In lieu of having the time to actually write anything of my usual length, or the two reviews I have cooking, I’ll announce news of a game that’s fallen off the radars of most: The Void, from Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge. Formerly called Tension, it’s been available for ages in Russia and Germany, and is coming to English-speakers in a couple weeks.
Never heard of Ice-Pick? Your loss. They made one of the best and most important games in history. Only it’s not really your loss, because it was also one of the most broken and FUBARed games in history, as so eloquently told by John Walker. With this, their second outing, early noises suggest that Ice-Pick has done it again, only this time without the FUBARing.
That first game, the FUBAR one, was Pathologic. Very few played it, fewer still could stomach it for more than a few hours. But it was monumentally important. Grim, brooding, eerie, Pathologic presented a world that’s hard to describe – a game about a town so ravaged by an unknown disease that even its structures were getting sick. A game that knew it was a game, and even told you so. An open world that was truly open, and brutally unforgiving: where if something happened without you present, you just missed it, period, and tough luck if that means you can’t finish now. A game where even things as innocuous as the food would give you nightmares. An insane place literally plagued; by a gruesome history, a blood-drenched present, and a doomed future. A slow, slow, slow game so badly translated that it approached incomprehensibility. Buggy enough to overwhelm an entomologist. Unplayable by most people, and not just because of the bugs. But just amazing, for reasons that are best described in Quintin Smith’s beautiful three-parter Butchering Pathologic.
Anyway, The Void looks to follow Ice-Pick’s tradition of plumbing dark depths of the human soul. Actually, in The Void you are a soul – the Void is where souls go when they’ve lost their owners. And the journey necessary to get it back is one of profound exploration through a realm that hungers for color – one resource you must master and use as trade, food, and firepower. It employs a glyph-drawing system (similar to what we saw in Arx Fatalis), something which I’ve never really been enamored of, if only because I’ve never seen it that well implemented. I’m hoping that Ice-Pick has overcome this issue in The Void.
Like Pathologic before it, The Void looks to be a slow-paced game about exploration, one in which you must return color to the world and free yourself by breaking your soul’s bond with Sisters, lissome females protected by hideous Brothers (yes, yes, I know). Once again it seems like the game will be unforgiving and deliberately tricksy, and not necessarily “fun” in the classic sense. But it looks worth it, particularly since English-speaking reviewers lucky enough to get an early copy are saying that The Void is brilliantly translated and largely bug free.
It also looks like this game is unabashedly carnal, including as it does very dark and disturbingly erotic undertones, copious nudity, and reflections on sexual control and domination between the genders. It is not, nor was Pathologic, a game for Little Timmy. But then, it’s about time we get more games that aren’t for Timmy. Ice-Pick Lodge is not about space marine shooters; it’s one of the creepiest, most creative, most genuinely artistic and thoughtful development houses around today, and I’m hoping they’re able to continue producing work well into the future.
You can learn more about The Void by reading Quintin’s RPS review yonder.
I really, really wanted to love Pathologic like I should. But I just couldn’t get over the awful system performance and downright broken translation. Please tell me this one will be in ENGLISH ENGLISH, and not phoned in translation from university students.
Intriguing.
I’m right there with you, Jdeuel. I played it and saw the genius, but I couldn’t get past the constant crashes and brutal difficulty. Never even finished the Bachelor’s story, the first of the three. It’s like a great novel you just can’t finish, or a brilliant movie you always fall asleep during.
But what I’ve heard so far is that The Void’s translation is second to none. Ice-Pick is very responsive to consumers and has taken complaints about Pathologic seriously.
This is a game, and a reference, I was planning to use in my review of Heaven. Small world. 😉
I read big things about Pathologic on quite a few sites but was always put off by the translation problems and stability/performance issues. I hope The Void addresses these sorts of problems because it’s like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul when I know something has promise but trips up on fundamental stuff.
Ahh! Yes it was John Walker’s article that I read some time ago about it.
The good news is that in some interviews, Ice-Pick has made noises about possibly remaking Pathologic at some point in the future, when they have money. Then perhaps we could experience it as it was meant to be. I’m kinda hoping GSC does the same thing with the original STALKER, because the 1935 build is just breathtaking in its ambition, but utterly unplayable. And in Russian.
Dang! I don’t believe I’ve heard of either Pathologic or The Void. What, have I been living in a cave all these years?!? Anybody have a copy of Pathologic for loan or sale? 🙂
These guys again… I liked a lot of things about Pathologic but it was a mean-spirited game in that it didn’t care about the player. I do remember a lot of it though, always a sign of a good game. It stuck in my memory but somewhere along the line the devs lost the thread. It’s pretty basic stuff that you need to keep asses in seats. If you get to pick your asses and still can’t keep them, what exactly are you doing?
I’ll have to take a look at this though. Steerpike is constantly unearthing weirdness in gaming and I do love me some weirdness.
Lakerz, I have Pathologic. PM me if you are still looking.
Thanks Mike, sorry I didn’t reply back until now and thanks for the kind offer! I did find a relatively cheap used copy of the game (still waiting for it to arrive). In the meantime, I read the links that Matt provided within the article and through them found a semi-recent LP (Let’s Play) thread at the Something Awful forums. I’ve been working my way through it which provides a good sense of what the game is like. At this point, I realize that Pathologic is not the game for me, heh. One thing I hate having to do in a game is micromanage things like hunger, exhaustion, immunity, etc. That has never seemed fun to me, just work. So, I think I would be one of the many people that try this game out and then never make it past day 1 or 2, hehehehe. Still, reading through the LP thread is fascinating. I do truly dig the evolving storyline and how the 3 playable characters all have different objectives/goals that intertwine within the game’s meta themes. This LP is for the bachelor (doctor) character, but I’m hoping to find ones for the other 2 characters as well. Supposedly, playing through as the female character is nigh impossible without serious frustration due to the translation issues.
In any case, I look forward to Ice-Picks next release…