Void Breach (2020)

Lately, I have been doing a play through of the Cosmic Void catalogue of point and click games. They are typically simple fun little games, with very random ideas and just out of reach puzzles that keep me thinking. They have all been pretty entertaining, so I wanted to try the oldest game in their repertoire.

They have come a long way. This game is pretty shoddy in many areas. The art is pretty atrociously amateur, and that’s coming from someone with a very high tolerance for MS paint style pixel art. There is some gold among the roughage though, I really loved some of the character art. It’s uncanny and grotesque (and a bit hard to tell how intentional that is). But the environments have no sense of perspective or even much of an articulation of what the space really is. It made for some very confusing navigation.

But the worst part is the puzzle design. This game asks you to do a ton of backtracking. Usually you get an item on one screen, then need to run to the other side of the world to use it - rinse and repeat. There’s no map, so you are fumbling through very confusing environments. There’s no consistency either, for example: you might exit a room on the right and then enter the next room on the right, top, or bottom.

Puzzles are not obvious at all, many times moon logic-y, so I had to run back and forth many times. It just got very tedious and frustrating to play. Some puzzles were good and logical. Just like some art was fun to look at. But overall I wouldn’t recommend this to many besides the most hardcore point and click fans with a pretty high tolerance of jank.

Check out their more recent games instead - they grew a TON.