There’s a counter at the top corner of my current run in Void Stranger that’s keeping track of how long I’ve been playing. I’d open it up and get the exact number while I’m writing this, but if I do that I’ll never finish this piece. I know what would happen: an 896 x 576 px borderless window (the selectable resolution I decided was the Goldilocks zone for me) would present itself above my other windows, a flickering greyscale world of WonderSwan/Game Boy-like pixel art, my current character perched on a square in the middle of space. That’s where I left off, trying to figure out my next step. If I click on that icon now, I would be sucked in for the next three hours, not even thinking about it, just enjoying the slick visual aesthetics and an irresistible and urgent soundtrack as I solved more puzzle levels that are as fiendish as they are fair. Just like I did the second night I started playing the game.
If you’ve played System Erasure’s previous game, ZeroRanger, you know that it initially presents itself as a top-down shooter that unfolds into a much more complicated venture, Void Stranger is no different. Except, it’s perhaps even bolder. As with ZeroRanger there’s an imminent risk of spoiling too much, too easily. And while I personally, generally, don’t believe in spoilers, the reveals and shifts here are crucial enough to the experience that I’d wager they’re worth holding close to my chest.
Depending on your facility with block-moving puzzles the first dozen or so hours will be spent as the amply bosomed Casca-like named Lady Gray (there’s also a Griffith-like figure too). You will learn that she went into a hole in the ground that is a profoundly deep (several hundred floors) dungeon filled with traps, puzzles, monsters, and weirdos. Every dozen or so floors you’ll encounter a comforting tree where you can save your progress, and the game will abruptly close out. Don’t worry, your progress is saved. It’s a charming, if initially (and, well, always) jarring approach—what Dark Souls Bonfires booted you back into the real world without ceremony? But it’s a major driver for the way narrative unfolds in Void Stranger. When you boot the game back up you’ll be treated with a flashback to play through that will provide further (though cryptic and incomplete) insight as to who this big-titty Casca is and why she’s going through all this trouble.
And you will go through trouble. Each rest stop triggers a new addition to the puzzling you’ll do on your first trip through the dungeon. Whether it’s adding new types of blocks, or new enemies, or both—when the background music changes, shit is about to get so much more real. The first floor or two after will give you an adjustment level. Something to get you used to the new mechanic. Then that mechanic will be deployed against you in full force. One snake becomes two snakes. A bull on a single path will become three bulls that need to be goaded into each other. A fucking Ramiel will eventually show up and then soon you’re in a room full of fucking Ramiels that are going to fuck you up harder than they ever did Shinji (and he had a mech). Sometimes you’ll get a Ramiel, three bulls, a snake, and it’s become a regular Twelve Days of Christmas, only now the floor is made of ice (or glass) blocks and there are gargoyles that will obliterate you for making too many moves.
The first night I played Void Stranger I got to the first tree and stopped. I had bounced into a giant naga’s giant breasts and she asked me not to, and then I had done some light puzzling. It was a great time. The second night I played Void Stranger I was up until 5 a.m. My partner has our Christmas lights set on a timer for 2 a.m. They shut off in an operant conditioning premise to signal to me that I am 40 and should have long since gone to bed. It mostly works. But not now, not here. Lady Gray and I have business in this ever-subterranean dungeon, my headphones melted to my ears with sweat as I frantically live-die-repeating my way through floor after floor.
In addition to its very deft tutorialization, the beauty in how Void Stranger approaches both its dungeon crawling and sokoban-style puzzles is that they are extremely fast. Floors are small, puzzles (even when solutions are convoluted and not immediately forthcoming) are blitzable. This is where I admit that despite a childhood love for The Adventures of Lolo and those little sliding image puzzles, I am actually truly bad at solving puzzles, and that aside from the “what shape will this be when it’s folded up” puzzles, I have the spatial relations skills of a half-inflated volleyball with a face painted on it. I ripped through attempts at breakneck speed, sure that at some point the game was going to tell me that all my deaths have some profound meaning, that like Metal Gear Solid I was being graded silently and without my knowledge or consent by a dark and unseen arbiter, the results of which would be revealed at a later date. But in the moment, it didn’t matter to me, I was happy to die and study and die. Resetting puzzle rooms until I understood them, or had cheated my way through. When I realized the time on that second night, I reluctantly dragged myself to bed, and spent the next half an hour working out how to fit a Stream Deck into my budget and where it would go on my nightstand. If I had one, you see, I could be playing Void Stranger in bed. I could play Void Stranger forever. As it is, when I’m not playing Void Stranger, the soundtrack hums along in my head. Finally something powerful enough to beat out the terrible jingle for that horrible exercise bike company. It’s a tremendous soundtrack. And with good reason, it has to be, it’s part of the propulsion from floor to floor, puzzle to puzzle, death to death. The instant “Void Symphony” dropped I was hooked, but “Affection Air?” “Buzzing Boogie?” “Greedy Groove?” The deeper into the dungeon you go, the more bangers you’ll encounter. It’s like how Undernauts was a revelation for its spaced-out jazz and ska-infused Dungeon Brass. With Eero Lahtinen’s use of synth slap bass, bright piano, and a palette of chiptune-esque vibes that know exactly when to meld and break away from classic PC-88 RPG and trashy ‘80s OVA soundtracks, this soundtrack propelled me through death after death as I reset puzzle rooms sometimes by accident, and other times by flinging Lady Gray into the void. These infectious grooves set the rhythm for play, and even as I write this, the heavy distorted drum snaps of “Buzzing Boogie” are slamming away in my headphones.
I don’t know the exact hour count, but I do know I’m somewhere north of 20 hours in, and I certainly didn’t expect this kind of depth or how much curiosity it would inspire in me. Deaths matter, moves matter, there are secrets I still haven’t figured out but I’m working on, and there are secrets that I’m not sure I ever will. There are things I have yet to try, and even by my count at least one floor I managed to skip somehow. There are memories to unlock behind gems hidden in puzzles on floors I brute forced my way through. And I’ll get to them. I’m sure because I am fixated on continuing to throw myself at the multiple playthroughs (I’m through two of at least three now) pf this multi-modal dungeon that continues to surprise and delight and rearrange my expectations. Which is something I didn’t realize my dungeon crawling heart needed so desperately. Dungeon Crawlers, as much as we may romanticize system design and mazes and puzzles, are a comfortable and comforting genre. Even when they are brutally difficult because of encounter design, resource scarcity, or absurd map design, we know what to expect and all the ways to mitigate and get around them. Dungeon Crawlers are in many ways, for the people who play enough of them, Fancy Clickers. Which is fine, and good even. But sometimes something comes along and shows you a staggering new vision. Void Stranger has superseded my nighttime ritual of yet another playthrough of Elminage Original on the Vita. I abandoned my Wizardry games, put another stab at Dragon’s Dogma‘s Bitterblack Isle on hold, I don’t need to hunt down FOEs in the remastered Etrian Odyssey now, it’s even tempered my need for a new or at least a new port of Sorcerian. This is the new paradigm in dungeon crawling for me, and for however long it holds, right now Void Stranger is as good as dungeon crawling gets.
Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.