Antipwn

It’s been some time since the last update. I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been frantically busy but really that’s not especially true. What has happened is that at the best of times I can be a little ADD and there was simply been a lot of shiny stuff distracting me over the past few months. Enough of the minutiae of my personal life however, let’s get on with the important stuff; namely my opinions and why you  should accept them as the golden nuggets of distilled wisdom that they are.

I’ve been playing a bunch of different games over the past few months and I think that the one that stands out as the most worthy of comment is The Void, a resource-management/RPG/strategy game from Russian based Ice Pick Lodge. This is a game that defies categorisation, Eurogamer tackled it as did Bit-Tech and neither of them found it easy to describe in terms that are meaningful to readers who have not experienced the game already. I’m not going to try and review the game here as much of what I’d say would simply be paraphrasing the Eurogamer article. I will underline the point that it is a very hard game, crushingly so. You can make choices in the tutorial that will mean your progress some hours later will become impossible, necessitating a restart. You also can’t take any of the information that the game gives you at face value, not even the most basic instruction dialogues from the tutorial. The game is not limited to the actual gameplay, an important part of the game is figuring out what the game actually is and what your win conditions are. This is at once refreshing and maddening. After all, in most games if the tutorial says that harvesting things for resources is a good idea, then it generally is. Not so in the Void. Each NPC gives you different information, not just about the world you are in but also about the game. Do you have to transcend, survive or rescue the Sisters? Are the Brothers nemeses to be feared or allies to be harnessed. How do your actions in simply staying alive matter to the complex factions? Decisions you make may have ramifications so much later in the game that it is impossible for you to predict them. In some cases you may not be aware that you did in fact make that decision.

Games like this are pretty rare, mostly players like to be told how to play the game then to go on and try to beat it on those terms. A difficult game is usually considered as one that has challenging encounters or overwhelming odds. A game where the gameplay is generally simple but the complexity comes from the metagame is unusual in single player games because players have been trained through pavlovian triggers to follow the breadcrumbs and defeat the game on it’s own terms. The closest parallels I can think of to The Void would be the original Myst trilogy, but that too is a poor comparison. Ice Pick Lodge have made a game for gamers, not for fans of video games.