So I don't know if anyone else got the latest Indie Royale bundle, and I don't know if anyone remembers
The Void, but I swear to God I made some huge post about it and I can't find it anywhere. So that kind of sucks. However, the latest Indie Royale bundle has the game in it! Which I basically got in on like minutes before the thing ended, so posting about it would have been rather pointless.
Anyway.
The Void.
This is the review that will make Cobra hate it, though it's written with a lot of respect and admiration. I think some of the information is wrong, though, because a lot of what he says isn't told to you actually is. If you root through the journal, you find helpful information about many things. This may have been patched in, I have no idea. I don't know if any updates were made for the game's inclusion in this bundle, either. I've also noted a number of things that other reviews mentioned about the punishing difficulty, like the drawing system being a bit too loose and letting you lose color reserves in failed glyphs, but I haven't experienced this that I've noticed. Failed glyphs just do nothing. So some rough spots may well have been patched out or updated.
This is the glowing review that admits to some faults but also gushes about why the game is so important. You will note that neither of these reviews are recent, both being from 2009. Good bit of intervening time there, but the game is still gorgeous. The engine won't wow you, and the graphics aren't technically impressive, but the artistry and design smother all that.
Anyway, I'll probably blog more about this at some point since I'm sort of not really visiting OWnet anymore unless I feel the need to share something, but I spent a couple hours with this game tonight and... wow. Just wow. This is the very definition of the rather overused term "emergent gameplay", and if you go in with only a vague idea of what the game is, you'll be surprised and intrigued almost constantly. Just when you start to feel bored, or like you're doing something wrong, or you need some direction, something clicks in your mind, or something amazing happens, or a new mechanic is introduced, or you're given something new to see and do.
It's an artsy game, but it's also not. Nothing here has felt like an art gimmick to me, and I was quickly drawn into the world and the emotion and the doubt. So much doubt. This isn't an art presentation with a thin premise for a game beneath it. This is something thoroughly planned out, and the game part is very much there. This is a difficult game that requires you to think and make reasonable choices about where you go, when you go there, why you're going, and how you intend to get back. I don't think it's as hard as it's being made out to be (likely due to some stuff getting fixed), but you can fuck yourself pretty hard if you aren't careful.
I actually bought the game a good while ago, a boxed copy, but my computer was dead at the time and I never really got to try it beyond fiddling with it on my laptop for a few minutes (it didn't run so well on that). I've thought about it several times since and still never played it, mostly because I didn't take my PC games when I moved from California. So I saw it on this bundle and that was that, I knew I needed to snag it. And I'm very glad I did. It's a fascinating game that I obviously can't speak much more about having only been in a short while, but it's already succeeded on so many levels for me. I can't wait to see where it's going to go, and anyone interested in gaming owes it a look. This is different and crazy, beautiful and fascinating. And not just because it has copious amounts of nudity and deals with odd themes. The actual way it works is unique too, and there are things I can tell you already that you won't quite be expecting just from reading general descriptions of it.
EDIT - Worth noting that on their site, you can get
patches for difficulty too. If you just want to enjoy the other stuff and not the game's toughness, there's an easy patch and medium patch. Apparently there are some other things you can tweak, too. There's also a torrent of "bonus disk" stuff they made available, and eventually someone subbed the Russian videos, so you can download the subs and use VLC to check stuff out.
