How Void Stranger rethinks hardcore puzzlers
Back in 2019 I put out a video essay analyzing System Erasure's previous game, ZeroRanger, mostly as a way of seeing if making video essays about games might be fun enough to spend time on1. I really enjoyed that game, but I distinctly remember that after beating it for the first time that I felt a bit disappointed in the scarcity of the narrative content relative to its high quality. SE seems to have acausally taken that unspoken disappointment as a challenge because their excellent new Sokoban puzzler Void Stranger is a bottomless fucking rabbit hole of lore, plot, and secret endings2. But rather than spoil people on that for no good reason, I fell into one of my classic game design fugue states and wrote something more in the vein of my old ZeroRanger vid, boiling down what I think are the most innovative aspects of Void Stranger's design. And I will proceed to talk about that after this very important message:
WARNING: This essay contains MAJOR gameplay spoilers for Void Stranger (as well as very minor spoilers for some other popular puzzle games). The game is best experienced blind. No seriously, the discord has like 5 levels of spoiler channel so people can get help without spoiling themselves. If you haven't played the game go play it (it's 10/10, highly recommend), if you don't want to then watch the release trailer and reconsider. If you still don't want to, then try playing ZeroRanger and realizing how good SE is at making games that appeal to people outside of that game's genre niche. This will surely convince you and you will not make the foolish mistake of continuing to scroll out of laziness.
The traditional formula
To understand the interesting thing I want to point out in Void Stranger's design, it's useful to look at how a typical hardcore puzzle game is laid out. The most basic recipe is to have the game split up into isolated puzzles accessible from a bare-bones level select, with sets of harder puzzles being unlocked by beating easier ones.
More interesting games such as Baba is You or The Witness tend to play with the "level select" side of things by including more obscure puzzles outside the context of the normal levels as well as an exploration element (among other things). But one thing remains almost constant across all games in this genre: The puzzle is sacrosanct. You will, with very few exceptions, always be given the exact same tools and starting conditions every time you start up the same puzzle. To expand on this point:
There is no way to earn new abilities (outside of new knowledge) that can be applied to previous puzzles.
Puzzles generally have (roughly) one intended solution.
You can undo mistakes freely.
Because of all this, you aren't really expected to solve the same puzzle more than once.
And this makes sense:
Granting you new abilities that make puzzle solving easier is, in a sense, just removing the actual puzzle and replacing it with an easier one.
Admittedly the "one intended solution" is less of a hard rule, but slide too far in the other direction and you've basically just made a strategy game.
The challenge of solving a puzzle isn't in the execution, solving a puzzle more than once is just a tedious exercise in memorization. On a similar note, not giving the player the freedom to undo and reset at their leisure usually just introduces unnecessary friction rather than any real challenge.
But Void Stranger's great innovation is that it, amazingly, breaks all of these rules and gets away with it through some very clever design decisions. Let's take a look at its structure and see how it differs.
First impressions
To recap, here's how the game appears to be structured at first glance:
Your character starts on the floor of a dungeon and must make progress by reaching the stairs located somewhere else on the same floor (the entire floor is always visible and stairs are helpfully highlighted should anything be obscuring them). Reaching the stairs puts them on the next floor down. There is no other way to traverse floors; you cannot travel backwards.
Reaching the stairs often necessitates solving a (difficult!) puzzle that involves moving floor tiles around, manipulating predictable enemies, and pushing blocks and statues. Stuff in the level only moves when you do.
Many floors contain optional objectives. Obtaining these is usually significantly harder than simply just reaching the stairs. Oftentimes one of the optional objectives is a chest that grants you a locust idol when opened.
Falling into an empty floor space or running into an enemy kills you, consuming a locust idol and resetting the puzzle to its initial state. There's no way to undo actions, so it's sometimes necessary to kill yourself if the puzzle has been put into an unsolvable state. Presumably, something will happen if you die without any locust idols (This is just one of the many unexplained mysteries the game presents you with as you climb downwards).
Some floors contain NPCs, murals, or memories that will expand on the game's plot and lore, as well as hint at secret content.
It's worth noting that virtually no mechanics are outright explained and the player is left to figure out pretty much everything by themselves, though as we’ll see in a moment important stuff tends to be strongly hinted at.
This floor’s puzzle is like Frogger, but uses snakes. It is not like the Snake one, which uses a big millipede.
So the game seems, at the moment, like a curious mix of a dungeon crawler and the more traditional puzzler structure seen above. Certainly a lot of quality of life features are missing in service of the strange life system and forced linear progression, but overall puzzles still function like the sealed off systems we discussed.
Now, speaking of the life system: if you die without any locusts (which will happen to most players, this game is tough) you'll be given the option to continue right where you left off or give up. The game does not indicate at this point what the downside to this is3, so I imagine most players choose to continue on rather than risk losing progress. Continuing on afflicts you with the VOIDED status, allowing you to die freely without losing any new locust idols you pick up. Funnily enough, this status brings the game closer to the traditional style by allowing unlimited resets, but it also serves as the trigger for the first part of the game's interesting structural subversions.
Before I get to that though I'll mention briefly one of the more unique NPC interactions found about halfway through the dungeon. Your progress is blocked off by a large head, who (incapable of moving) demonstrates a secret way to use the smirking statues you've been seeing throughout your climb: By falling down in front of one, all your locust idols will be consumed and you'll be skipped ahead an equal number of floors. This is your first glimpse at how movement between floors isn’t as rigid as it might seem4.
Second loop
Once you've managed to traverse the entire dungeon, about 200 floors, one of two things will happen depending on whether you have the VOIDED status or not. If you've been absurdly careful and managed to not void out you're rewarded with the game's first real ending. But the much more likely outcome is that you've voided out and will therefore be presented with a hauntingly beautiful vocal musical number, the game's "bad" ending. You’re then forced to use the hidden functionality of a four-eyed statue (also found throughout the dungeon), which clears your VOIDED status but resets you back to the top of the dungeon.
At first, this set up seems pretty rough, and if the game was simply asking you to solve the same couple-hundred puzzles again (but without making mistakes this time) it would be a pretty egregious design flaw. But right before resetting you're given a pretty blatant hint on how to use one of the game's main hidden systems. Roughly 20 floors down is a "brand" room. Arranging the tiles here in the fairly obvious 6x6 pattern being shoved in your face unlocks a hidden room that grants you the "Memory" item, allowing you to speak to rocks (who drop gameplay hints and lore). From this point on, the second half of Void Stranger's gameplay starts to unfold: an ARG exploration element that recontextualizes the entire game. If you've been taking notes on the murals found throughout the dungeon you'll notice that each one is shortly preceded by a brand room with the exact right set up to draw the brand depicted by that mural5.
As you proceed through your second run, new NPC interactions and information obtainable from rocks scatter bits of novelty throughout the old floors. More interestingly though, you'll pick up two items from the secret brand rooms that make progress much faster: wings to fly over gaps and a sword that can kill enemies (which you get from one of the game's sick-ass Sokoban boss fights). Once-brutal puzzles become trivial, which brilliantly weaves that exhilarating feeling you get from using cheat codes for the first time right into normal gameplay. You tear your way through to the bottom of the dungeon once more. If you've voided again (Sokoban boss fights ain't easy!) you'll be reset, but keep your items. On your third run, thanks to some new interactions on the first few floors, you'll learn how to collect much more locusts, as well as how to use those locusts to discover shortcuts. A knowledgeable player with the right items can go straight to the bottom of the dungeon in minutes, a task that might’ve originally taken them hours. Thanks to this fascinating knowledge-based pseudo-roguelite6 progression, reaching the bottom without voiding just gets easier and easier.
Hardmode(s)
Once you've obtained the Void Stranger's first good ending, you'll be put through two additional gameplay modes. The first is a return to the game's initial structure, with harder versions of every level, colloquially known as "Hardmode". While you can technically obtain the items again in this run, the game initially nudges you in the direction of not doing this by removing them from their original locations. This is a purer puzzle-solving mode, with some of the hardest puzzles in the game, but it won't matter if you void out. Plus, a determined player can get around solving them if they really feel the need to.
Once you've beaten Hardmode, you're sent into a third mode that's much more focused on the secret-hunting exploration side of the game. Levels are back to their original, easy configuration, and every item is unlocked from the start, but reaching the ending is no longer a simple matter of getting to the bottom. You'll have to use all your secret tricks to jump around the dungeon and probe around until you find what you need, training you to observe carefully and follow up on the mysteries left unsolved. The gameplay this reminds me the most of is Outer Wilds, but I feel Void Stranger's more rigid structure and ability to mix things up with long strings of hardcore puzzles7 lends it more engaging and varied pacing.
Once you've completed all three main modes you aren't left with any obvious direction to go in. But, like with any great puzzle-exploration game, combining all your skills and investigating those secrets that have been right under your nose from the start eventually brings you to the game's "final" ending... which I see no need to spoil here!
...
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Wrap up
Now that we've covered both the traditional structure of hardcore puzzlers and how Void Stranger diverges from it, let's review those traditional rules and how the game avoids the problems that might arise from breaking them:
No new abilities and only solving puzzles once: By getting the player to loop through puzzles multiple times, Void Stranger can maintain the purity of the puzzle solving on the first run while shifting the player's focus to exploration and secret finding on any further run. Because of this shifted focus, the game is free recontextualize the puzzle with new abilities, even if it ruins the difficulty, because the challenge no longer lies in the puzzle itself.
Freedom to undo: On later runs that are trying to avoid voiding, limited resets add a welcome sense of challenge to puzzles that have technically already been solved. But thanks to the safety net that voiding provides, Void Stranger is still able to provide this freedom to undo when it’s trying to present a purer form of puzzle solving.
Open-ended puzzles: While most puzzles still have roughly one intended solution, optional objectives and the slightly open-ended nature of some puzzles (especially once you have items) blends well with the lives system and adds a unique element of resource management and risk-reward not typically found in the genre. Notably, a certain common optional collectable only appears when you aren’t voided, preserving that risk element and often providing novel challenge on later runs.
And there you have it. Eero Lahtinen and Antti Ukkola have further proven to be game dev geniuses and I hope this game makes them gobs of money so they can fly to a convention somewhere where I can congratulate them in person for once again Saving Indie Games. Oh, and if you two are reading this and want to get this game onto the switch, DM me on twitter or discord or something.
It was fun, but not as much as actually making games. I won't link that video here for every day I strive to stop being the number one world champion at embarrassing myself.
This is probably the only game I've ever played that makes me want to write a lore doc, probably in part due to the tragic lack of attention it's been getting (i.e. no one's done it for me).
As much as savvy players might suspect one exists.
I'll also note that this dumps players straight into some of the game's harder levels with 0 locusts, making it quite likely they'll void out if they haven't yet.
The brand rooms precede the murals, which, cleverly, makes it impossible for players to draw those brands on their first run without outside knowledge, with the exception of the first brand and your personal brand.
To be perfectly clear here, the game features no randomization. Well, with a couple of minor exceptions, but they’re not really relevant.
Even the "exploration" mode ends with a series of unique puzzles that require the items, rather than treating them as cheat codes. Also an awesome bomberman-esque boss fight.