Board 8 > Void Stranger

(+) Yeah! (+)

I guess I'll unvoid myself and go back in with infinite locusts. Was trying to do without so I could get to the floors with locusts but I feel like that's not happening now lol.

Wow I am so goddamn stuck on B062 on hard.

Oh that one is annoying. You need to get the bulls? (gorillas?) lined up above and below their respective buttons and put a pit in the middle to keep the left creature on its button once it's there.

I think until your beat Lillie it's still valuable to have infinity. But once you know how to use the locusts it becomes less valuable.

Well I powered through and finished the run with Lillie. I managed to brute force one of the brand answers by translating it, which I'm not sure was the intended solution, but it worked. Although all that really got me was a clue about manipulating digits.

Now I guess I'm supposed to do stuff with Cif? This game is very long.

I honestly ended up powering through some stuff by using guides just because I was getting kinda done with endless puzzle-solving and there were still a couple of key things that I was missing that I would have had to look all over for. The really important stuff in this game is SUPER cool but the puzzle solving just gets to be too much after a while, especially when you can't move around the game freely to try to unearth secrets. It just gets so frustrating and time-wasting. It's worth it to see what the game is gonna do, but I really wish it was structured more like Outer Wilds.

Yeah I'm starting to want this to be over. I feel like I have no idea how close I am to the end, but the idea of going through 200+ floors again doesn't really inspire me to play more.

I have an annoying problem right now where I know what needs to be done and how to do it, but I can't for the life of me, whether I consult the game or consult the internet, figure out where the information for what needs to be done is actually found. There must be a hint for what to do somewhere but I don't know where it is! I can skip just finding that hint and just do the thing that needs to be done, but... it's bothering me!

I'm just gonna say with Cif - I had no idea what to do here because I skipped past the critical floor(s) using a shortcut and had no real way of knowing. It was annoying.

Yeah I'm kinda torn on using skips because I feel like I'm gonna skip past a floor that I shouldn't

That's kinda the big problem I have with this game is like... yeah, you can use skips and stuff to get around the map, but your ability to really move around is still very limited and (mostly) linear. The game would be a lot more interesting if I could explore freely by eventually figuring out how to basically move to any level I want - as it is, even if you're using all the shortcuts available to you, there's still a lot of annoying puzzles you have to do over and over again, some of which are difficult to solve, require 50+ steps, and can't be trivialized with wings/blade. I really want the game to become more open so there's less time wasted and less paranoia feeling like I'm missing stuff.

Well, finished with Cif and now I'm back to the beginning again.

I'm not really sure what to do now. I have some theories but I don't really want to spend time repeating things just to validate my theories. I suspect I need to kill Tail, Mon, and one other in a run with Gray, then return to B000, since there statue there depicts three things. I did get a shortcut hint from having the right number of locusts, but I don't yet know what to do with the glowing grids. Like, I think I know what they mean, but I'm not really sure where to apply them.

As a side note, I kinda wish they hadn't given Gray such comically large breasts

I played a little past the voided ending. I think it goes well past Outer Wilds and begins to dip into the territory of things like Fez and The Witness in how much tedium your expected to engage in. Even if you know what you're doing and are able to decipher the cryptic puzzles, it's a lot of repetition. It does do some pretty clever and impressive shit, but I'm not perceptive enough to figure the stuff out on my own, and doing the same puzzles multiple times grates on me too much.

I'll hope some YouTuber does a deep dive on the story. The videos I've found so far aren't very good.

The voided ending was definitely my peak experience with this game so far

Paratroopa1 posted...

The voided ending was definitely my peak experience with this game so far

Yeah, kinda feel the same way

Paratroopa1 posted...

The game would be a lot more interesting if I could explore freely by eventually figuring out how to basically move to any level I want

That's basically what it is at your point. Yes you have to repeat puzzles but definitely none that are hard or 50 steps. Look up all the floor skips available to you. Like I said, I did everything with Gray and skipped a bunch of the repetition. You can get to where you want in like 10 mins.

Figure out all the brand rooms and floor 000 and a certain floor in the 200s.

Finally got around to finishing the game, mostly out of curiosity for how it would end.

After wasting time trying to get to Mon in Gray's playthrough, I just looked up what to do. Wound up looking up many of the answers in the DIS section, not because I think I couldn't have solved them, but rather because I wasn't sure if becoming voided would impact things negatively. At that point, I was pretty done with the game wasting my time. It ended up not mattering since Bee takes all your locusts anyway, and I didn't want to attempt a deathless run of that fight.

One thing I don't really get about the DIS fight...why is the weakness the right bit? Was there supposed to be a clue about this somewhere?

Overall, game does some cool shit, but it's so mired in forced repetition (made worse by the fact that the game is happy to force you to start over). And as far as puzzle games go, this feels closer to Fez than Outer Wilds/Tunic.

DIS puzzles are far and away the best part of the game, such a good reward for persevering. But that's why the game only works if you genuinely like the puzzles. The reward is just more and harder puzzles. I also don't know if getting voided does anything there. But you should be able to get back there from the beginning in like 10 mins.

I got stuck hard on the right fetus on the boss and had to look it up. Kept going for the left. Not sure why they did that.

I did like some of the puzzles there, but I entered with only around 30 locusts, and watching them tick down while not really knowing if I'd be able to get through kinda killed my enjoyment. Feel like they should've just auto-voided you at that point--they definitely could have come up with a reason for it.

And yeah, I went for the left one too. I think Lavos hard conditioned me to do that.

Realized today that they never even bothered to reveal what the letter from Gray was all about. It got teased at the beginning and end of Lillie's route and so I assumed the true end would touch on it or something.

I still have to go back and finish this game but I'm still feeling dissatisfied with the fact that I accidentally looked up the answer for how to kill Tail but absolutely no amount of exploring the game OR cheating and looking stuff up is telling me how I was supposed to figure out how? so I don't even know if I'm sequence breaking. I've done all three characters' normal endings and I know I need to kill everyone and then go to floor 000 for some reason

This game is extremely cool but also deeply frustrating, I really don't know how to evaluate it

Paratroopa1 posted...

I still have to go back and finish this game but I'm still feeling dissatisfied with the fact that I accidentally looked up the answer for how to kill Tail but absolutely no amount of exploring the game OR cheating and looking stuff up is telling me how I was supposed to figure out how? so I don't even know if I'm sequence breaking. I've done all three characters' normal endings and I know I need to kill everyone and then go to floor 000 for some reason

This game is extremely cool but also deeply frustrating, I really don't know how to evaluate it

If you get to the brand room and speak to the intact seal, it tells you to hit the statue guarding the first traitorous lord's weakness 23 times. You're supposed to infer that her tail is her weakness since that's the only new thing getting rid of that statue opens up.

I agree with you about the game being cool but frustrating. I feel like the game could have benefitted from much tighter design and less forced repetition.

Honestly though I just really love Outer Wilds/The Witness/Tunic and I feel I've been chasing the same high I got from those games

I did get to the brand room (pain in the ass, honestly I got halfway through figuring out the solution and then I was like, "okay I get it, I'm just gonna look it up now" because I was kinda over it) but I must have missed that somehow? I'm not sure how I missed that.

VintageGin posted...

Honestly though I just really love Ourer Wilds/The Witness/Tunic and I feel I've been chasing the same high I got from those games

Agreed, Outer Wilds is my #1 game of all time, The Witness is like a top 10-20 game, and Tunic is definitely a top 100 game for me also although I have some more problems with Tunic - I really wish that the powerup cards you find actually did more useful things, so that if you could solve the puzzle of 'what do they do' that could be a sort of alternate wincon to the game's otherwise unnecessarily hard combat - I don't know why the combat in the game is so hard if you can't solve it by figuring out the game's puzzles. Tunic is so good otherwise though so I kinda wish it was just the like 5% more of the way to being perfect

But yeah I am basically chasing after more games that are like Outer Wilds and The Witness which are both 10/10 games for me and unfortunately Void Stranger LOOKS like it's going to get there at times but it doesn't quite put it all together. Some of the ideas this game has are AWESOME but the whole package is frustrating

Yeah, I kinda get that complaint. It's a little incongruous with the rest of the game that the boss battles just require you to get good at the combat rather than having more puzzle-y solutions. I didn't mind it too much, though I definitely could have done without the graveyard battle segment.

But the manual in that game resonates with me so much given I spent so much time as a child just looking at the manual for Zelda 1. It was such a cool way of presenting the game.

And yeah, I picked up Void Stranger precisely because I'd seen comparisons to the other games. Like you said, it seems like it almost gets there, but I feel like the game gets bogged down with how many sokoban puzzles there are and how hard some of them get. I almost feel like the second act should have been something else entirely. The larger, overarching puzzles were far more interesting than the 200th move-the-tile puzzles.

I also think the game doesn't really do a good job of respecting the player's time with regard to the forced repetition.

Outer Wilds is completely flawless and prob the game of its decade. This game does actually compare to it, which is crazy. There's been a bunch of "brainia" type games since OW and they all feel like a shadow of OW, or just plain miss the mark. VS stands apart and on its own and is so fresh. Tunic was fun but definitely disjointed and a bit shallow. They had too much Souls on the brain.

I hated the repetition and lack of undo at first but after it is super convincing. It does demand time from the player, but actually relatively little to deliver the feeling of mastery, speedrunning, sequence breaking, and most importantly DEPTH, which other games spend way more time and fail to do. OW also famously requires repetition, and that turns a lot of people off, but it's crucial. If you think that was a good use of time but not VS, then just aren't as much of a sokoban psycho as the ending of this game is designed for. I literally never was disappointed to see another puzzle (especially the DIS ones).

I was actually disappointed in the shooter tbh cuz I knew I wouldn't want to go deep into that.

What makes this even more frustrating for me is that I LIKED the sokoban puzzles. Like, some people really don't enjoy the basic puzzle solving in this game but I actually did... THE FIRST TIME. Only on the first playthrough. After that? I was done with that shit. I didn't want to do the 'hard mode' puzzles and looked up a lot of solutions, and I really think the game would have been much better if there were even more shortcuts and more ways to hop around the game freely.

I feel like you could go to any room you wanted in 5 mins, 10 max. I guess it could've been faster but it's not significantly different from an OW run.

The thing is, it's not a puzzle anymore after you solve it once. It's terrain that you navigate through, also like in OW.

Also you could skip hard mode entirely if you are looking stuff up anyways (I did).

The thing about Outer Wilds though is that it guides your experience a lot better. "There's more to explore here" meant that I wasn't doubting whether I was wasting time or not on something.

While you can skip the hard mode portion, there's nothing in the game that suggests it's optional.

And the idea that it turns from a puzzle into terrain is sorta true, but it still requires more focus to navigate than OW, with likely more unique inputs and more thought in how to get to where you want. I definitely shot past a floor that I intended to visit, partly because I forgot where it was, and partly because I was using the shortcuts the game provided me without thinking about the fact that I'd miss a key floor.

Yeah if it had the OW style knowledge map it would probably be more accessible. I liked having to dig through the internet to find answers, especially since I played early and the game had few players that (unlike Souls) there weren't any guides or videos for some things, just some people on discord. But I don't think a little in-game guide like that would've hurt the game, would've been nice.

The shortcuts are definitely hard to use and I messed them up many times. I also killed myself many times trying to go fast in OW. Both were super satisfying when you got it right though, and I want more games that challenge you like that.