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.

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PPR Presents Limelight: Ball x Pit

K, so here’s something a little more current—one of stand-outs in the recent ID@Xbox showcase was a game that I could only describe as the Peanut Butter and Pickles of indie action titles: Ball x Pit. Like, the word salad that came out of George’s mouth when he talked about it with the rest of the PPR crew that was both outlandishly wild, and strangely accurate at the same time.

Imagine a Bullet Hell, Rogue-Like Arkanoid-esque vertical-scroller, with intermittent life-sim city/resource building ala Actraiser…

If that reading that sounded crazy to you, imagine typing it out for y’all to glean upon—either way we’re really excited to scope it out!

Be sure to tune in to our Twitch at 7:00 PM PST on 11/04/2025 to watch the this incredible mish-mash of gameplay mechanics masterminded by one dude from New York! You can check out the streams here or directly on our Twitch channel, and vibe along with us as we work towards ushering in a new age of Limelight for y'all!

QCF: AVGN 8-Bit

ne might almost expect a game with the namesake of the Angry Video Game Nerd series to be horrible by design. After all, the Nerd — created and portrayed by James Rolfe — has a penchant for bringing what he calls the worst of the worst to light, sometimes sprinkling in bits of reluctant video game trivia with a sea of curse word-ridden catchphrases. In some instances, it's not entirely unwelcome to see low doses of a weird low-budget robot, cursing mutant, or some other weird shit.

An FMV intro of Rolfe as the Nerd at the beginning of Retroware's AVGN 8-bit may not inspire confidence in the ease or enjoyment of any trials ahead: "This game sucks ... just the way I like it."

Thing is, it doesn't actually suck. Dare I say it's pretty well-rounded, though not the most inventive experience in terms of level flow, gameplay mechanics, or boss battles. This game won't change your life, but you'll have some fun along the way.

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QCF: Hollow Knight: Silksong

t isn’t very often that the cultural zeitgeist of video games just comes together on a subject like the friggin’ Planeteers summoning Captain Planet, right? I mean, thinking back, the last few times something like that happened were the releases of Pokémon GO or Grand Theft Auto V—video game releases that surpassed the typical grand-scale spectacle for their respective audiences and had instead exploded into being these larger-than-life experiences that invaded all of the water coolers out there.

Well, it happened again with the long-awaited sequel to the 2017 sleeper hit from indie studio Team Cherry—Hollow Knight: Silksong.

What was once ranked among the vaporware meme status of Half-Life 3 or, to a lesser extent, Banjo-Threeie (can’t really do Shenmue III or Zach Snyder’s Justice League, because well, those ended up coming out), the highly anticipated follow-up finally emerged from years of silence with a surprise launch date that was showcased in the 2025 Gamescom event. The sporadic appearance of the trailer not only showed everyone watching and in attendance that the game was alive and well, but it also steadily concluded with an eye-opening launch date that was just a mere two weeks away.

No advance press copies or influencer kits—a worldwide release for everyone to experience completely sealed from behind Team Cherry’s doors until its Sept. 4 launch date. The clandestine rollout couldn’t be more thematic for Silksong, as the crux of the game teased a quest that spanned a world far bigger and more daunting than Hollow Knight’s Hallownest ever was, and after spending hours of needling my way through the troubled lands of Pharloom, I can safely say that the hype is real.

Silksong is one of the finest Metroidvanias ever made—a true peak for the sub-genre of “search-action” gaming.

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QCF: Promise Mascot Agency

he Yakuza/Like a Dragon titles are a series of video games that quickly etched their mark onto my heart, especially after I started to lose hope of whether or not the next Shenmue entry would ever happen. In spite of the action-laced criminal drama that the series is famous for, though, the B-Story styled side-quests and activities were what always hooked me for hours on end, more often to the extent that the main objectives of the games were ironically set to the side. While Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio made sure to pack plenty of flashy distractions and gripping stories, there was a certain recurring trend among the low-stakes pastimes that were included in each Yakuza title—a business-simulator-like mini-game. These side-operations didn’t just have some flimsy premise to justify their inclusion, either; these games are often sizable productions, complete with their own wacky gravitas of the “Saving the Orphanage” variety attached to the ordeal, and in some instances were just as deep as the main plot.

Thinking back, I remember spending a whole night grinding away at Ichiban Confections, and just easily lost count over how many times that I had thought to myself, “Man, this should be a whole-ass game with a full-time 40-hour campaign and everything…”

Well, it would seem that Kaizen Game Works must have heard my silly pipe dreams and did just that with Promise Mascot Agency, and even enlisted the incredible talents of Takaya Kuroda for good measure.

Beyond the parallels to the Dragon of Dojima’s outings, Promise Mascot Agency offers an engrossing story of perseverance and redemption through a massive melting pot of gameplay mechanics that have no business working together as well as they do. The end result is a fresh and weirdly addictive venture that delivers an experience that’s even better than the bizarrely solid sum of its parts.

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PPR Presents Limelight: Hollow Knight: Silksong

he indie equivalent of Shenmue III and Half-Life 3 is out! The meme is officially dead! Everyone’s favorite chat spam has materialized, and the sequel to the 2017 Metroidvania Sleeper is here!

Hollow Knight: Silksong is FINALLY a thing, and everyone’s kinda freaking out about it. Join George as he dives headfirst into the gloomy, labyrinthine journey that’s sure to be filled with all of the cheap enemy placement and tricky wall-jumps you could ever imagine and then some! The jury is still out on whether or not the wait was worth it, but one thing is for sure—the amount of hype and joy for this release is feverish, and we, for one, cannot wait to see what all of the hullabaloo is all about!

Be sure to tune in to our Twitch at 9:30 PM PST on 09/06/2025 to watch the highly anticipated sequel from Team Cherry! You can check out the streams here or directly on our Twitch channel, and vibe along with us as we work towards ushering in a new age of Limelight for y'all!

PPR 159

verything’s an Ad nowadays (#notanAd) and the constant outpour of late-stage capitalism getting pumped out through our screens and on our pages has objectively reached a point of Ad nauseam (sorry, we just couldn’t resist.)

In all seriousness, though, if there’s one form of entertainment that’s fueled by marketing magic more than any other medium, it’s video games, and there are generations upon generations of material to take a look back at and examine the expansive world of Video Game advertisements via printed ads and broadcast commercials. Join George, Sean, Andrew, and special guest Peter Skerrit as they examine nearly 50 years of promotional material and discuss some of the memorable, or more accurately, psychologically impactful ads that have embedded themselves deep into the minds of these middle-aged game junkies.

From the edgy attack Ads of the 90’s to the arthouse schlock of the late aughts, we’ve got all of the deep cuts for you, as we can’t help but feel nostalgic for the shameless sales pitches of old and the levels of showmanship that Video Game advertisements used to have back then before giving up and paying Geoff Keighley a bunch of money to hock their stuff for them.

Mail us at our new email Mailbag@presspauseradio.com, leave a voicemail at 469-PPR-TALK, and be sure to stop by at our Forums if you haven’t already registered and post your thoughts about the show. Finally, make sure to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube, follow us on Twitch page and Twitter, and finally take part in our Facebook and Steam group!

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PPR 155

fter nearly ten years with everyone’s favorite console/handheld hybrid, Nintendo is FINALLY gracing the world with a grand-scale presentation of the Switch successor, the Nintendo Switch 2.

So, what better way to hype ourselves up for the big N’s upcoming hardware than to fantasize a bunch of our pie-in-the-sky. “what-if” wishes that we want to see out of the new console, along with some educated guesses and predictions to throw around amongst ourselves. Joining Ed, George, and Sean this time around is Hayes Madsen, a games journalist currently penning words at inverse.com, who worked at over a dozen other outlets, and has graciously accepted the invite to discuss a slew of topics for this week’s episode!

On the cast, the crew will weigh in on their shared impressions of this year’s GDC, the state of indie games, Game Informer’s return, and everything Nintendo leading up to the Switch 2 Direct! Also, a bit of warning; we unfortunately ran into some recording hiccups that slightly affected the audio quality of this episode, but rest assured PPR-gonauts, the latest show is VERY MUCH still listenable, so please, enjoy all while we collectively salivate at the promise of consistent frame-rates and 4K resolution from Nintendo of all things!

Mail us at our new email Mailbag@presspauseradio.com, leave a voicemail at 469-PPR-TALK, and be sure to stop by at our Forums if you haven’t already registered and post your thoughts about the show. Finally, make sure to rate and subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube, follow us on Twitch page and Twitter, and finally take part in our Facebook and Steam group!

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