Void Stranger is a sokoban-style puzzle game made by System Erasure, released on September 1st, 2023. SE is also known for their previous work on ZeroRanger, a STG (shooting game, better known as "shmup"). The Steam description gives us a basic premise of the game:

Descend into the forgotten labyrinth teeming with fiendish foes and traps that defy reason.
A swift defeat lurks at every corner for those who neither study their surroundings nor think their moves through with care.
Trust your wits and slowly, surely, you will conquer the mysteries before you.

You do remember why you are here, right?
Or have you lost something?
Something very important to you.

Delightfully vague, for good reason - this game has A LOT hidden under the surface, to the point where if I tried to talk more about it, it would be revealing too much. This is one of those games that you just HAVE to experience for yourself, and go in blind...

Which, already calls to mind the question: "wait, why bother with this LP then? also you've played it already??"

To be honest? I don't particularly have a reason for making this other than "I wanted to". But I suppose there's also a few other reasons I'd want to make this - for one, the game's puzzle difficulty can get... quite brutal sometimes. The game is also relatively long, so it's fair that some people may just simply give up from how daunting it all can be (although, if I've learned anything from ZeroRanger...). Maybe this could at least let them appreciate the game a different way... I don't know.

In any case, it's a game I like, a lot, and I want to nerd about it, and that's a good enough reason for me.

As a sidenote - while this game has a few connections to ZeroRanger, they are very very loose and are not critical to understanding this game's story. Still, it might help!

Well then... let's embrace the Void.



♫ Void

The game opens directly to the controls. They are pretty simple - just a single button other than the movement keys? The game is anything but, however...





We get to customize the settings to our liking before actually going in - something way more games should do, honestly... but the defaults are all fine, and beyond some cool art for each menu, there's nothing truly of note here, so let's begin.



We're asked to enter our "brand"... whatever that may be. Let's draw something that vaguely looks like me!



Good enough. Selecting the top or bottom border lets us confirm our choice - let's go!




Well, that's one way to make an entrance. What's on that wall up there?




Huh. This seems important somehow, but for the time being, this is kinda useless to us. Let's head down a floor.



Oh shit! A chest! Open it open it open it



♫ Concern

Ah. Something is indeed wrong. Not only did that statue completely disappear somehow, but we're limited to tile-based movement now! Damn it! Now I've got to do my walking animation in place permanently!

Also, we're kinda stopped from progressing by the gap in the floor. Can this seemingly cursed rod help us somehow?



Interesting... this rod lets us literally pick up tiles off the floor and position them elsewhere. Well, that clears the gap easily enough. Let's go.


♫ Void Symphony

This floor seems a little bit less dangerous. And we've got another chest to open! We're getting pretty spoiled already...



I don't know if I would want to put a locust in my mouth, but you do you.



Picking up the idol adds a new counter to our HUD at the bottom, implying we'll be finding a lot more of these. What are they for? Void knows...
Just above the chest appears to be a boulder that we can't move, nor can our heroine make any sense of it.



Next!



So far so good. The chest gives us another locust idol - it's probably safe to assume that that's all we'll be getting from these.



Something that's not immediately apparent in this screenshot format is that you don't immediately fall down when you walk into an empty tile - your character will play a small slipping animation before actually falling down, at any point during which you can walk back on the tile you were standing on. Very useful.



Quite a small room... and very little space to walk around on. There's also another strange-looking statue that we can't do anything with, but we can definitely whack it by "walking" into it, not that it seems to have any effect.



This room is where we're taught a very basic but highly necessary technique of.... actually, I don't even know if it has a name. But by using 3 tiles, we can move a "bridge" in a straight line to cross large gaps, like so:



We're not always going to have enough tiles to build one full bridge from one place to another, so this is good to know. Next!



This one is a step up in complexity, but it's nothing we can't handle. This room hammers in the fact that we can't simply turn around on the spot - I guess the rod took that away too - meaning we can't quite navigate as easily on 1-tile wide platforms. Reaching the southeastern set of tiles gives us a means to get both the chest and the exit:





Ah, here comes the actual "sokoban" part. In addition to moving tiles around, we'll also have to clear these boulders out of the way. Most notably, the exit is blocked by a boulder sitting directly on top - the game helpfully marks the exit if it's being covered by something if we stand still for a while.



From here on, I'm just going to display the room layout by itself without comment if there's nothing special going on - I could record myself doing all of the puzzles, but that would be quite a bit of effort, and I'm not sure it would be terribly interesting. Besides, this isn't a walkthrough! There's still going to be plenty to talk about other than them - this game is pretty deep, like I said.



B010 has a strange-looking tile at the top (that can't be seen in the screenshot goddamn it but it shows up as a glowing X on the ground). If we pick it up...



It's a... crystal? We don't actually get to keep the thing until we exit the floor proper - that would be too easy - but once we have it, we can head to the "Memories" option in the pause menu to spend it on stuff!



... well, once we get enough of them, that is. Moving on.



GAH! It's a snake! It's trapped in a hallway separate from us thankfully, giving us a chance to observe how it moves.
This snake enemy only moves left and right in a straight line, spending a turn to flip around if it hits an obstacle.
It's worth mentioning at this point that things only happen when YOU do anything - enemies will never move by themselves unless you also perform an action.
Not just moving around, but bumping into walls and pushing boulders also counts as a "turn", which can be very helpful if we need an enemy to continue on their path without having to move ourselves.



"But Lyra, can't we just kill the things? Hit them with the rod!" Good thinking! Let's try that out!



Holy SHIT. Not only can we not attack them with the rod, but they deal a whopping 999 DAMAGE if they hit us, killing us instantly... but luckily, we now know what the locust idols do - they can revive us, and act as a life counter! Better not lose any more, or else... We don't know what might happen if we run out of them.



GAH! It's a bug larva thing! This enemy behaves almost exactly the same as the snake, except it moves up and down instead. Safely isolated in its own claustrophobic 3-tile hell so we can observe it wriggling around.





Huh, that's a new statue. We can push it around and bunp into it, but that doesn't do anything for this one, either.



The chest in this one also seems unreachable - there's not enough room to grab the locust and get out without being killed! We'll sadly have to leave it be and come back later... if there even IS a way to come back here, that is.






Hm... Something about this room... It looks familiar... oh! The inscription we saw at the very beginning! This is the same one!

..... but, uh, what does that even MEAN? Picking up the memory here didn't do anything special... Are we missing an item of some kind?

No choice but to keep going. It is a mystery for another time.



Okay, the chest for this one seems even more impossible. There's absolutely NO room at all to get past the bugs, and the other path is blocked by the stairs - if only they weren't there, we could just walk right over!!!

...

If the stairs weren't there... wait, could it be..?



AHA! The rod can also pick up the actual stairs tile and place it elsewhere! How ingenious!

... although now that I think about it, we could've used this knowledge a room earlier - maybe the issue was that the stairs had to be removed? I guess we'll have to revisit that room later.





Wait, that's a person! And they're about to be attacked by a wee beastie if we don't do something!



Fortunately, all it takes is to just block it off with a hole. So what's your deal anyway?



I mean, I wasn't going to. I wouldn't have saved you otherwise...




The convo ends here, but she's got more to say if we keep trying to talk to her:



Uh... I found a huge pit in the ground and felt like jumping into it all action hero-like? Is that good enough?





Sorry, girl, I'm doing the best I can here, considering my only actions are "move" and "use rod".




She goes on to tell us that she remembered how she ended up here (and is definitely not me hiding the fact that I fucked up a screenshot and missed a line of dialogue SHUT UP):





The music stops at this point for a moment.







Well, that's all she said. I don't think this girl has a magical rod of her own - I'm not sure how she's gonna get out of here by herself, and I do feel bad leaving her here, but... alas. Keep moving we must. The best we can do is leave her a path to walk on.





Oh. Well. This is different.




Yeah, sure. This is a decent stopping point, I'd say.





-- PLACE YOUR FAITH. EMBRACE THE VOID. --

[You continue on to EPISODE 01]