An ambitious immersive sim roguelike that betrays its more humble origins, but makes for one of the most compulsive plays of the year with debatably the best comic art style (and name!) yet realised.
Hubba Bubba is more versatile than I thought.
One of my favourite games of last year was actually a DLC. Prey: Mooncrash was an insane roguelike-immersive sim experiment that I thought I'd never see the likes of again. So what should crash into my lap but just that? Void is as ace as its name would suggest and easily breaks into my top ten of the year at the time of writing, BUT you should probably know what you're getting into.
First, you'll have to forgive me a spell of sticklerism. Despite its protestations contrariwise, this is a roguelike through and through. I think the definition of late has expanded sufficiently to incorporate such aspects as meta-progression (see Dead Cells and Hades) and level-skips (see Enter The Gungeon and Spelunky). I'm being pedantic perhaps, but I mention it because I feel Void shakes things up enough that it would be a shame to lose track of the martini cocktail itself.
The setup is both perfectly conducive to roguelike shenanigans and an absolute riot. The prison ship, the Void Ark, has broken down in the Sargasso Nebula, stocked to the brim as it is with desiccated prisoners ready to be awoken like instant mashed potato. Obviously, the only logical course of action for the hopelessly sociopathic and bureaucratic A.I., B.A.C.S (voiced deliciously by Stanley Parable's Kevan Brighting), is to activate them one by one for suicide raids of the local derelict ships of mutants for resources to fix it. Each new prisoner inherits the crafting progress of the previous unfortunates and shakes proceedings up with new positive and negative traits. These include everything from doors opening automatically for you Star Trek-style, monochrome vision, alerting enemies by hacking like a smoker intermittently or whooping like an idiot upon picking up items, being annoyingly diminutive, etc. Luckily a bit of splicing can relieve you of some of these handicaps should they prove too annoying. Craft the story item and you've progressed to the next story stage (unless you're on iron mode, of course). The story doesn't expand much beyond showing the never-ending series of hilariously banal bureaucratic hurdles fixing the ship descends into, but the dark humour leveraging the sheer human cost is enough to carry it. Void is still packed with personality. The Kittybot that darkly mind controls its victims and the often gut-busting barks of, for example, the Scottish pirates and Scouse mutants come to mind. This is a very British venture and I'm all about it.
Treading water.
Boasting Jonathan Chey of System Shock 2 and Bioshock fame, Benjamin Lee of Ren & Stimpy (he'll love that), and Cara Ellison of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, this remains a titchy team, with presumably a budget to match, for such an ambitious project. Void is a masterclass in excelling through its own limitations. The procedural generation of derelict ships you plunder is incredibly simple but effective, enemies are 2D sprites (minus shimmy effect) that disappear in puffs of smoke - but you won't blink, the art style is one of its most striking features in spite of its simplicity, and cutscenes, nothing more than a series of comic strips - that I don't think have been bettered in style outside of the original Max Payne games. That we can say we have such an indie immersive sim released in 2019 gives me a lot of hope for the genre and the industry as a whole.
How the sausage is made doesn't matter if its a filler-dominated, tasteless mass, but Void is certainly none of those things. Void is split into its first-person action scavenging and the resource-dependent space travel and workshop crafting. These strategically feed into each other - the fuel and food demands of travel demand risk-taking in scavenging, weapons and tools must be carefully selected according to the threats on board, potential new crafting opportunities need to be weighed up against the potential for level-ending death, ship types can be boarded according to the pressing needs of your character, pirates need to be avoided lest they board the next ship with you to ruin your day - unless you've scavenged a torpedo to blow them out of the sky, etc. For all its interactions, the space travel element is kept very simple, sticking to the same handful of elements like collectable resources, pirates, space whales, gene modifications, and ships to consider. A tincture more depth here to make it more its own separate boardgame-like experience might have shifted it into a more equal standing with the scavenging. As it stands, it feels much more a side consideration - simply informing your resource decisions and priorities.
A continental breakfast? Tell me no more. I'm in!
The first-person blasting, sneaking and scavenging is Void's absolute bread and butter, and it makes me helplessly greedy for more than it can ever really give me. To make Void shoulder some real criticism, my biggest frustration is that it starts off significantly more difficult and uninteresting compared to where it ends up. Once you gain more oxygen, health and revives to play with, even in the face of increasing difficulty the further into the nebula you travel, the difference remains stark. Choice too - Void really thrives on its immersive sim-brand emergent gameplay. Whilst some of my favourite tactical considerations are available from the outset - locking doors behind you, shooting enemies into space through an airlock, spending merits to access space systems, balancing the slowness of stealth with limited oxygen, and hightailing it to the helm to find out all resource locations, etc, it only really opens up strategically after a handful of key unlocks. The most inspired tool in the game, the Rifter, warps enemies out of material reality until you place them back - say, in an airlock, behind a locked door, or in front of oncoming missiles; turrets and Secbots can eventually be hacked using merits and enemies made allies with the Scrambler; projectiles can be reflected back using the Bouncer. Although there's good variation in firepower otherwise, I can't help but long for more interesting devices like these. Ever more creative solutions round firefights, and all of these being made available earlier would help prevent the early-game from being dominated by the go-to solution of perforce racing around with a pistol. The optional challenge modes forcing you to forgo weapons, direct tools, and even anything but a spoon means they're keenly aware of the potential in shooting-absent gameplay.
I'm... gonna stick with the old one.
The upgrade system is one of the most satisfying around. Visually engaging and a blast to expand, it's not based on something vacuous like XP, but ship scrap and parts - allowing you to target the upgrades you want by boarding only the ships you need to. Once the system is sufficiently invested into, the gameplay loop of boarding ships (with little besides to do) no longer feels quite as limited. Indeed, if I could level another real criticism, it's that for however impressive a creation for its team size, it's certainly felt in content and variation - particularly in the enemy types. The particular joy that comes with unlocks is amplified, I think, by the sheer want for anything new in the nebula. Void is a constant joy to play, but it becomes a very predictable joy that surprises you only in what you can't exactly predict - the exact ship layout, the enemy locations, or even random variables like the power needing to be restored or fire/radiation plaguing every doorway. Even then you'll probably know exactly what to do.
Void, true to its System Shock family tree isn't necessarily about delivering the best gunplay, but it does outfit you with weapons more than fun to go gung-ho with. Of course, with such limited resources, it's often disincentivised. Stealth without any awareness indicators or effective places to hide isn't entirely reliable, but if you use the helm to discover enemy locations, make use of the toxin gun to silently kill, and otherwise avoid scavenging what wouldn't be possible without alerting enemies, it's very reasonable. It's carving out your own playstyle like this, a routine of sorts (I always head straight for the helm, rift away problem enemies and aim to scavenge everything whatever the cost), and being both constantly challenged and rewarded for it that makes Void such a compulsive play.
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to give the art style and soundtrack their proper dues. If you've been reading this and you have working eyes, you don't need me to tell you what an astonishing animated realisation of a comic strip Void has achieved here. The attention to detail, from the comic onomatopoeia of 'VORRP!'s and ''KBOOM!'s, right down to the first-person action itself being contained within its own panel, is to die for. The soundtrack is populated by a real mix of ambient tracks bringing out the eerie horror of the ships and the pulse-raising electronic and even rock tracks that make running for your life quite as tense and frenetic as they are. It's remarkable that, from what I've seen, seemingly everyone has a different favourite rather than coalescing around a favoured few.
Unforgivable crime. Vacuums are people too.
Void is a mighty ambitious immersive sim roguelike that might betray its more humble origins through sheer repetition and lack of content, but equally makes for one of the most compulsive, downright unique plays of the year with debatably the best comic art style yet realised and a name and a half to match. Its dark humour and commitment to again experiment like Prey: Mooncrash before it with an intoxicating roguelike-immersive sim fusion sets it utterly apart from most anything our there. I'd like to think System Shock 2 is looking down and smiling upon us - or even that Jonathan Chey, being a former project manager, is more than entitled to say it is.
