Void Stranger

Void stranger is an esoteric, unique and often tedious game who's primary audience is the type of player who are fine spending countless hours to unravel the mysteries surrounding the main plot. If you are this kind of player, then this game will likely be one of your favourite games. However, if you want a game that respects your time then you should look elsewhere.

This is a 'sokoban' puzzle game, a type of puzzle named after a series of warehouse box organising games from the 80s. It sounds obscure, but if you've played any amount of Japanese videogames you're sure to have run across a few of these types of puzzles before, scattered into titles like zelda or pokemon.
The game, at first, seems like a dungeon consisting of around 200 of these puzzles which you have to methodically work through. This is punctuated every now and then with cutscenes which give backstory as to why you've entered the dungeon in the first place. Without knowing any of the tricks, this first run will take you around 3-7 hours and will likely end ambiguously, without offering any real resolution to the story you've experienced so far. As no guidance is provided to the player, the intended experience appears to be to replay the game multiple times, discovering as many tricks as possible in order to reach the true ending of this section. Unfortunately this means playing the same puzzles repeatedly until you discover certain tricks which let you traverse the dungeon faster. The bloated playtime counts you see from people who have finished the various routes of this game mostly come from repeatedly going through these puzzles and secret hunting. Although fun at first, I got very tired of these puzzles after a few runs and around 20 hours of play and ended up looking up a couple of the secrets in order to reach the second ending faster. It was quite fun and rewarding discovering secrets myself, but ultimately it took too much time for me.

The storytelling philosophy is similar to dark souls, in which you'll experience story snippets through esoteric interactions with NPCs, which won't make much sense until you've experienced the large majority of these interactions and put the pieces together. If you're in the 1% of people who went through dark souls putting the lore together item description by item description and not the 99% who just listen to some hours long video essay summarising it for you, you'll probably really enjoy this aspect. Unfortunately I found the story a bit lacking overall.

The perfect version of this game for me would be between 15-20 hours long and involve more than just the same type of puzzle over and over again. As it is I can't really reccommend this game, but I did have some fun with it. Just not enough to justify the massive time commitment.

Hermoso y cruel, pero compensa lo último con creces. Aquí tus errores pesan hasta el final y tu voluntad de seguir avanzando es crucial. Sin duda uno de mis videojuegos favoritos y no me canso de hablar ni de escribir sobre él.