides of the brand if you look at “both sides” (left tile and right tile) of the broken brand. I feel like this is the game breaking its own rules in a way that isn’t very fun, but now I have all the information and can do the brand. I think I’ve only got this one and one more to do. There’s eight right?