Shavings from Other People’s Nightmares

Normally this would be filed under First Impressions, because that’s what we use when we’re talking about our first impressions of stuff. Clever, huh?

But these aren’t my first impressions of The Void. They are my eleventh impressions. And we don’t have a category for that.

So here are my eleventh impressions of The Void, a game by Russian studio Ice-Pick Lodge, creator of Pathologic and one of the great underappreciated art houses of development. Bear with me, as we’re about to talk about one of the oddest, smartest, hardest, and… dare I say it? Sexiest games I’ve ever played.

Impressions 1 Through 10

1. Can’t figure out the menu system. There are no labels! Do I click triangle or swoosh? Or… globby thing?
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2. Figured out the menu. Actually not that complicated. Played for about an hour and found something eerie, brilliantly art-directed, and… there’s that word again… sexy.
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3. Died. This happens a lot. Game is ridiculously hard. Opinion going downhill rapidly.
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4. (see 3)
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5. I can see why a lot of people would walk away in frustration. It’s insanely difficult. The instructions are well-written and well-translated, but not clear. Manual and game both act like I should know something I don’t. It’s a real pity to see something like this fall prey to a couple of boneheaded decisions about play mechanics.
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6. (see 3, 4)
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7. Fuck it. This game is just as broken as Pathologic, and with just as much squandered opportunity to stratospherificate the concept of artsy game development. They painted a Rembrandt then pooped on it and hung the sodden mess. They’ve released cheat codes but I’ve just lost interest. Not recommended.
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   {Fast forward four months. MrLipid – who’d bought a boxed copy of The Void because I thought it would be a great Closet candidate – lets me know that someone has hacked together an “easy” patch. Apparently it helps a lot, so once more into the breach.}
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8. Easier, definitely. But I still don’t… get it. Aspects of play are strangely circuitous. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something, some mechanic that would make it all clear and reduce that insane difficulty. I just don’t understand why certain things are happening. Or how. Plus, I get the idea that the game is actively misleading me.
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9. Lipid gets in touch again with a link to a walkthrough of The Void. Aha! It’s poorly translated but does explain some things. After nine plays and lots of reading, plus a few lucky guesses, I finally get it. I GET IT! Now I can actually enjoy the game. Whoops, not quite yet (see 3, 4, 6). Understanding is clearly not mastery.
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10. Okay, I started over. So far so good. I haven’t really made much progress but between the Easy Patch and the once-you-get-it-it’s-pretty-simple mechanics I was failing to grasp, this is a highly playable game. You know what, though? I did miss one thing. Gotta watch that sickle-shaped bar more closely. Grr. Oh well, I’m only like 30 minutes in, I’ll just start over.

The Void: Eleventh Impressions

All living things must die. And when you die, you go to the Void.

But most souls only linger there briefly. Souls are heavy, you see, and they sink once there’s no life to hold them. The Void is the event horizon of the soul: the last point one can pass before the weight of the soul carries it beyond reach. Once a soul sinks past the Void, it is lost forever to this universe. That is True Death.

Now and then a soul is able to hold on in the Void for a while, and delay that last descent.

Nothing lives in the Void, though nothing there is truly dead. It is an abandoned labyrinth of interconnected chambers that look like shavings from other people’s nightmares. It used to be a colorful place, but now almost no color remains. And that’s a problem, because Color is everything in The Void: it is life, it is power, it’s your only resource. Without it you die, and you need it for basically any action.

As a soul that’s managed to cling to the Void, you roam its sinusoidal tubes and chambers in search of Color, always hemorrhaging your dwindling supply. There are horrors that attack you and slurp Color from your very body. Travel along the pathways that link the Void’s realms is a slow but certain death sentence as Color drains with every step. And the place itself, so macabre, so… I can’t even describe it. The Void is so beautiful and so hideous that there’s no comparison. Wild gardens of Color riot against rust and rot and dereliction; monsters madmen couldn’t fathom protect (and sometimes brutalize) lissome women who are, frankly, hot – in a way that will render you equally aroused and ashamed. You, too, will protect (and sometimes brutalize) these women, these Sisters, who were never human, existing both separate from and inherent to the Void.

Your relationship with the Sisters – whether (and how much) you help or hurt them, what you give and what you ask in return – is the core of The Void. True to form, Ice-Pick Lodge accomplished something here, particularly with the sexuality in this game. There are very clear undertones of victimization (and darker things) but somehow there is a duality in its presentation that makes the experience both alluring and enervating. The Sisters are often naked, often helpless, yet simultaneously very powerful: sometimes much more so than the ones who hurt them.

Sisters want Color. If you get it for them they will help you. And when you do give them that gift the erotic charge of the game drives even further; their reactions to receiving their favorite colors are implicative of ecstasy and suffering at the same time. And despite yourself you’ll be staring, your heart beating in a certain way. As I gave Color to the first Sister, drop by drop as I could spare it, I couldn’t tell whether her writhings were borne out of fulfillment or seduction or lust. I didn’t know whether she wanted me or hated me or was just using me for my Color. Yes, the Sisters are attractive (usually) and yes, they’re often naked. But neither of those things contribute that much to the sexual energy of the game. Why it’s so erotic is impossible to describe, but trust me, it is. Heavy Rain was great, but its attempts at eroticism were downright pathetic compared to what you’ll find in The Void. This is a game that will turn you on, and honestly I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that does that. What’s shocking about it here is that The Void has many messages and themes – and many visuals – that shouldn’t be a turn-on at all.

It is so clear that artists designed this game, and artists wrote it. It is not just about sexuality, though that’s a major part. The use of nudity, the use of eroticism, even the suggestions of violence are part of a multimedia tapestry that Ice-Pick Lodge is trying to tell, and if it weren’t such a frustrating game they’d belong in the Smithsonian. Because you couldn’t produce The Void as a book, or a movie, or an opera. It has to be a game, just like Pathologic had to be a game: you have to be there, you have to see, to experience. In time the games show you things that would be meaningless unless you’d been involved. You have take the actions that reveal what Ice-Pick is trying to say. It wouldn’t work if they just told you. Pathologic had a lot of problems, and so does The Void, but god, with both games you can so obviously tell that you’re looking at the work of people who have a distinct artistic vision and the means to communicate it. Never before have I wanted to love two games as much as I want to love The Void and Pathologic. But while I eventually gave up on the latter – as artistically resonant as it was, it just wasn’t fun to play – in the case of The Void I might just make it. The art is so totally there. The game I’m less sure about.

The Void is a fairly slow action-adventure – I’m reminded of Arx Fatalis, and not only because of the glyph-based magic system. Both games are bleak and undergroundy, and don’t require lightning reflexes. Moreover, neither do much to help you understand what’s going on. You’re a soul who’s made it to the Void, and one of the very few who might have a chance of turning this grim nightmare realm into something better. Play your cards right and you might even be able to return your own life. But souls are heavy, remember – mess up in the Void and you’ll never come back.

{Interlude}

This ties in with both the “ridiculously hard” issue and the “it makes no damned sense” issue because the developers so grossly overamped the difficulty and were so thoroughly (and, perhaps, intentionally) opaque in explaining how to gather, use, and benefit from Color.

Because pared down to sheer simplicity, The Void is a resource management game wrapped up in incredible beauty, stunning art direction, haunting poetry, deep philosophy, ruminous examinations of afterlife, and unbelievable eroticism.

Color comes in different colors (obviously). Each represents different things: Crimson is anger, Gold is trust, Silver is chance, and so on. It’s rare. It’s your hit points, it’s your ammunition, it’s your mana, it’s even your method of locomotion. You can’t do anything in The Void without Color. But the developers didn’t explain how to find, make, use, conserve, manage, organize, sustain, grow, wrangle, keep track of, or otherwise benefit from it. Rather, they did, but they didn’t do it clearly.

It’s actually simple. Here’s a handy diagram:

Ice-Pick Lodge saw fit to complicate the above beyond all comprehension of Byzantinism, tossing about words like Lympha and Nerva and Camera Obscura, never explaining what Color does, when its role changes, how it’s best used; never clarifying why this or that is safe or deadly. They go on and on about palettes and color drops and branches and how you can “rip” color from yourself, and how the Hearts can be open or closed, how Color can be spilled, and how the vials in the corner indicate how the Color within you is touching the Void, and so on until your brain leaks out your ears. Why they didn’t make it straightforward I don’t know:

• Pick up Color and it goes into a vessel there on the right (oh fine, if we must – in your Lympha).
• Move Lympha into your Hearts as needed.
• The SUM of Color in all your Hearts equals your total health.
• INDIVIDUAL colors, when in Hearts, also provide specific effects. (For example, lots of Blue would make you move more quickly, lots of Red would power your attacks)
• As you move around the Void and time passes, the Color in your Hearts is automatically processed and moved over to the left – your Nerva. Nerva no longer represents health; it’s like ammo or fuel. You can use to move around the Void, plant trees that will grow more Color, and paint glyphs that affect the world. You can use any Color to do anything, but again specific colors may be better than others at certain actions.

You have no fucking idea how long it took me to figure that out. And I consider myself at least modestly intelligent.

That’s it. That’s all they’d have had to do, along with assorted comparatively minor tweaks to improve some of the more ill-advised core gameplay mechanics. Do that and The Void would have it going on. I mean, a weird, slow, dialogue-heavy game about the sexuality of the afterlife might not have universal appeal, but it wouldn’t be consigned to Pathologic territory.

Color is absurdly scarce. And since your Hearts are always processing it into Nerva, it creates the illusion that you are constantly losing health. In truth it’s just being turned into a different tool, but what it boils down to, since it doesn’t clearly explain any of that, is that you drop dead a lot, and even once you figure out how to prevent it, there’s so little Color that the slightest delay or misstep can end the game for good. This is especially challenging since The Void doesn’t, by nature, hold your hand. What you do, when, is partly up to you. You’re not even told that some objectives are timed.

There are other subtleties as well: the faster time is moving, the faster your health drains. The fuller your Hearts are, the faster time will move. While in your Hearts, some colors might attract foes, or increase the amount of Nerva it costs to take some action. Similarly, some colors (in your Hearts, and only in your Hearts) may offer benefits like increased protection or faster travel. You’re expected to track all this in real time by constantly referring to… I don’t know… a billion tiny meters and gauges that aren’t always visible on the same screen and fucking move.

So it’s a juggling act. If they’d just tried to explain it more clearly, put a little more Color into the game in the first place, and done an assortment of tweaks to correct the stupider mechanic and control issues, the whole effect would be a cool resource management adventure. As is it’s just confusing. Thanks to the Easy Patch and eleven tries, I’ve now got the hang of it.

Interlude ends.

Back to the Artsy Stuff

Some reviews have gone out of their way to accuse The Void and Ice-Pick Lodge of sexism and objectification, and even worse things. There is a theme of sexual violence in the game, where men are presented as brutish, monstrous grotesques and women as helpless-but-all-powerful lost souls. I personally don’t think that Ice-Pick did what it did out of any anger toward women, or any intent to objectify them, or any desire to sexualize victimization. I really don’t, and others agree with me. I feel that The Void is, taken as a whole, a piece of art and that, like some pieces of art, it reflects aspects of the world as perceived by the artists – sometimes in uncomfortable ways. Personally I believe that what really upsets the game’s detractors is how effectively The Void manages to arouse while skirting the very edge of stuff that is just plain not right. But I believe the people who created it did so with honest artistic intention and genuine skill. Hell, there’s a FOUR GIGABYTE bonus download featuring hundreds of paintings, drawings, songs, poetry and other stuff use to inspire The Void. These guys aren’t the Housers, and this isn’t The Ballad of Gay Tony; they weren’t after cheap titillation. They were trying to say something.

Now, of course, if what they were trying to say doesn’t agree with you, I respect that position. I think they would as well. But it’s disingenuous to accuse Ice-Pick Lodge of some sort of anti-feminist sentiment simply because they used, at times, sexualized imagery near violence to make an artistic point. After all, is Spielberg a Nazi because he made Schindler’s List?

Much hay has also been made about the fact that The Void lies to you. It really does. It tells you one thing and does another. Characters lie, locations lie, even the game mechanics lie. Things you are assured will keep you alive conspire to kill you; places you’re led to believe are safe come under assault. You cannot trust The Void, which is interesting, because most of us go into games assuming that they won’t go out of their way to deceive us. Pathologic did it too. Of course, I’m not 100% sure how much of this was intent on the part of the designers, and how much was asinine design decisions. As much as I’d love to say that I trust Ice-Pick Lodge with absolute implicity, the fact of the matter is they’re a lot better at creating art than games. If they ever do get a few really solid game designers in that office… holy boy.

SO! Impressions? Do I recommend The Void?

At this point, I must quote games journalist  Tom Chick:

If I were Japanese, I would say “…”

Should you buy The Void? That answer depends entirely on your willingness to shed $19.99 (as of now on Steam) for a game that might shiver your timbers or might just annoy the crap out of you. I leave it in your hands, just as the Void would.

Email the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.