Late to the Party: Void Stranger

emories of my youth in school certainly aren’t the most pleasant times from my childhood, because, surprising no one at all, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call an academic kid—some would say I was more of the opposite. Still, aside from all of the coming-of-age crap that public school pounds into you, there was a memory I had from an art assignment our English teacher gave us to complete (weird, I know, but stick with me.)  The guy was SUPER into Ernest Hemingway, like, he just loved the way that old drunk could mentally instill a scene with his stories using just carefully woven words and nothing more. So, naturally,  he wanted us to try and draw out a specific scene from one of his books, A Farewell To Arms, where we had to do an interpretative sketch drawing of the moment the main character, Frederic, was caught in the mayhem of the Italian army’s retreat during World War I.

The classroom sheet detailed the instruction in a blurb at the top, right below the usual heading where you would write out your name and the date, with the rest of the sheet being a blank canvas for you to use for the sketch. I don’t know what came over me, but I used ALL of the real estate the paper had to offer, which included me scribbling art over the instructions and header area, using every inch of the paper I could.  I mean, I too enjoyed the work of Hemingway, so I’m sure that helped my engagement with the work, but my teacher absolutely gushed over the paper after I turned it in (I promise you this humble brag is going to go somewhere, stick with me.) My English teacher praised that my vision wasn’t limited by the concept of margins, and that I went beyond these perceptions to complete my goal with the classwork.

I haven’t really thought about this dumb little moment for years, until just recently, when I decided to pick up where I left off on a little gem of an indie game that took over my life for a few weeks in 2023, System Erasure’s Void Stranger. As much as I had enjoyed the game, I eventually succumbed to the density of its challenge, and the availability of several other new games at the time, I decided that it was time to move on to something else to boot up on my screen.

So yeah, I started playing Void Stranger again, since I thought it was a natural fit for some bedtime gaming with my new ROG Xbox Ally X, and at some point, something just clicked, and it really has sunk its teeth into me this time around. I know I’m a sucker for the usual Avant-Garde gameplay designs that actively work to subvert the very conventions they’re built with, with stuff like Tunic and FEZ, but Void Stranger is just, in a whole different class of its own.  After, ahem, falling deeper into the void with my play through, I managed to tough out the game and make it to the credits.

Something that I’ve felt immensely proud of, and yet sickeningly anxious about, because I’d soon learn that I’ve only scratched the surface of this dumb little brain worm of a game.

In the simplest terms of a video game, the mechanics of Void Stranger is truly an onion that presents itself in this unassuming form that steadily reveals an unsettling depth to it with every layer you peel back. After being asked to create a “brand,” the visuals shift towards a black and white 8-bit pixel aesthetic that immaculately animates the silhouette of a figure walking from the vanishing point of a desert horizon, and smash cuts to an up-close shot of the mysterious figure's face,  grimacing a 10-yard stare that’s surprisingly palpable for pixelated graphics. The female-presenting figure suddenly stops at a square-sized pit, dug deep into sandy ground with equilateral dimensions that seemingly go on into a never-ending abyss. The figure briefly ponders the pit before leaping into the gyre, with another smash-cut to a title card, simply stating “Void Stranger: Gray” before the game instantly shifts into a top-down perspective that further evokes the feel of a Game Boy game, where the figure, assumedly named Gray, plummets right into the floor of a dungeon-like room. In the room lies a stairway, a glowy spot planted randomly at the west end of the area, and a mysterious mural that looks similar to the grid you first customized the “brand” you were asked to make before starting the adventure. The stairway will take you to another room that houses an ominous-looking chest that’s adorned with an even more imposing statue of a creature looking over it. Guiding Gray to the chest and pressing the action button will open the chest to find a magic-looking staff, eliciting the game to comment upon the uneasy feelings it exudes. From this point on, the gameplay now feels different and restrictive, as the method of navigating Gray is now limited to one tile at a time. Furthermore, after pressing the action button again, Gray will swing her new staff, absorb the floor tile in front of her, and leave a hole behind, with the next swing placing the tile back and filling the hole back into solid ground. With the next set of stairs being blocked off by a chasm, the hook of Void Stranger swiftly punched me right in the jaw, as all of the familiar feelings of Legend of Zelda and Pokémon made me realize that this game was going to be a high-fantasy Sokoban-ass game.

Sure enough, I took one tile from the plethora of floor tiles around me, and then took it over to the gap that gated off the stairway, and poof, I created a new makeshift bridge to get me past the trench, and I moved onto the next floor. This one floor impressed the lesson that the Void staff can suck up one floor tile at a time, and can only be placed down in another gap in the floor. Stepping over the edge of any hole in the floor will result in death if you don’t quickly clamber your footing back onto solid ground, a little quirk that grants a small mercy for what will steadily become a merciless journey. I also want to clarify that restrictive movement that I mentioned earlier, the free-range eight-way movement I initially had from the very first floor was now replaced with four-way movement, where I can only move one tile at a time upwards, downwards, to the left, or to the right, and absolutely no way to adjust the direction I’m facing without taking a step IN that direction. The subsequent floors after obtaining my new game-making stick were all designed to acclimate my understanding of the simple yet deceptively deep possibilities around my new staff. The method behind the madness was how little System Erasure’s puzzle dungeon had directly communicated ANY of these dynamics to me, as I was left to my own magic device to figure out what to do next, and solely relied on the conveyance of the game’s mechanics in front of me.

I mean, let’s look at the first ten floors for this example, all arranged in a manner that gently infers the best course of action with little to no consequence for a poor choice, with plenty of floor space to canvas a path forward, in contrast to hazardous chasms surrounding the area. These starting levels will introduce core mechanics to the journey, like optional treasure chests that contain the crucial Locust, the “extra chances” of the game, along with movable rock-like objects that can be pushed towards any unoccupied tile space adjacent to them in typical Sokoban fashion. The eleventh floor introduces another big wrinkle, enemies, and much like the grid-based movement players are subjected to, so too are the enemies, who move in sequence with your movement, dressing up this weird puzzler title with some minor turn-based tactic accessories to add to the madness.

Now we’re in new territory, because the threat of failure that was entirely contingent upon the assessment of static fixtures within the room has just added a dynamic element to the challenge of making it to the next floor. It isn’t even enough that I had to defensively plot my moves against the life-or-death danger of roaming baddies; I soon had to learn how to manipulate their positioning in relation to my own within this pseudo turn-based setup. In keeping consistent with the theme of blind discovery, however, I was able to adapt to this new situation through a freak accident of an action that completely exceeded my initial understanding of the game’s puzzle physics and rules. What was this eureka moment, you ask?—Why, it was bumping against a wall in the room, and prompting Gray to knock on the wall, which, uhh, yeah, enemies just continued along their charted path in the room and significantly cleared out some of the imposing “fog” that once menacingly obscured my road to success.

This sensation of serendipity would not be the first time this would happen, and is in and of itself, is the real theme of Void Stranger—whatever limit you perceive to block you from success can, and at some point, SHOULD, be circumvented.

At some point, I came across what I could only describe as a “checkpoint” room as I was presented a chance to rest at the base of this out-of-place tree, and when I took the chance to breathe, I never expected for the game to whole-ass shut down on me and boot my ass back to my Steam library.

This, in and of itself, is just another clue to the double entendre of Void Stranger’s messaging that hinted at something bigger, because yeah, I guess it checks out that if a game asks me that I want to rest, that could be interpreted as a request to log ALL the way off and go touch grass or something. After processing that this happened, I quickly clicked my way back to the game and was greeted with a completely different scene, placing me in what seems like the halls of a castle, surrounded by NPCs that are quivering over what lies ahead in the room placed front and center of the hall. Moving around and with the normal eight-way movement again, mind you, I suddenly came to the realization that this moment was Void Stranger’s sole means of disbursing exposition to me, as I was getting lore about Gray through an interactive flashback. In this little soliloquy, we discover that there’s a bratty princess hiding out in the room, and that Gray is begrudgingly tasked with being her vassal, and this is all done within the conceit of a scripted JRPG-ass turn-based battle no less.

After concluding the bit of narrative, the scene transitions back to the rest stop, with the tree now withered, and with some pretty heavy Soulslike vibes, and where I started encountering friendly NPCs in my trek through the next stretch of floors. It was here that I started to notice more of the meta-details in the information being disseminated to me. I gotta come clean and say that I already had a semblance of an idea that this was going to happen because of the coded allusions to this sort of thing from the water cooler talk that influenced me to grab the game in the first place. I did NOT, however, anticipate the elegance of its crypticism.

Like, I really want to preface that the hidden meanings to everything that Void Stranger is still esoteric as shit, and will absolutely take multiple times to process, but it’s also sort of stirring to that effect because of its enigmatic presentation. Take FEZ, for example, which had a big meta puzzle that I’m about to spoil, so if you want to avoid me dishing on a thirteen-year-old game, then just skip to the next paragraph. I promise you won’t miss much of the point I’m trying to make. Also, you could just play FEZ, I promise it’ll be worth your time! So in FEZ, there are several unique symbol-like characters that are arranged in such a way that they appear like hieroglyphics that relay an impression of being a secret language, often plastered somewhere that implies that it's trying to tell you something, but also burdening you with the task of deciphering that message. Well, in a single room, lies a purple monument with an assortment of these secret language symbols adorned on different sides that are accompanied by a fox that keeps running around and vaulting over a chill-ass dog. Well, thanks to the experience of enduring all of those ESL classes from my elementary school days, I slowly realized that this repeating scene of a fox spastically jumping back and forth I can't fully express enough how much shit this NPC sucks—Her encounter is easily one of the most stressful parts of the game, and will haunt me more than anything else.over a resting pooch was the game illustrating the most famous pangram of the English language, “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” After counting the clusters in of symbols between the different sides of the room, I realized that this one single room was the crucial decoder to uncover the real meat and potatoes of FEZ’s secrets.

As rewarding as this discovery in FEZ was, there was a sense of pretension to it because it relied on external knowledge that didn’t necessarily challenge a general sense of logic or something more relevant to the game, and instead came off like a snobby easter egg that quizzed your familiarity with the English language instead. The Aha moments of Void Stranger, however, don’t necessarily challenge your wits with a seemingly unrelated factoid to decipher its hidden meaning, and instead cleverly nudge you to question the understanding of what Void Stranger IS as a game, and how you can use those hints to impact your progress in the game. The one and only reference I’ll make to this is something I’ve already mentioned off-handedly in this Op-Ed. Remember that mural I observed at the beginning of the game? Well, the mural was ALSO tile-based, where some tiles were filled in, and others were not, and were uniquely measured in a perfect 6X6 arrangement.  Now, wouldn’t it be crazy if you encountered a room with arranged in the 6X6 dimensions, and have the ability to actively rearrange tiles to MATCH that same mural you took notice of on a previous floor?—yeah, you’re welcome (or I’m sorry, but also, don’t fret, there’s still SO much more to it.)

This isn’t a perfect system by any other means, and the game has absolutely no remorse for people banging their head against the wall, and as difficult as I may have suggested the game to be, I can’t tell you how many times it made me feel like the stupidest stupid idiot that ever stupided in their stupid-ass stupid life. Every Sokoban predicament where you could envision the “invisible thread” behind, inside your head, will rapidly tie that thread into an invisible cat’s cradle, and it’s by design. The further you progress in Void Stranger, the more you see the theme of devotion, and the game subtly questions what kind of resolve players are willing to devote to succeeding in it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look up the occasional walkthrough for a troublesome floor here and there, especially when I realized I had stumbled upon a beautiful yet painfully tragic moment in my play-through of Void Stranger that had me questioning whether or not I should still continue, but let me tell y’all—I did it, I reached the end credits.

One I said that the puzzles steadily become more diabolical, I MEANT it.

And yet, despite that, there’s SO much more still ahead of me in this game that I am UTTERLY excited to dive even deeper into. It’s the sort of curious whimsy I’ve been missing from many games the last couple of years, and I highly encourage anyone reading this to take the plunge and buy Void Stranger for yourself. It’s an incredible story that stands even taller as a meta-commentary on what a Video Game is and can be in terms of an experience. I have a whole new mode to pace through that expands on what I’ve already experienced with Gray, and well—I can’t say any more than that. I honestly feel like I've divulged too much as it is. I can say, with full confidence, that any new release from System Erasure has become an instant “on sight” purchase from me, which has been this comforting, reinvigorating feeling about the state of independent games and the sort of character they can still possess. There are just SO many derivative works on the digital marketplace from independent developers, and some of them just seem like they were made with market trends that’ll ensure sales over something they ACTUALLY wanted to make.

Void Stranger doesn’t feel like that—hell, two years later, and its rating on Steam is currently sitting at a “Very Positive,” which is a significantly wide gap for exposure from their debut release, Zero Ranger. Despite not hitting the same level of acclaim, there’s an entirely different sense of passion behind the production of Void Stranger, and hell—I’ll take it over the likes of Blue Prince any day of the week.