The Void

Icepick Lodge made something again. It’s called “The Void“, it’s ostensibly a video game, but it feels odd describing it as such. It plunks you into a world with no real-world parallel, where the rules are obfuscated, nothing is intuitive, characters treat you in part as a worker, a slave, a lover or any mixture, and seemingly at random, and you are primarily tasked with simply performing according to their expectations. I’m reminded of the first time you sit down to play a board game you’ve never played with others who already know the rules. “Come over, sit down, we’ll teach you as you go along”. Except secretly, maybe your they are lying to you, manipulating your ignorance to further their own cause.. Who doesn’t want to win, right?

In fact, a board game is the best comparison I can think of. You move along a closed world, effectively a  table, the game state governed by a distinct sequence of time based “turns”, where the end of a turn signifies a new round of resources to gather, missions to complete and the like. Adversaries move around like you do, taking resources you need to further your own cause. All players are doing what they are intended to do, and that is where The Void takes the most inspiration from its predecessor; the profoundly masochistic Pathologic.

Pathologic was a game that  knew it was a game, and knew that you knew it was a game. You, the player, have a part to play. You have an intended purpose, and your goal as a player is to follow the script, step onto the stage and act accordingly. Pathologic stated this plainly. You were essentially an actor in the play, and sinister characters would reprimand you if you attempted to break sequence or not follow the script. The Void is much the same, but it is a play where the characters are ALL slaves, to the point of obsession. As you are eased into the world – sparsely populated and obviously long dead – you are bewilderingly met by characters who already know why you are there and what it is you are supposed to be doing. Now that you’ve arrived, “life has returned”. Now that there are enough players, the game can begin anew.

It feels needless to describe the rules of the game much further, because discovering the rules is as big a part of the game as it is to play by them and eventually bend them. Suffice to say the world of The Void is obsessed with Colour; Everybody depends on it for survival, yourself included, and running out of it means a tragic and anticlimactic death. You are always starving. Everybody is starving. And everything you do, from travel to combat to conversation, it all costs Colour. But you can’t simply pick it up and use it. In its raw state, Colour is simply stored. And simply hoarding it is wasting it (and there is no bigger sin in The Void). To use it, and for you to survive, it needs to be “digested” in your body. As it moves through you it passes to a usable state in your “palette”, where it can no longer be used for sustenance, but can be used actively to manipulate the world. But you can’t simply hoard it in your palette either; space is limited. Excess Colour passing through your body is wasted. And Colour is always passing through your body. That different shades of Colour act differently in your body adds another level of complexity to what quickly becomes the most demanding economic simulation you likely ever encountered.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The world responds actively to your use of Colour, and you are never told explicitly how. You are even given conflicting information, and you are left to intuit what does what and why what happened when. In this day and age where game experiences have been practically homogenized to allow even the briefest attendant a notion of mastery, The Void is flamboyantly ignorant of such banal terms as “usability”. The Void is nothing without its mysterious and chaotic world, where one character will ask you to perform one cryptic task, only to have you be reprimanded for it and asked to reverse what you did. The Void keeps you on toes you didn’t know you had.

All this, and I have neglected to even mention what the game looks like. One “level” consists of a pale, platinum blond girl resting in what appears to be a suspended gondola, unblinkingly staring up through a hole in her ceiling at the moon, which happens to be staring back. From a sky made from blasted rock.

The game is simply a stunning collection of set pieces. It’s practically a gallery of surrealist landscapes and characters, who speak to you in riddles and poetry, all bleak. For a game about Colour there isn’t much of it around. This is an utterly blasted landscape. Whatever was pretty here is now gone.

It’s a tough game to build a real opinion of. The prevalent sense, even after hours and hours of play, is that you are not really getting it. I’m certainly not sure I’m enjoying the game in the traditional sense. I can’t describe it as “fun”. It is blisteringly difficult to understand and get into, and will often punish you much later for things you did early. It demands absolute effort and attention, which by definition makes it a game unsuitable for a jolly good relaxing time. But it is a fantastically interesting game, and never stops being interesting.

A long session of The Void made all other games in my collection seem primitive. I’m very happy we have PC gaming and distribution such as Steam to let us get a taste of this kind of divine madness, painfull or not, in a market that seems more than preoccupied with making another military shooter or franchise sequel. I’m eagerly anticipating what Icepick Lodge does next.