00:00:30.16 Dave Hello everybody, my name is Dave Jackson, and you're listening to Tales from the Backlog. and This is a video game deep dive review podcast where each week I'm joined by a guest to bring a game out of the backlog, play it, and discuss. My guest today is a friend of the show, a host of IndieQuest and PolyKill Podcasts, joining me straight from the void. Welcome to the show, Steve. 00:01:04.66 Steve Yes, hello. Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to talk about a very strange game. 00:01:10.77 Dave That's right. Yeah. And not one that I hear a lot of people talking about, um, you know, sometimes I'll hear it pop up here and there, uh, on other shows, but not like, you know, a dedicated episode like we're doing here today. That game is void stranger today, which is a puzzle adventure game developed and published by system erasure for PC in 2023. System Erasure is a Finnish two-person development team of Eero Latinen and Anti Ukola. 00:01:40.24 Dave and I hope the pronunciations are halfway correct. Apologies if not. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, first of all, thank you for stopping by. Here's how spoilers work in the podcast, and it is a yeah an important one for a game like Void Stranger. So we're gonna set up what the gameplay is like. We're gonna set up the basis of the story in Void Stranger, but this is a game that has a lot of secrets and a lot of things to discover for yourself. 00:02:08.09 Dave And we're going to kind of talk about the like potential for what you might find or how you might find it, but we're not going to spoil specifics of how you do stuff and what you'll find exactly. We'll just give you a little bit of a tease we'll say. So you can check down in the show notes for a timestamp for when spoilers begin for void stranger. And until then consider yourself safe. 00:02:32.37 Dave So what is Void Stranger? If you're listening and you don't know what this game is, we have prepared some quick pitches for the top of the show. I say Void Stranger is a Sokoban puzzle game with an RPG story. Steve, what would you say? 00:02:46.29 Steve I called it a tile-based puzzler that demands patience and rewards curiosity. 00:02:52.51 Dave Perfect, yeah, I agree with all of that. We will certainly talk about how much patience this game demands in a little bit. um Speaking of patience, I suppose I played this for 27 hours across PC and Steam Deck. 00:02:59.54 Steve yeah 00:03:07.36 Dave I played it, actually, so we'll talk. This game was so compelling for me. I had a really hard time not playing this. So I played on Steam Deck originally because I like you know an indie, a you know a sprite-based game, they feel right at home on Steam Deck. But I actually like played it so much that my hands hurt. So I switched to PC so that I could play with just the keyboard. And that helped me finish out the game. ah But I switched back and forth. The cloud saves work perfectly. Everything was good. 27 hours. ah How about you? How long did your playthrough take you? 00:03:41.89 Steve I think all things told, I clocked in around 35 hours. 00:03:47.27 Dave Mm-hmm. 00:03:48.13 Steve Um, and all that was on PC, although like you, this game did really get its claws into me to the point where I didn't pull the trigger, but I was literally like surfing the steam deck page thinking, do I just buy one right now? 00:04:02.99 Steve Cause but my setup is set up in a way where my computer is in a different room from sort of the general place I spend my time. And I was like, I can't. I can't go all the way to this other room and hold myself off to play. 00:04:13.90 Steve I need a steam deck now. 00:04:14.88 Dave Okay, I was gonna say like you're like you have like this separate cordoned off area and you're like, I can't just be in there all the time. I have to be around the house a little bit, right? 00:04:21.41 Steve Yeah, exactly. I need to show the six or seven other rooms some love. 00:04:28.85 Dave Yeah, exactly. ah So we always kind of start the show off with our histories with Void Stranger. And I don't quite remember and don't quite remember why we settled on this game in particular, as the one that you are going to come on the show and do. um So were you aware of this game before we had talked about doing the podcast here? How'd you hear about this? 00:04:52.47 Steve Yeah, so on one of my podcasts, Polykill, we have a segment on that where we just kind of look at upcoming releases for the next couple of weeks and literally on name alone, I was like, Oh, I'd never heard of that. What's that? And I clicked into it and I was like, Oh, that's cool. You know, it's got like a nice, initially I thought it's going to be kind of like a game boy retro throwback sort of, um, a much more light puzzler, I guess, is what I anticipated it being. And then I saw that it is from the same studio that had done Zero Ranger, which is a game I'd not played, but I knew had a reputation of being quite good. And so that intrigued me. And I decided to pick it up right away. It helped that right around that time. 00:05:36.11 Steve I would say that there's like a certain subset of people I follow on Twitter and in other spaces, like Spelunky obsessed type people that were really saying nice things about this game. 00:05:46.50 Steve And so I decided to play it. I actually decided to stream the first two or three hours of the game, which was, I think, actually a pretty terrible decision. I don't think this game streams all that well for a number of reasons that we'll probably get into, but even just the base level puzzles intrigued me enough to want to keep playing. 00:06:04.40 Steve Then I got it. distracted for a long, long time. And then when you and I were talking about potential games, you mentioned Void Stranger, and I was like, I think this might be my only chance, my only excuse to to put the time in to go revisit it. 00:06:09.67 Dave -huh. Yeah. 00:06:16.30 Dave There we go. I love it when that happens, when the guest is like, this game would have just sat there if ah if we hadn't you know had this as a possibility. So that's cool. 00:06:25.04 Steve Yeah. 00:06:25.56 Dave I like that. um For me personally, I had never heard of this game. I'd never heard of Zero Ranger before. I'd never heard of the studio at all until on an episode of Acts of the Blood God, 00:06:39.43 Dave one of the hosts or guests were talking about it. It was an episode with Reb Valentine and it was either her or Eric from Acts of the Blood God talking about this game and the way whoever it was described it, the Sokoban puzzles plus a JRPG story, they said. 00:06:57.07 Steve Mm. 00:06:57.09 Dave I was like, well, that sounds cool. Like I was like, you know, I like the idea of Sokoban puzzles and like, you know, I played a lot of Zelda games, I pushed some blocks in my time. um But then the idea of like, okay, you're going to do puzzles, and then you're going to get a story. 00:07:12.57 Dave And they describe the story as, you know, epic and full of twists and turns. And I was like, okay, you're speaking my language here. So it went on the wish list. I eventually bought it when it was on a Steam sale. 00:07:25.24 Dave And then it just sat there for a while. And when we started up our backlog resolutions list for my Discord server for 2024, I made sure to put it on my list. 00:07:36.60 Dave Like, this is really intriguing. I just like, I need to, even if it's peer pressuring myself, I need to, 00:07:42.67 Steve Yeah. 00:07:43.65 Dave get that little extra thing to play it so that's that's why i started playing it and like you i streamed the first couple hours of this game and i also did not enjoy streaming it um there's i i felt a lot of pressure doing puzzles with like you know people watching and 00:07:55.99 Steve Yeah. 00:08:02.86 Dave It wasn't like a stream where people were chatting. If I remember, there wasn't that many people watching anyway, but like the idea that I'm stuck on a puzzle and like everyone could be just tuning in and just watching for a minute and be like this fucking guy and then, you know, getting out of the stream or whatever just didn't, didn't feel right. So I never streamed it again, but I did. 00:08:22.78 Dave get super hooked on it after that. um And then for our quick opening thoughts here at the top, you know, we've both already mentioned how compelling we found this game. And this is a really interesting one to talk about. And when we talk about the experience of playing this, we talk about how addicting it is and how satisfying it is to make progress but it's also like very difficult and very unfair and frustrating and it does not respect your time at all and 00:08:58.18 Steve none zero percent 00:09:00.29 Dave zero respect for your time and that's like a thing that so many people say that they value in video games but like I was so compelled by the secrets I found and like you know you would this is one of those games where you'll like you'll figure one thing out but you'll find three other loose ends to pull on and so all of those things really hooked me. 00:09:20.89 Dave I couldn't stop playing this despite how hostile it felt at times. 00:09:24.26 Steve None. Zero percent. 00:09:26.69 Dave I did get to a point where I needed to use a guide to beat the puzzles, but I never once considered just like, let me go look at the ending on YouTube or something like that. 00:09:37.37 Dave I wanted to like go through it and see the process and all of that ah myself. So I really enjoyed this game. but I really hated it sometimes too. And it's one of those games that, for the top, like five to 10% of people who like this game, might be your favorite game that you've ever played. It's kind of satisfying and like you'll get, you'll go crazy trying to put all these secrets together. It's just like there's a level of hostility 00:10:08.66 Dave For me, that's gonna keep it from being a game like that. I still just, I respect the hell out of this game. It's kind of like a Tunic. The Tunic I thought was just too difficult for its own good. And it kept it from being one of those Alzheimer's. And I put Void Stranger in that category too. But I do think this is a really cool game. 00:10:28.79 Steve Yeah, very much so. It makes me glad that we are like 20 years past all like reviews or discussions of games requiring a numerical score because I could not imagine having to assign a number to the experience of playing this game when one half of your time is spent. 00:10:39.58 Dave Uh-huh. Yeah. 00:10:48.20 Steve Well, I guess it's kind of split into thirds. The first third is you enjoying these actually very well crafted puzzles that do a lot to like layer on each other and add new mechanics and they do a good job adding complexity without ever overwhelming the player. You know, the screens all still stick onto one PC monitor and things like that. 00:11:10.97 Steve And then your second third is like all this sort of intrigue and you're wondering, you know, what's going on and you're just kind of like making mental notes of things as you go along. And then the last third is you redoing some part of that first third because the game has, you know, through a single action you've taken undone, in some cases literal hours of your progress. 00:11:31.59 Dave Yeah. 00:11:32.80 Steve And you're like, I had two hours to play games tonight and I'm done now and I made no progress at all. And yet I know tomorrow I'm going to boot this thing back up. Very determined to go in and do it again. 00:11:45.20 Steve So yeah, I'm really, uh, the, the intellectual side of me that respects my own time and then the gut side of me that just wants to see stuff that's cool as hell are in a little bit of conflict on this one. 00:11:58.39 Dave Yeah, absolutely. It's a game that contains multitudes for sure. ah But good thing we have a podcast ahead of us to dig into all of those multitudes. 00:12:03.49 Steve Yeah. 00:12:08.40 Dave So we're gonna listen to some of the really awesome music from Void Stranger. And when we come back, we're gonna set up what it's like to play the game. 00:12:18.19 Dave So Void Stranger begins with a character kind of walking toward this pit opening in the ground. um you At the beginning of the game you are asked to create a brand where you'll get like a grid and you get to design a sigil for yourself. They call it a brand in the game. ah So you do that then you see your character walk to the edge of this pit and then jump in and it's puzzle time. ah We'll get into the story a little bit later but since this game puts you in gameplay first with zero story context whatsoever 00:12:53.96 Dave We'll talk about what it's like to play it first. So Sokoban style puzzles, Sokoban for those who don't know, are block pushing puzzles ah like in Zelda or the game Sokoban. But ah is this a type of puzzle that you enjoy but straight off before we dig too deep into it? 00:13:13.32 Steve It is, although I would say maybe more than almost any other type of game, I hit a mental fatigue with them pretty often. So when they hit, they really hit me. 00:13:24.03 Steve So stuff like Baba is You and things like that are like some of my favorites. 00:13:28.38 Steve But almost always, I feel like these games hit a point where like. The levels designed for everyone end and the levels designed for Sokoban Sickos kick in and you're like, okay, I think, you know, I have not, you know, I didn't take the right degree track in college to be able to handle these puzzles. 00:13:46.17 Steve And so I'm just going to have to tap out here. um But I was, I was very much enjoying them as they came up in this one, I have to say, I think they did a good job. 00:13:53.80 Dave Yeah, I'm with you there. Like, I really like the idea of them and I like, you know, anytime a Zelda puzzle involves this kind of thing, I'm into it. 00:14:04.32 Steve Yeah. 00:14:04.46 Dave Baba is You is another one. I like that game. I did not get anywhere close to beating that game, but I really enjoyed, you know, the first couple islands in that game. 00:14:12.75 Steve Yeah. 00:14:12.96 Dave um So we say Sokoban and there are some actual block pushing puzzles in this game, but that's not actually like the meat and potatoes of the puzzles in Void Stranger. Most of it involves this magic scepter that you pick up that lets you pick up floor tiles and then put them down on any empty space. And so a lot of the puzzles in Void Stranger involve you walk into a room you see the exit staircase somewhere on the screen and you need to use this scepter to pick up and put down tiles to get yourself to the exit and like you said earlier they introduce new mechanics they introduce you know enemies they introduce all kinds of things that layer on top of each other so that 00:15:00.29 Dave It is actually, like you said, kind of those, those thirds of the game, the first third, I was like, I'm really good at this. And then the second third, I was like, this is tough. I wonder how much longer this is going to go. 00:15:11.68 Dave And then the hardest puzzles in this game are so incredibly complex. I, I, it was like, I could have dedicated my entire summer and fall to figuring it out, but I decided I was just going to look at a guide instead. 00:15:18.94 Steve Yeah. 00:15:27.83 Dave I, it got to that point for sure. 00:15:30.85 Steve Yeah, very much so. And it's interesting because the pacing is a little different from other Sokobans that I've played. And that goes a little into some of the mystery stuff in the game. 00:15:39.68 Dave Mm hmm. 00:15:41.47 Steve But you'll be playing through and you'll do some like ah what to me feels like a very hard level. And then there'll be like one or two just sort of gimme levels, either like literal gimme levels where you just have to walk to the right or something or a puzzle that 00:15:49.44 Dave Mm hmm. 00:15:58.39 Steve feels so painfully simple that you wonder like did this did this get put out of order like did they intend for this to be one of the first 10 or so and so that that helped me a little bit to give me like a little bit of a free win a little mental reset because the whole the whole point in the game is you're descending deeper into the void and so you're you have like a level counter that is constantly 00:16:19.16 Dave Yeah. 00:16:19.48 Steve taking up for like how deep underground you are. And there's something to every now and again, the game giving me like three or four, just sort of free levels. And I see like, Oh, I, you know, I rolled into the seventies now. I feel pretty good. 00:16:32.70 Dave Mm hmm. Yeah. um There are like several different types of those, ah like you said, like kind of gimme puzzles, there are some words, it's still actually a puzzle, it's just way easier than the room you just did. And those, you know, they make you feel good about yourself, and they kind of give you ah a breather from, you know, 00:16:52.89 Dave using your entire brain on some of these puzzles like like it took me um and then some of them have other purposes and I think that's a good like segue into just kind of touching on the fact that this is one of those games like a tunic or animal well or something like that where There is a lot more to this game than meets the eye. And even in your first, you know, 50, 70, 100 rooms that you do, there's a lot more hidden in plain sight stuff that you just don't have any context for. There's a lot of stuff that you have to do like weird sequences of events to get to. It's a game that really pushes you to 00:17:40.24 Dave ask questions, experiment, um pull on those threads. Cause like you said, you're going to go through these rooms and you're going to be solving puzzles, but there's also going to be stuff where you're like, what is that? What happens when I mess with that thing? Or what happens if I jump in this pit or stuff like that? So it's a game where there's a lot more than just picking up tiles and putting them down. 00:18:06.17 Steve yeah and sometimes even not just things that are sort of like hidden in plain sight but sometimes the game will have you do something like a you'll interact with something in one of these levels and it just kind of naturally triggers in your brain like that felt like it should have been important but then the game just keeps moving onwards and forwards and you're like Okay. 00:18:33.19 Steve It was weird that you presented that to me and then now we're just kind of moving on. And so even if you're not in full blown discovery mode, there's this little thing, like this itch in the back of your brain. 00:18:36.96 Dave Yeah. 00:18:42.31 Steve That's like, I don't know. It feels like you're asking me questions that you're the kind of ignoring my answers to what's going on there. 00:18:48.57 Dave Mm hmm. Yeah, and you can't go back either. Once you go down a staircase to the next level, you cannot go back up. 00:18:51.81 Steve the 00:18:55.28 Dave So those seeds will be planted and then you like. I don't think it's a huge spoiler to say like you can restart and you know start from the top of the tower and go back. 00:19:05.54 Dave You'll be doing some of these puzzles. a lot if you choose to play and explore everything there is to explore. 00:19:08.95 Steve Yeah. 00:19:12.71 Dave ah So there is, you know, like, that's a double edged coin, right? Two sided coin, double edged sword. Yeah, I'm mixing up my metaphors. ah You get the satisfaction of going through places you already know, looking for new things. 00:19:30.16 Dave But you are also doing the same puzzles. sometimes dozens of times and ah there is so like that on one side there is that exploration and discovery. 00:19:44.12 Dave On the other side there is intense tedium and punishments for making mistakes and ah hostility. ah This game is full of all of that. 00:19:54.02 Steve yeah 00:19:56.35 Steve And I would say sometimes it's not even a punishment for making a mistake. Sometimes the game has asked you like, be curious. And then sometimes the reward for your curiosity is them, not literally, but almost literally saying, I have wiped your memory card, you know, start from scratch again. You know, now you know not to do that next time, or maybe you should, who's to say, but enjoy the next hour and a half. 00:20:24.58 Dave Yeah, uh, definitely lots of points where I felt like. Progress written was erased at the drop of a hat. like ah let's just I'm just gonna make up floor numbers here, but like let's say I'm on floor 176, and I do something that I felt like the game was kind of pushing me to try, and I get reset back to level one. 00:20:35.70 Steve Yeah. 00:20:50.67 Dave and that feels bad. ah like You have gained knowledge from it, and you'll probably get back to floor 176 faster than it took you the first time, but it still feels bad to have to do those levels beforehand. And especially before you know more and more of the game's secrets, this is a game that is just full of, ah like we said, tedium and disrespect for the time that you spend playing the game. um it It feels like it breaks a lot of rules that you know game designers try not to break anymore. 00:21:27.18 Steve Yeah, very much it reminds me of i'm not not to be defensive of a different game, but one of my favorites of all time, probably my favorite is Outer Wilds. And people have a lot of, I think, fair complaints about not enjoying the loop mechanic in that game and having to redo a certain amount of progress. 00:21:47.39 Steve But this feels like the actual hostile version of what people are like trying to get at when they describe that game. like This is truly a developer that is like looking you in your eyes and saying, 00:21:54.39 Dave Yeah. 00:21:59.83 Steve We made a great game, but you have to like and basically prove that you're willing to put in the time to get to it because. Yeah. and The first time you get reset or the first time that you get back to that first floor, at least for me, you know, I would go, I went down like two, three levels thinking like, Oh, this is going to be a little bit of like a sleight of hand or a trick or something. 00:22:18.47 Steve Like they're going to be like, Oh, look, we, we faked you out. And then you realize, no, I literally am. 00:22:22.65 Dave ah yeah 00:22:22.72 Steve I'm just playing it again all the way through. And you know, I don't. I remember plenty of the solutions and, you know, how some of these mechanics work, but some of these floors were tough and I'm not going to remember, you know, on floor again, making up a number 85, what the specific, you know, series of 50 inputs I put was. So a lot of these, I'm kind of having to resolve the puzzle again as I re-explore. 00:22:46.55 Dave Yeah, it is kind of like the developers just kind of like staring you in the eyes and being like, how much do you really want it? Like, it's ah it's like there's there's a lot here for you, if you're willing to put in the the work and the time, but we're gonna fuck with you along the way. 00:22:52.91 Steve Yeah. yeah 00:23:03.94 Dave And like, it it kind of makes me think like, 00:23:08.63 Dave I think a lot of people will be compelled to keep going and explore to a certain point. I think the game goes beyond that point for a lot of people. And I've heard a lot of people, people who are puzzle people, people who are like pen and paper, take notes while playing games type of people, who are like, they're in it. They want to discover stuff like this. And some of those people I've talked to have just been like, no, Void Stranger just does too much. 00:23:35.29 Dave to like the juice is not worth the squeeze for me. And for me, I made the decision like I'm, you know, if that happens to me, I'm just going to check a guide for a solution to a puzzle instead of spending 10 minutes trying to figure out this one room of hundreds that are in the game. um It's going to be a really individualized decision for each person who tries this game. Like how much are you willing to put up with? 00:24:01.91 Steve Yeah, I would, I did something similar. I set sort of like, I guess my own moral boundaries around like how, how far I would allow myself to push myself or be pushed before I would consult a guide. 00:24:12.99 Dave Uh-huh. 00:24:15.12 Steve And I think 99% of people at some point will probably either use a guide or stop playing void stranger spot as they go through. 00:24:23.20 Dave Yeah. 00:24:24.39 Steve Um, but I was very tempted pretty early on to be like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to need someone to just tell me the answers to these. 00:24:31.53 Dave Yep. So we've established, we've established there is a lot of bullshit in this game. Um, and you know, 00:24:44.59 Dave If it were too much, I would have just said, hey, Steve, let's play a different game for the podcast. 00:24:47.58 Steve yeah 00:24:49.19 Dave I'm not gonna do this. But as we've both said earlier, before we talked about all that you know hostility, I didn't quit. I was still super compelled to keep going. 00:25:01.40 Dave So like there is a magic, I think, to this. it Like they they managed to walk that line, like that that fucking like mean football coach type of line or something where they like, they're berating you and fucking with you, but all it all it does is wanna make you go harder at it. And like, I think that's part of why I would play this game for like three, four, five hours a day when I was playing it the most. Like I would get reset back to level you know one or whatever and it'd be like, fuck this game. 00:25:35.81 Dave And then like 10 minutes later, I'm picking the steam deck back up and I'm like, all right, let's let's get back in there. like There's a really weird thing that happened in my head. 00:25:44.79 Steve It's almost like speed running. I don't know. There's something about it where you're, you lose a run and you're like, okay, I can, I just need one more run. And I think in a void stranger, a lot of that is that even when you're like, you know, taking issue with the structure or, you know, maybe don't, don't agree with the choices that others have made for you. Um, 00:26:06.81 Steve it's all the other component pieces are so good. but Maybe i'm really what I'm saying is that the soundtrack is so good that I'm like, okay, if I just have to listen to this music for another two or three hours, I'm willing to do that. 00:26:17.66 Dave Yeah, the soundtrack is good. ah We'll talk a little bit about the story set up here in a bit, but the story is compelling enough or was compelling enough for me to want to see what was going to happen the next time I got story stuff. So yeah, that that other stuff helps for sure. 00:26:34.79 Dave um also like you know, while I was still at the point where I could figure out the puzzles by myself, which is like a huge majority of the game, I want to say. um Kind of asterisk. 00:26:47.98 Dave We'll talk about that in the spoiler section. ah I did think the puzzles themselves were awesome. Like I really enjoyed these puzzles. 00:26:55.29 Steve Yeah. 00:26:56.27 Dave they Every room for a while. It has a simple solution once you map out if you were to look at a guide and it says, like here's what you do to solve this. It's not that complicated, but you really have to become familiar with the mechanics that are available to you and the game's language, the visual language of you know what type of tiles there are, what type of statues there are, stuff like that. um And I did think that the puzzles themselves were quite fun. 00:27:25.89 Steve Yeah, I think so too. And it goes back to what I was saying before about them not adding too much complexity. They know when to switch up and introduce a new enemy type or some sort of new tile that you're walking on or something like that. 00:27:43.88 Steve But they don't like it, at least not very quickly and not really much at all until maybe very late game. They don't suddenly combine like seven or eight of those together in a way that is just visually overwhelming for you to to parse. 00:27:54.56 Dave Yeah. 00:28:01.95 Steve And the puzzles are designed for you to solve a lot of them in multiple ways, it's not like there is a solution to each floor that you just have to work out and then execute on. There is like some degree of freedom in how you approach the majority of these levels to solve it on your own, as long as you sort of understand the what's and the whys. And that makes, I think, the process more enjoyable. 00:28:31.76 Dave Yeah, yeah, for sure. For the huge majority of the game, puzzle solutions are not like literally up twice, right? Press the wand down twice, press the wand, you know, and if you mess up, if you deviate from that at all, you're fucked. It's really never like that until much, much, much, much later like some optional stuff, I would say. 00:28:53.76 Steve Yeah. 00:28:54.07 Dave um For everything else, because of the way the scepter works, you can pick up a floor tile and put it down. If you put it down in the wrong spot, you just pick it back up again, you're probably fine. So you do have some creativity with how you ah solve the puzzles. And if you fail, you just jump off the edge, you restart at the same, you know, the staircase of the same puzzle and you just get back to it ah with a fresh set of eyes. So like a lot of the puzzles did take me Sometimes many tries to figure out, but they did all feel like I could figure it out my own way. 00:29:30.33 Steve Yeah and you know for everything we said at the macro level about how the game maybe doesn't respect your time at the micro level they actually do a lot like the game has some real kindness to it in like if if you're just like clicking rapidly and you happen to click over a pit The game will kind of like do this thing where your character will sort of flail for a second and give you the opportunity basically to step back and be like, Oh, I didn't mean to actually do that. 00:29:48.47 Dave Oh yeah. 00:29:54.04 Dave Yeah. 00:29:54.20 Steve So it's, you know, you don't get in that thing where you're like, Oh, I see the solution and I'm just going to pull punch it in and accidentally misclick once the game. Well, it'll stop. And I'll be like, Hey, you probably didn't mean to do this, right? 00:30:05.14 Dave yeah Yeah, for sure. 00:30:05.20 Steve You have two seconds to fix your mistake. 00:30:08.01 Dave Very generous, like, yeah, coyote time or your character has a really, really good balance. They're not gonna fall in a pit right away. They know they have some time to catch themself, for sure. 00:30:18.12 Steve Yeah. 00:30:22.31 Dave So um yeah, anything else about the experience of playing the game? I guess one thing that just popped to mind is different parts of the game. 00:30:31.93 Dave We'll say the dungeon that you're going through with all the puzzles have different puzzle themes and um Then they layer on top of each other um the enemies that you see in the puzzles all like to have a role to play in the way you solve the puzzle itself. It's not like a game where it's like, okay, there's a bunch of bears in this room. I need to kill the bears, then do the puzzle. The bears are part of the puzzle. And it's um it's interesting, like the different gimmicks that they throw in there for enemies and hazards and things like that as you go. 00:31:08.36 Steve Yeah, very rarely is it I have to solve this puzzle and the enemies are just providing tension to try to make that more difficult. 00:31:19.09 Steve It's almost always like you were saying, it's almost always the enemies are part of the solution or sort of just serving as another obstacle for you to overcome when you see the objective in front of you. 00:31:31.49 Dave Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, uh, was there anything else about the kind of gameplay experience to, uh, to mention here before we move on? 00:31:42.63 Steve only that I think that it it It does have very good pacing because of the way you were saying every like I'd say every 10 20 floors or so they they split it up with some story section for you or the opportunity to stop and take a break and So that makes it a little more like I'll just I'll just do one more puzzle one more puzzle because after you've done like 15 in a row, you know, I'm probably pretty close to Getting a little bit more story. 00:31:55.51 Dave Yeah. 00:32:11.33 Steve That's a little bit more incentive for me to push on just a little bit farther and After that, they're probably going to do some sort of soft mechanical reset in terms of introducing something new and moving my brain in a different direction. 00:32:22.03 Dave Yeah. 00:32:23.73 Steve So I think that contributed to my experience of always playing this game for like two or three hours at a time, because it is sort of like drip feeding you little rewards at just the right interval. 00:32:37.75 Dave Yeah, for sure. Like every 20 to 25 rooms or something like that, you'll come across a rest room and in the room there's a tree and your character can go up and take a nap by the tree. And if you choose to do that, the game will put you into story scenes. Or actually what will happen is it will close the game So that's a good like quitting point too. 00:33:02.60 Dave If you are just kind of pacing this out, you can play this game pretty naturally for like, you know, a half hour at a time or however long it takes you to get to the next tree. 00:33:14.52 Dave And then the next time you boot the game up, it will start you with a story scene. So we're going to take this opportunity to listen to a bit of music. 00:33:19.29 Steve Yep. 00:33:23.81 Dave We'll come back and we'll kind of set up what the story in Void Strangers is about. 00:33:31.17 Dave The story in Void Stranger begins as a kind of a fairy tale. ah You play as a woman named Lady Grey, also known as Grey the Destroyer for her fighting ability. um Lady Grey is the lady in waiting for the belligerent Princess Lily, who's known as the Demon Princess in her castle. 00:33:54.21 Dave um She's kind of like a helper for Lily. um They go on a journey. They are going to go meet a possible husband for Lily. On the journey, they get ambushed by bandits. Gray kicks the shit out of some of them, but then more bandits come. And they're saved by a valiant and noble prince. ah And so we meet this prince character, 00:34:21.93 Dave That's all the story content spoilers that I'm going to give for now. I will just say that the story follows Gray and Lily throughout their life and ah takes some pretty crazy twists and turns along the way and at designated points in the story, it will it will kick you out of the story and then you'll wake up back, you know, under the tree in the puzzle dungeon. So they always pick good, you know, little cliffhanger spots for you where you want to know what's going to go on in the story, but now you're back in the puzzle thing. So they work together really well. Like I want to know what's going on in the story, but now I got to go do these puzzles and 00:35:01.97 Dave If I'm super intrigued by the puzzles, then I'm going to want to push through, you know, tough puzzles or actual bullshit to get to story content. Um, but also the puzzle part and the story part do intertwine in a way as you go through. And I won't say much more than that, but I was really intrigued and compelled by the story aspect of it too. 00:35:27.59 Steve Yeah, same, it was. interesting to me at first because it's like you're being told the story of a different game almost because of the way they sort of non-sequitur just drop you in to these levels and you start and you're seeing this and you're like oh I'm I feel like I'm getting some backstory but I'm not really getting much relation to the actual gameplay obviously as the story progresses that changes a little bit and you get a little bit more of a context of the broader picture of things but 00:35:53.43 Dave Um hmm. 00:35:58.64 Steve Um, it was, it was enough for me. It was probably not my primary motivator initially because I was more hooked on the puzzle side, but it did a good job of like, uh, pushing me to that next tree. 00:36:12.12 Dave Yeah, definitely like there's a prize waiting for you when you make it to the next tree. Even if the thing that you want the most is the puzzles, you at least have a reason to because like stopping at the trees is optional and I never passed it up because I wanted to see what was going on in the story for sure. 00:36:31.30 Dave Um, did you end up enjoying the story now that we, you know, of course not going to spoil what happens, but like overall, did you find it to be entertaining? 00:36:41.03 Steve I did, it's, it's the, to me is the kind of story where I actually ended up really liking it. And like minute to minute, I was like, Oh, this is awesome. But if someone came up to me afterwards and I was like, Oh man, that was so good there. 00:36:55.75 Steve And they said, Oh, really explain it to me. I'd be like, Ooh, I don't know. 00:36:57.98 Dave yeah Yeah. 00:36:59.81 Steve I don't know that I can, uh, you just have to trust me that the parts that I did understand were cool. And there's probably connective tissue. I don't see the other parts. 00:37:07.41 Dave Yeah, there is a lot going on for sure. And I kind of wrote here that this is one of those Pepe Silvia corkboard type of stories. Because it's not only that the story is complex, but the way they tell you the story is completely out of order. 00:37:23.96 Dave There's a bunch of pieces that you're not sure how they connect until much later. um So like it starts out as this very simple fairy tale, but the way the story progresses is not a simple fairy tale in the slightest. 00:37:38.15 Dave So ah that provides you with um more of that intrigue, but also you know if you are the type of person who wants to like take notes and you know put together characters and their relationships and stuff like that, I think there's there's a lot of fun to be had piecing this story together too. 00:37:38.64 Steve Yeah. 00:37:56.88 Steve Yeah, I pretty much ended up writing down like a little synopsis of every time I got any sort of story cutscene because i I learned pretty fast that I would 00:38:04.09 Dave Yeah. 00:38:08.06 Steve basically not be able to hold it all in my head at one time. So I was like, I should at least write some of these things down so that when characters get mentioned, you know, some of them have two, three, four names that they go by. When they get mentioned, I could have almost an index to look up to be like, this is who they're talking about. 00:38:23.50 Dave Yeah, yeah, for sure. um Also of note is ah the way the game is presented with you know visuals, music, and things like that. Visuals are credited to Antti Ukola, who's one of the you know the two people ah primarily developing the game. 00:38:42.18 Dave It's kind of a striking style, and it's weird to say now that this is a striking style, but black and white ah GameBoy type aesthetic, pixel art, and really, really reminded me of like a Link's Awakening type of visual style here. 00:38:55.95 Steve Yeah. 00:38:57.81 Dave I love this like the second I saw this. 00:39:01.10 Steve Yeah, same. Something about the like the little almost chibi sprite of your main character and how that contrast contrasted with like the nice beautiful full pixel art version that you'd see in some cutscenes and stuff. 00:39:12.80 Dave Yeah. 00:39:14.23 Steve It reminded me a lot of a Final Fantasy adventure or something. One of those early RPGs on the original Game Boy where you could tell that they had these just like cute relatable approximations, but then every now and again, they want to show you like the really cool battle art or something of one of the characters you're fighting. 00:39:31.10 Dave Yeah, it's one of those where it's like, I think that the puzzle sections of the game and maybe even the story sections where it's still in that same Game Boy art style, like you get the feeling like this could actually run on a Game Boy. 00:39:48.44 Dave Like the way that it looks and the way it's presented. But then you have these huge, nice like pixel art portraits during the story scenes. You're like that. They couldn't do that on a Game Boy. 00:39:57.64 Steve Yeah. 00:39:58.36 Dave Those are two nice things. They're really cool, though. ah It's still black and white, but they managed to express like a lot of and they're like lightly animated to like very lightly animated. 00:40:10.63 Dave But they express a lot of personality with, you know, the way the characters are drawn, the way their faces, the facial expressions are and things like that. So when you see Lady Grey's face or you see the princess's face or the prince or any number of the other things that come up in the story, it's always really cool. I loved the blown up, we'll say pixel art as well. 00:40:34.75 Steve Yeah. And I, at first I thought that I would get a little tired of it being entirely black and white and you can go into the menus and you can change between like five or six different preset color palettes. And I played around with them a little bit, but I don't know anything about the tone of this game. It felt more appropriate and black and white. So I would do a few floors in like the violet color palette. And then I ultimately ended up just going back and sticking with the black and white. 00:41:00.74 Dave Yeah. i So question for you, since a lot of it is in, like we said, that, that black and white Game Boy type pixel art aesthetic, did you feel like it was always, uh, readable as far as like what you need to interact with and what different things mean, um, in the puzzle sections? 00:41:20.99 Steve I, to me it was, but barely because there are, there are a couple like, uh, you know, objects or things that they interact with that are subtly different from one another. 00:41:32.60 Dave Mm hmm. 00:41:33.83 Steve And that subtle difference is important in terms of how you'll interact with those things. Um, and to the point where in like the notes I had, I had taken little screenshots of like multiple objects and I had like blown them up and labeled them as to what they were and what, what I had discovered about them. 00:41:50.44 Steve Um, so I didn't ever have a readability problem, but I could always sense that like ever so slightly different, you know, like a little bit smaller pixel art or something, and I would probably lose track of things, but how was it for you? 00:42:03.58 Dave Yeah, it was around the same thing where for most of the game, I understood it's like I said earlier, it's like you do have to get the kind of visual language of the game and how it teaches you because because no one there's not going to be a text box that says like this thing does this, you just have to, you know, fuck around and find out. So uh you you do need to learn like just based on the way things look and for most of the game there's like no issues whatsoever there are things that you have to learn as you go for like very late game things that like you said they're they're different but like 00:42:42.60 Dave they're as similar but different as this pixel art style will allow. So like if I didn't squint and focus, I could easily mistake one thing for the other, for sure. 00:42:48.81 Steve Yeah. 00:42:54.56 Dave But that's late in the game. It's something that I feel like a lot of people aren't even going to get to the point where that might be an issue. 00:43:01.65 Steve yeah 00:43:02.65 Dave um But it did kind of rear its ugly head like once or twice. um You know, you'll have like a line of statues and one of the statues will do something bad to you. And if you're just kind of glossing over like, okay, line of statues, you might have something bad happen. Just cause you know, that one didn't stick out like a sore thumb, you know? 00:43:24.91 Steve Yeah, we will stick a pin in that until spoiler talk comes, because I'm pretty sure we're concerned about the same issue that cropped up. 00:43:28.04 Dave Yeah, for sure. 00:43:32.32 Dave for sure. Yeah. ah Something that we're not concerned about is the music in Void Stranger. So the music is credited to Eero Latinen and the Game Boy visual aesthetic rules the way the game looks, but not the soundtrack. Like this is not one of those where it's like, this is going to be an authentic Game Boy game. 00:43:53.93 Dave um There are some chiptune songs in here, but there's a lot of piano and synth and stuff like that in the soundtrack as well. 00:44:04.63 Dave And this is one of those things where if the soundtrack wasn't fucking stellar, I might have quit playing this game, but the soundtrack is fucking stellar. 00:44:12.12 Steve Yeah. 00:44:16.32 Steve Yeah, extremely good, very energetic and like has a pretty big range too. And there's a lot of music in the game. 00:44:22.73 Dave Mm hmm. 00:44:25.22 Steve You know, when you get to, you know, one of those like different sections that, you know, maybe right after one of those trees and after those story bits, most like chunks of floors as they group together naturally and have their own music. 00:44:38.34 Dave Yeah. 00:44:38.50 Steve And so you'll enter into a new area and the songs are all very cleverly composed where the first, you know, five notes, the first two seconds come in and like immediately give you a sense of what's going on. And so you'll hear just that tiny little riff at the beginning and you'd be like, all right, yeah, here we go. I'm down. 00:44:55.63 Dave Yeah. And it's, it's really important that there's a bunch of range and the songs are quite long actually, which I think is really good. Like they're a lot of like the, you know, like you said, like the, the zone music for, you know, this zone, that zone, this zone, they're like five minutes long, at least on the soundtrack, which is really important because you're going to be spending a lot of time you know, maybe bashing your head against a puzzle, or you're going to spend a lot of time doing the same puzzles over and over again. And if you have a song with like a 45 second loop, it would start to get really annoying, I think, but these are, you know, a lot of them are like actual, you know, songs with different, you know, structures and there's, you you know, bridges and chorus and things like that. And there's breakdowns in the middle of some of these and 00:45:46.35 Dave there's a lot of variety to what's going on in your head. And I couldn't get these songs out of my head after I stopped playing. It's maybe part of the reason I would be drawn back to the game so much where I'd be like, I can't get the song out of my head. I might as well just go play the game instead of walking around myself going, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. You know? 00:46:08.21 Steve yeah I mean, it would be, I would, you know, I'd end my session and I'd walk away like I can't believe that just happened. And then I'd immediately go into the other room and turn on the Bluetooth speaker and I'd put the soundtrack on Spotify and listen to it. 00:46:19.50 Dave Yeah. 00:46:20.62 Steve yeah ah I feel like there's a general design rule. Again, another one that they're just breaking in the way that they design this game is for puzzle games, the music, I think tends to try to just get out of your way. Like I think a lot of puzzle games want the music to be like either really light or really low key or just like not a lot of density because they don't want anything you know pulling extra cognitive load off of you while you're trying to solve the puzzles but that is not the case here there it's like it's like vaguely almost chiptune prog rock in a lot of cases they they're just going 00:46:47.70 Dave yeah nope 00:46:55.37 Dave Yep, there's a lot to them. And so like, I'll give a couple examples and like, you know, what I feel like the kind of mood that they're putting across and some of the instrumentation to kind of back up what you just said, because it's totally true. um The first area song is called Void Symphony, and I probably already used it in the episode, but it's like, it's got this weird sinister sound to it. 00:47:19.25 Dave as you know you're going into this strange dungeon. But it has like this really heroic melody that's playing as you're setting off on your quest. And this is the zone one music and things like that. And it's like you said, the game's not afraid to have this big heroic melody playing while you're trying to figure out This is level one you're trying to figure out how to play the game, because there's no real tutorial here. 00:47:45.79 Dave um But it's yet it's not afraid it's like now this is an adventure you're starting an adventure right now. um Couple other songs that I mentioned one called affection air which I think is my favorite. 00:47:51.99 Steve Yep. 00:47:57.23 Dave ah song in the soundtrack has this super clangy bassline that's that's going the whole song and then these ah Repeating arpeggios in the background and then like a really sad piano breakdown in the middle of the song um And it's it's in a you know, not the hardest level but in a pretty challenging part in the dungeon so you're gonna hear the song many many times and a lot of these just made a huge impression and 00:48:24.52 Steve Yeah, they all, well, not all, but a lot of them seem to have this simultaneous balance of energizing and pumping you up and pushing you forward. 00:48:35.67 Steve And also like a little discomfort or a little unease or a little sadness. And that I think unease is probably a word that permeates a lot of the game. And so the music is doing a lot of the lifting in that. 00:48:45.23 Dave Yeah. 00:48:47.67 Steve but a lot of them have qualities of both and like how you listen to it and how you read it is going to give you one side or the other or both at the same time. 00:48:56.84 Dave Yeah and a lot of um like intrigue in the soundtrack as well as a game that's pushing you to explore and use your brain and things like that too. So I really have like nothing but compliments about the music and you know the presentation other than ah a couple of sprites that are a little bit too similar like for all the you know whining or whatever about you know bullshit or hostile design earlier like when you get to Like the actual experience of playing this, you're doing some pretty fun puzzles and like this just crazy good soundtrack is going in the background. And, you know, I'm just, it adds a lot to the experience. I think if the music was laid back, like in a lot of puzzle games, like thinking of the Talos principle or something like that, this, I, this game would be demonstrably worse, I think. 00:49:50.01 Steve Yeah, it's a big part of what gives it its very unique vibe. And ah the one of the biggest compliments I can give the soundtrack is just that it doesn't sound like anything else I've ever really listened to. Like I can't think of another game that is doing the Void Stranger thing. 00:50:07.48 Dave Yeah. Cause it's kind of tough to pin down. I don't think I have the vocabulary to pin down. What is the void stranger thing? It's a pretty eclectic soundtrack and they're not afraid to bring in lots of different sounds into it. 00:50:21.33 Dave So yeah, it's really good. 00:50:21.62 Steve Yeah. 00:50:24.56 Dave Let's see. All right. So before we get into spoilers, let's wrap up the non-spoiler section of the show by first talking about, you know, any closing thoughts you want to bring some things together or just answer the question, who would you recommend to play void stranger? 00:50:44.19 Steve Uh, so I feel like maybe some of our discussions skewed a little bit, like trying to scare people off, but I actually have the opposite feeling where I think almost everybody should check this game out. It is really cool. And despite those things kind of like maybe, maybe the wounds feeling a little bit fresh in some cases, it's the excitement to get back into it is definitely my takeaway as I finished the game. So who I would recommend it to. 00:51:13.10 Steve it will one anyone who's patient and if you're the type of person that appreciates games like animal well or tunic or if you're the type of person that appreciates games where people recommend it to you and then they won't tell you why like it's in hushed tones that they're talking about it um if you're like me and that's catnip for you then definitely check out void stranger 00:51:34.37 Dave Yeah, well, you know, we've already done 50 minutes about it. So like we already can tell, I don't really buy them, you know, I recommend this game to you, but I can't give you any type of recommendation that well it personally doesn't work that well for me. But there are always things that you can talk about. And it's kind of like you said, unfortunately, like a lot of the talk in the gameplay section was about you know how fun the puzzles are but also how directly hostile to you the game feels sometimes and that's just something that not a lot of games do nowadays. um There's a lot of smoothing out those rough edges and I wouldn't even call them 00:52:21.72 Dave rough, just edges in this game. There's just really rough things that this game does. It's part of the core experience. Um, so like, I think when recommending it, you have to be aware that that is what this game is doing. You have to be aware that that's part of the experience of playing void stranger. And it's, you know, I didn't look up the steam achievements, but I would guess that a lot of people probably didn't finish the game or didn't get to one way of finishing the game, I guess we'll say. like it's a I think it's going to put a lot of people off. So you have to be aware of that. But you are also able to draw your own line for you know when it becomes too much? When am I going to either tap out or check a guide? And 00:53:07.31 Dave until you get to that point, it's a really fucking cool game. And then even if you do get to that point, like me, and you decide to go the route of following a guide for, maybe you look up an answer to a specific question, or maybe you just go to a guide that's like, 00:53:24.69 Dave I literally, I would have like ah the guide up on one side and the game up on the other side and just read the guide and type in, you know, on the keyboard, up, left, up, up, up, Z, up, left, up, up, you know, like that to get through the hardest puzzles. 00:53:37.19 Steve yep 00:53:39.37 Dave um I got through that because I was so compelled to see where this game went and I knew I wouldn't be satisfied by just watching it on YouTube. and I'm glad that I did. 00:53:49.98 Dave so it's a really weird one where you know I do recommend that most people check it out, but I know that there's a lot of people listening to this who are hearing what we're saying and you're thinking like, that doesn't sound like something I would like. 00:54:02.09 Steve Yep. 00:54:03.44 Dave and 00:54:03.57 Steve Yeah. 00:54:05.49 Dave I don't think we're being overly overdramatic about it. Like this is a mean game sometimes. And a lot of people are not going to like what it's doing. 00:54:13.43 Steve Yeah, very much so. But if you're someone who, you know, can go in knowing that and you tell yourself the first time the game kicks me in the shins, I'm out, you'll still have probably several hours of like good, well-made puzzles. 00:54:27.42 Steve So you can at least appreciate those. 00:54:27.85 Dave Yeah. and great music, for sure. 00:54:30.64 Steve Yeah. 00:54:31.31 Dave And there are the sickos out there, I know you, because you're you've been on my podcast before, who... have a game, like you said, kick them in the shins. And you're like, Oh, that was good. 00:54:42.42 Dave ah Let's go. I can't wait to see what the next one is. So there are people who enjoy it when a game pushes back on you a little bit too. So if that's you 100% try to avoid strangers. 00:54:54.26 Dave ah So recommendations, it is a very cool game, despite, you know, us talking about 00:54:58.76 Steve Yeah. 00:55:00.99 Dave bad times that we had along the way. There were plenty of great times, too, as well. And in the spoiler section, we're going to spend quite a bit of time, I think, like talking about a bunch of cool discoveries that we made and like really getting deeper into why this game was so hard to put down, just things we can't say right now. We're saving those, as sometimes happens on the show. 00:55:22.87 Dave So before we get to that point, let's do our housekeeping, starting with you, Steve. Like I said, at the top of the show, you are on the IndieQuest podcast. You're on the Polykill podcast. So tell people about those and where they can find you. 00:55:40.04 Steve Yeah. So you can find either of the shows at polymedianetwork dot.com. IndieQuest is a show. Imagine kind of like the fast food version of your show, essentially. It's me and a couple of my co-hosts each bring an indie game to the show, kind of give it You know, it's run through its breakdown, its component pieces, and then give it a recommendation on what we call the quest log. 00:56:04.15 Steve So it's just a giant running list that we maintain of all the games we've ever brought to the show. And basically, do we give them a thumbs up or two thumbs up is how it breaks down. 00:56:11.65 Dave Mm 00:56:12.49 Steve We call it the main quest or the side quest, but anything on that list is worth checking out. 00:56:15.01 Dave hmm. 00:56:16.61 Steve So if you're a fan of indie stuff, you can go check out that one. And then Polykill is a podcast about beating your game backlog. So again, very relevant to folks here. 00:56:27.71 Steve ah We talk about games that we're currently playing, games that we've finished. We solicit all the games from our listener base and community and the games that they've finished and talk about the games that they're working on in the last couple of weeks. 00:56:40.72 Steve So it's just kind of like a big community opportunity to get to the games that we've been putting off for a long time. So. Yeah, come check out on either of those shows. Hope you enjoy it. 00:56:52.85 Dave Yeah, absolutely. IndieQuest, and that's the reason I think one of the reasons Void Stranger was something I suggested to you is because I know you're always looking out for indies. 00:57:03.81 Dave So ah yeah, Indie Quest is a great show. I recommend that people check that out. And I will be checking out Polykill after hearing the pitch as someone who's you know, working toward making dents in the backlog, we'll say. And um you have some ah some fun streams too, if people want to check out ah like some retro game streams from time to time, always enjoy when I'm able to pop in and see those. ah So I'll put links down in the show notes to your shows, your Twitch channel, and people can come check you out. It's good stuff. 00:57:38.94 Steve Yeah, I appreciate that. 00:57:41.29 Dave And ah for this show, same ways to support the show. As always, if you have enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a rating and or a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify podcast addict, likes and comments on YouTube. All of those things will help people find the show. ah So if anyone out there is looking for a void stranger podcast, they might find this one and that's what we want. 00:58:06.26 Dave So that's a big help. You can join the Discord community, which is a great group of people in there always talking about the games we're playing. And, you know, if you've played Void Stranger and want to come in and chat about it, we would love to have you come in and probably tell us about some of the stuff that we missed after we get through the spoiler section here. 00:58:26.13 Dave You can also listen to my other podcast. It's called a top three podcast where we do top three lists. And last but not least, if you want to support monetarily, you can do that at patreon dot.com slash real Dave Jackson, where every patron starting at $2 a month gets to vote in a monthly poll for games I do on the show. You get some bonus episodes and there's some other treats on there as well. 00:58:51.46 Dave So with all of that being said, we are going to take a break. And when we come back, it will be full spoiler time for void strangers. 01:00:34.78 Dave Okay, we're back and it's full spoiler time for Void Stranger. And a little disclaimer at the top here, actually two. The first one, as always, it's not a linear walk through the game. So if you don't wanna be spoiled on Void Stranger, please go play the game or ah stop listening, I guess. Hopefully if you don't wanna be spoiled, it means you wanna play the game. But the show will always be here for you if you wanna pause it and go play and come back. 01:01:02.19 Dave The other disclaimer here is that there's a lot in Void Stranger to discover, and the story is ah tough to parse for me, I guess, in particular. um We'll talk about that, I'm sure. But in this spoiler section, we're going to talk about cool stuff we found. We might talk about the story a little bit, but I'm not going to try to explain the story to you. That is not my job but and also ah not what I'm most excited to talk about in the spoiler section here. 01:01:27.74 Steve Thank you. 01:01:32.75 Dave So what I am most excited to talk about is just the cool stuff that we found, the mysteries that presented themselves to us and how we either found solutions or didn't if there's anything that we never figured out. 01:01:47.66 Dave So ah Steve, what was, what's something that jumps out at you as something fun that you discovered or, you know, a mystery 01:01:56.65 Steve I'll just take you through my first two playthroughs, which I guess is already getting into it, but um So Like right away or pretty early in the game you will yeah There's like a life mechanic that exists with these Grasshoppers like that 01:02:01.76 Dave Yeah. ah Yeah. 01:02:18.64 Dave Yeah. 01:02:19.87 Steve These bugs that you find, and every time you fall into a pit, it consumes one of these bugs. And they're basically functioning as lives. And if you run out of them, you can continue on with the game. 01:02:31.60 Steve Um, you're, you're given a choice, basically. It's like a game over screen. They say, do you want to continue or not? If you choose no, it's like, it's very abrupt. Suddenly it's, you're like, okay, they're basically like wipe your save file and kick you back to the main menu. 01:02:44.75 Dave Yeah. 01:02:45.42 Steve Like, no, you really are not continuing with this game. 01:02:48.24 Dave Yeah. They kick, I think they kick you back to steam, like the game shuts down. 01:02:51.14 Steve yeah Yeah. Yeah, just harsh. But if you say yes, uh, this little like, I don't know, bat creature has you eat this apple and then you can carry on and in place of what was formerly healthy, you know, it just says avoid. 01:03:06.53 Steve And now you kind of like, it's pretty clear immediately that you've made some sort of like deal with the devil for eternal life or however you want to call it, because now you can die as much as you want. 01:03:06.71 Dave Yeah. Mm-hmm. 01:03:15.87 Steve And there's really no consequence to it. Um, and so I pushed down, I'm assuming you did the same thing. I'm pretty sure you did push down all the way down into like the early two hundreds of in terms of floors. And the game gives you something you could consider an ending, but then it basically immediately kicks you back up. And to me, it felt very clear. Like I kind of had a suspicion the whole time, but it felt pretty obvious that I needed to do this again and not. 01:03:45.79 Steve ah go void or like get void health. 01:03:47.19 Dave Yep. 01:03:47.67 Steve I needed to basically get all the way to the bottom without losing all of my life. And I was able to do that my second run. I'm curious how it went for you. 01:03:58.45 Dave Um, I think that I probably got pretty deep into it and then checked a guide because I like you. I was sure that that's what I had to do to get like the, to finish the gray route is to get to the end without being voided. Uh, the first, the first run, um, I jumped off the edge in the room where you get the scepter just to see what would happen. And so I was voided immediately at that first run. Um, 01:04:25.96 Dave But ah yeah, so the second run, because I hadn't figured out the treasure chest trick, where you bump the back of a treasure chest, and then you can get three crickets instead of just one. 01:04:34.29 Steve Mm. 01:04:40.31 Dave I didn't figure that out till much later. um So yeah, I think I did check a guide to beat the gray route because I, you know, I didn't want to do the whole fucking thing again. Because some of the puzzles at the end are really tough. And, uh, I remembered how many times I died the first time. 01:05:00.74 Dave you know, trying to get through them. 01:05:00.97 Steve Yes. 01:05:01.90 Dave And like you said, I got back to floor 190 and I don't remember the solution to this thing. Like it's been hours since I was in this room. 01:05:08.11 Steve Yeah. 01:05:10.90 Dave So yeah, I think that's the first time I checked a guide just to get to the end to see what would happen because I, and I thought that would be the end of the game. So like, 01:05:20.24 Steve I was confident it would be too. And um I think that for the first two playthroughs, I had what I imagine is the developer's sort of intended experience. 01:05:32.90 Steve So I did that first run, made it to the bottom. 01:05:33.50 Dave Mmhmm. 01:05:35.85 Steve It was you know clear I got kind of a bad end. Then my second run, as I was going down with intention to not you know go void, I also started to uncover what you learn about the brands. 01:05:48.75 Steve And so, you know, we've talked about in the previous section how these levels are split into different chunks. A lot of the start of those chunks, you'll come into a room that just has this sort of mural on the wall. 01:06:02.71 Steve It's just like a picture made out of squares. 01:06:03.68 Dave Yeah. 01:06:06.48 Steve And there is no other context. You know, Gray has really no way to interpret it. She's basically just like, oh, that's strange. But you can tell from the way that they've dedicated the whole floor to showing this to you. 01:06:18.71 Steve Obviously, it means something. My first playthrough, I just was like, I don't know what that means. But my second one, I got a little bit more intentional, like, OK, this must mean something. And that's when I started taking screenshots and what ultimately became a folder on my desktop with about 100 different screenshots in this game. 01:06:35.37 Dave ah Yeah. 01:06:36.30 Steve Um, and, and you learn that pretty shortly after all of those rooms, usually I would say within like 20 to 30 floors, you'll come across a room that has the exact same number of tiles that those brands do. And they're really good about communicating the first one because the first one you come across is in the shape of the first brand like you need to only have remembered that shape and you'll be able to identify the room when you come into it and they just need to lift up one tile you need to lift up the staircase and suddenly these things fill in on the side of your screen and it's still not ah clear what to do but then when you drop down you learn like 01:07:12.87 Dave Yeah. 01:07:18.45 Steve Oh, okay, there's more to it. And you open up a treasure chest and you get your first of the other items in the game, which blew my mind because to now, you know, I've at this point I've played the game five, six, seven hours. 01:07:30.61 Steve And I'm fully sure that the rod that we're using is the only item available. And now I'm like, oh, that that was the first item of who knows how many. 01:07:37.08 Dave Yeah. 01:07:42.24 Dave I did not figure out the brand thing by myself. And I just, I never made the connection that the murals that you see have the same number of tiles as those, you know, seemingly empty rooms. 01:07:52.81 Steve Mm. 01:07:55.45 Dave I just thought the game was giving me a break in those seemingly empty rooms. ah So I did not figure this out by myself. And I used a guide for every brand room because I would look at those other than the first one. 01:08:09.67 Dave um and Maybe the second one, I would look at most of them and just be like, I don't even know where to start with this thing, especially as they get harder later. And like the last couple of them are insane. 01:08:21.79 Dave ah So yeah I didn't figure that out ah by myself. um One of the discoveries that I did make by myself is that um in the level with the tree, you 01:08:26.96 Steve Yeah. and 01:08:35.60 Dave there's nothing blocking you from going down to where the inventory and like the UI thing at the bottom of the screen is. And when I figured out that you could walk down there, but also pick up that stuff, that blew my mind. 01:08:50.14 Dave And for a while, it was just like a curious thing, because I didn't figure out how to use it for a while. um Because I think when I first figured it out, I was voided. 01:08:57.78 Steve Oh, yeah. 01:09:02.28 Dave So I couldn't. Well, you can't swap HP. There were some, or maybe I didn't have any crickets or something like that. So I was like, I think I can give myself more HP, but why do I need more HP? 01:09:11.22 Steve Yeah. 01:09:14.62 Dave Maybe I can give myself more crickets, but I have to get down to a higher floor and then like, I don't know, I forgot or something like that. But I did crash my game a few times by just messing around with that. 01:09:21.97 Steve yeah 01:09:26.28 Dave And that was a fun thing to discover. 01:09:29.21 Steve Yeah, you can grab the wrong part of the UI and the game basically just shuts the desktop. The game loves shutting down to the desktop. it's There's like seven different ways in the game to just shut it off, but i I don't even remember now at the top of my head how you do it, but the first time I discovered that 01:09:36.84 Dave Yeah, it does. Yeah. 01:09:46.89 Steve It was completely an accident because it was in one of the later levels. I was in like, I think the early two hundreds or something, and I was just trying to solve a puzzle. And without even thinking about it, I didn't even process that that was the UI. 01:10:00.73 Steve I just built a bridge to like go around and push a block. 01:10:01.54 Dave Yeah. 01:10:06.62 Steve And there was this moment where I was like, wait, I'm standing on top of. my cricket symbol right now, like I shouldn't, I shouldn't be here. 01:10:12.93 Dave Yeah. 01:10:15.87 Steve And I ended up grabbing, I want to say it was the level one, like the, the tens and the ones place of the level number. And I may be finishing the level at that point. I'm not sure, but I did something then that results in you exploring this weird empty void. 01:10:32.81 Steve Did you ever get to that place? 01:10:33.32 Dave Mm hmm. I did. ah There's a couple of those places I got to. There's one that's like a white void where um there is. I wanna say there's like some hazard that's like showing up on the screen and you have like a limited time to solve the puzzles in there before that thing catches you. And if it does, you die or something like that. But you get to like the end screen of that is just an end screen. Like there's nothing to do there. You just have to um you just have to like die and leave, I guess. I got to that one. There was another one I got to where 01:11:16.31 Dave um i i was I think I was playing as Lily and it's like I'm on top of a portrait of Gray. Like it's a puzzle and you had to rearrange it to like make this picture of Gray holding Lily when she was a baby or something like that. 01:11:32.33 Steve Hmm. 01:11:32.49 Dave um But I couldn't figure that out either and I died. I think I jumped in a pit or something and that was over. 01:11:40.39 Steve Oh, this is the void stranger thing, because ah neither of those are the one that I was talking about. 01:11:40.57 Dave So but there's lots of weird voids that you end up in. 01:11:49.10 Dave Okay. 01:11:49.43 Steve Strangely enough, I never got to the weird white one. 01:11:50.14 Dave ah okay 01:11:52.54 Steve So that one is complete news to me. I did get to the place where you built a picture. um And the way I did it, I thought that it was part of my kind of like true ending route, but the, anyways, the one that I got, it's ah it's just a completely black screen when you're in it. And there's this sort of very faint, humming noise. And it's a little bit like, you know, Zelda Lost Woods or something where you are moving screen to screen, but they all look identical. So you don't really know how you're moving, but as you start to move around, you realize that if you move in certain directions, 01:12:31.39 Steve The sound is getting louder and louder. So you're sort of navigating blindly moving towards the audio source. 01:12:36.00 Dave Hmm. 01:12:39.76 Steve And ultimately when I got to the source of that sound, it was like this giant looked like an egg from an alien or something like that. Like this giant egg that had opened up and clearly birthed something at some point in the past. 01:12:54.01 Steve And I'm pretty sure again, in typical void stranger fashion, I interacted with it and I talked with it and then the game just shut down to desktop. And when I booted it back up, I was back in the level before I had done that. 01:13:05.31 Steve So I'm not sure if that is like part of a larger mystery or it's just like a fun Easter egg for messing with the UI in the specific way I did. 01:13:05.72 Dave Mmm, okay. 01:13:14.60 Dave Huh, so I didn't and don't think I did that. So there's that. um Speaking of those other items, so I got the memory item by just beating the game with gray, I think. 01:13:32.56 Dave ah That's the one that lets you like to talk to the rocks and the statues and stuff like that. 01:13:37.97 Steve Yeah. 01:13:38.04 Dave I think that's how I got that. And I don't remember if I got the sword by doing a mural or if I got it by just looking up the brand and putting it in at the brand input screen. Cause you learn like you can kind of customize like what items do I want to start with? What character do I want to start with like a brand input screen at the beginning? 01:14:01.63 Dave Which is a cool, cool way to do it, to be like, I want to play as this character with these items and, you know, maybe some other modifiers and stuff. And it's a, I've never seen a game do something like that. Like when that brand screen came up the first time I played it, I was like, what did, what did, I don't even understand. Okay. I'll make a brand, I guess. And then I never, like, did you ever figure something out to do with your brand that you made? 01:14:30.51 Steve No, I was never able to find a place to put it. 01:14:31.85 Dave okay 01:14:36.32 Steve i I don't know about you, but I just made mine a smiley face. I felt like I had no choice. um And I know I never ended up using it for any purpose, but I agree with you that the way that you can put other brands in that section is really smart. 01:14:51.00 Steve It's one of the like many gentle ways that the game like starts to roll back the hostility a little bit because it's so harsh at first where you're learning like they teach you all the ways to mess up first and then they teach you all the ways to like navigate more easily 01:14:57.11 Dave Okay. Mhm. 01:15:09.82 Steve After that, once you've proven you're willing to do it. 01:15:10.33 Dave Yeah. 01:15:12.34 Steve And that is one of them. So when earlier we're saying that it just wipes your save, it's like, well, that's true, but it's also going to give you these tools that you can start the game with. 01:15:23.32 Steve And these items, when you have all of them, trivialize a lot of the puzzles or significantly reduce the difficulty of a lot of puzzles, especially the one that lets you hop over a single pit safely is like you can, you can shoot through the first 50, 60 floors. 01:15:32.52 Dave Yeah. Yeah. 01:15:42.44 Steve Like it's Mario 1-1 at that point. 01:15:45.10 Dave Yeah, exactly. Now, did you find the wings and the sword just by experimenting with those murals? 01:15:53.79 Steve So that's why I say I think I had the ideal playthrough that the developers wanted, because my second run, so my first non-void run with Gray, I found the cube, the wings, and the sword all back to back. 01:16:06.55 Dave Oh, shit. 01:16:06.91 Steve So I was able to get to the end of that run without a guide, because I was playing on easy mode, basically. like I was skipping half of every puzzle and getting to like manipulate things. 01:16:12.99 Dave Right. 01:16:17.17 Steve um So I was feeling like I was on my high horse at that point. I was like, Oh man, avoid strangers going buttery smooth for me. 01:16:21.78 Dave Damn. 01:16:24.21 Steve I'm loving this. 01:16:26.01 Dave That's ah That's cool. I did not know about the wings or the sword until I played as Sif. And Sif starts with those and I was like, holy shit, this is incredible. 01:16:33.15 Steve Which it is. 01:16:37.81 Dave And then I thought like, Well, those are taking up those spaces down in the you know the UI where everything was empty when I was playing as Gray and Lily. So ah i could probably need to look up how to get those as Gray. 01:16:52.84 Dave And it was like, oh, the murals, those things that I like didn't know anything about, that's what those are for. 01:16:58.27 Steve Yeah, 01:16:58.55 Dave So I did not figure that out. 01:17:01.34 Steve yeah it made, it was really nice for me, uh, going into Lily's run because you can still put those brands in and start Lily's run with all of them. 01:17:11.16 Dave yeah 01:17:13.69 Steve And so I was like, the puzzles were harder, but it was also compensating back in the other direction. Cause I had all of these opportunities to make them easier for myself. 01:17:24.91 Steve So that part was nice. But yeah, that would be rough to not find them earlier. And you said you didn't find them until the Sif run, folks listening, like that's like your fourth playthrough of the game in like an optimal setting. 01:17:29.87 Dave Yeah. yeah Mm hmm. 01:17:36.14 Steve Like you're going to have probably two is gray. Then you're going to play as Lily and then you're going to play as Sif. so 01:17:41.74 Dave Right. And Lily's is hard mode. It's like, it would be like if you just turned on a hard mode modifier and you did like the hard version of every single puzzle in the game, that's Lily's route. And I didn't have the upgrades. I didn't know about them. So I think I texted you and I was like, man, this like, I don't want to spoil it, but the game just got way harder and I don't think I can do this. And so I did like, 01:18:08.47 Dave I was also afraid of going voided because now I, you know, cause I beat, I just beat the game with gray not being voided. So I was like, Oh, now I have to do hard mode and not get voided. Like this is bad. Cause the first, it's like room two, after you pick up the scepter introduces those, uh, or it has one of those little orbs that follows you around or like the, the diamonds or whatever they are. Um, 01:18:34.53 Dave And like, so the easiest room in the game had that enemy in it. I was like, Oh, fuck, this is this is not good. So I used a guide. 01:18:46.46 Dave like I tried for like 15 or 20 levels in Lily's route. And then I was like, I saw that's when I was pulled up by someone who made this incredible guide on Google Sheets. 01:18:58.33 Dave That is 01:18:58.48 Steve I'm sure I followed the same one, yeah. 01:18:59.81 Dave Yeah, it is, it is ridiculously good down to the input. So I literally didn't look at the screen. I would just be like, you know, if I press these buttons in the right order, I will get to the end of the puzzle. 01:19:13.60 Dave And I did all of Lily's route like that because I, I just didn't know about the things to make the game easier. 01:19:16.56 Steve Yeah. 01:19:20.60 Dave And those puzzles were too hard. So, and then by that point I was like, 01:19:23.84 Steve Yeah. 01:19:26.92 Dave There's probably going to be more after this or I'll see the end of the game because what I thought was the end was not even close to the end. So here we are. 01:19:36.44 Steve Yeah, I did the same thing. I played through half of Lily's route, I guess on my own. And at some point, even with all those tools, the puzzles get very hard. 01:19:47.87 Steve They do the later like hard mode Lily route puzzles do start to approach the like, there's only one solution to this puzzle type of design, especially some of the later levels where you have like the shadow copies of yourself that are following behind you. 01:19:57.96 Dave Yeah. 01:20:04.87 Steve That means like you. Your options for movement are extremely limited, but yeah, I got probably a little over halfway through Lily's run and. I was not void yet and I was losing ground and I was like, I don't know if I have the heart to get to the end of this run and learn that I have to have done this one on voided as well. 01:20:27.53 Steve And if I was like, this is probably like, this has got to be so close to the end of the game. 01:20:27.91 Dave Yep. 01:20:32.62 Steve Like it would make so much sense that like you do this run through the hard mode puzzles and then you're done. So that's when I started following a guide to get to the end of that run. And then you're like, oh, this isn't even the end of the game. 01:20:43.10 Steve This is like the halfway point of the game. 01:20:46.22 Dave Yep, yeah. So after Lily's route, then you do the route as Sif, which is easy mode, because Sif has all the upgrades. Then after you beat the game as Sif, you have um one more route to do if you know what to do. 01:21:03.27 Dave others like If you don't know what to do, you might be just doing the shit over and over and over again until you figure it out. So did you figure out on your own how to go to floor zero? 01:21:16.85 Steve Uh, I would say yes and no. So at that point I was doing less consulting of that guide and I think you had finished it by that point. 01:21:28.52 Steve So you were kind of like my, my nudge in the right direction. 01:21:29.35 Dave Yeah. 01:21:31.62 Steve And I forget what you said. I had a bunch of, I laid out like a whole bunch of stuff I had like half figured out and you, you sort of nudged me like, Oh, you need to ah You might've said go to floor zero or something. 01:21:43.73 Steve You said something that immediately clicked in my brain like, oh, I should have known to try that. So what you can do is one of the ways you learn once you discover you can mess with the HUD is that you can swap around any of the items, any of the tiles in the HUD that have numbers. 01:22:02.87 Steve more Most importantly, 01:22:02.88 Dave Yeah. 01:22:04.53 Steve your kind of grasshopper account and the floor number, the last two digits of the floor number, because you can't take the first two because it will break the game. 01:22:08.51 Dave Yeah. 01:22:14.60 Steve um But you can swap the last two, which means you can be on floor 100. And if you've somehow managed to get 99 grasshoppers, that's not really realistic. But as an example, 01:22:25.17 Steve you can grab that, swap those two, and when you go into the stairs, you will now be on floor 199 and you've jumped ahead 99 levels. And inverse to that, that's one of the only ways to go back up floors that you've already gone down, which you sometimes need to do. 01:22:35.12 Dave Yeah. 01:22:39.15 Dave Mhm. 01:22:42.65 Steve So you'll occasionally be getting towards the bottom and be like, I think I might've missed what I need to do. And you'll Like I, I was like throwing myself into a pit to get my grasshopper count down to the right number so I could swap it in and get to the floor I needed. But kind of like what feels like a logical conclusion to that thought is you can then swap the zero counter on the grasshoppers. You know, I have zero life. I have no lives left with the floor number and jump back to a floor before the one that you started on, which turns out to be kind of like. 01:23:18.75 Steve One of the ultimate mysteries has kind of like a super Metroid defeating the four bosses statue going on. 01:23:23.59 Dave yeah Yeah, so two things there. First of all, the ah using the UI to skip forward is how speedruns work in this game. 01:23:34.57 Dave And I watched like a wild speedrun of someone beating this non-voided in like a ridiculously short amount of time, where they just memorized the optimal solution to every puzzle that you have to do. 01:23:39.39 Steve Oh. 01:23:50.26 Dave um They did some brands in there to get some items. It was like starting from a fresh game file to the true ending in like just making it up like 12 minutes or some shit like just ridiculous because They've mastered all the ways to skip around the dungeon um So figuring that out oh and then also using those those statues with the 01:24:04.64 Steve wild. 01:24:15.34 Dave if It's a certain type of statue. If you jump into it, it will push you forward. However many crickets you have, it will push you that many floors forward, which is another aspect of the speed run. 01:24:25.81 Steve Uh, that took me a long time to figure out because for a long time, it just felt arbitrary to me. I was like, these are jumping me ahead. Some number of floors. 01:24:36.49 Steve It wasn't until really close to the end of my play that I realized that I could control that. 01:24:36.94 Dave Yeah. 01:24:41.62 Dave I figured it out because um they consume your crickets when you do that. So I would like to do it and I would skip like 40 floors ahead and be like, oh, this is awesome. 01:24:52.40 Dave I'm gonna be at the end in no time. And then I pick up a cricket in the next room and I would jump in again and it would skip me one floor or forward and be like, oh, well that sucks. What did I do? 01:25:03.15 Dave Oh, okay. I see what's going on here. 01:25:05.16 Steve Yeah. 01:25:06.29 Dave So um I use that on the, ah the run where I was trying to do all the bosses to get the ultimate scepter, because I think in that run, you need to skip ahead where you can to be efficient. But then you also have to go back. 01:25:26.94 Steve Yeah. 01:25:27.12 Dave Uh, at some point, and that's where, uh, the other statue that we haven't talked about yet, the one that resets you to floor one, which was a rude fucking awakening the first time I figured out. 01:25:39.22 Dave And then like the second time it happened to me when I just fell in a pit and didn't realize that statue was next to it, you know, and it resets you from floor, like 200 back to floor one. 01:25:47.57 Steve Ah. 01:25:51.75 Dave And I was mad when that happened. 01:25:54.96 Steve I was furious and then so rude. So yes, you get to the statue that literally starts the game over. And in hard mode in Lily's route, there's like five floors where they just sort of almost nonchalantly put one of those statues above the staircase. 01:26:15.27 Steve And those rooms are usually not that hard. 01:26:15.91 Dave Yeah. 01:26:18.84 Steve And so if you're playing through, especially when I was going through that first half without a guide, you realize that you're not like parsing every single tile in every level. Like as long as I see the route to the stairs, my brain just kind of starts running towards it. So there were, I think, two different times where I was like, like dozens or over a hundred levels deep. And just because I wasn't paying attention, I walked into one of those 01:26:47.20 Dave Yeah. 01:26:47.73 Steve ah statues and started my game over. And that was like another strong impetus where I was like, I'm not paying close enough attention to ever get through this game. I'm going to need to consult a guide to know when these statues appear. 01:27:00.24 Dave That happened to me on ah the So if you do all the boss fights, and I wanna talk about them ah in a second, but if you do all the boss fights on like the quest to open that chest to get the ultimate s scepter thing, after you do that and you get the ultimate scepter and you you go to the brand room where you have to pick up all the tiles and you fall off and it takes you to like the beginning of the next dungeon, that room has one of those right in front of a staircase. So it's like you went through all the stuff 01:27:35.08 Dave And then if you just see off, thank God, staircase, it resets you back to level one. The good, the only good part about that, and it's like, you know, obviously an intentional choice is that that doesn't end your run. It just sends you back to floor one. So it's not like a reset, but you do get sent back to floor one, which you do need to use sometimes. But when it happens, when you're not wanting it to happen, it's like, um, come on. 01:28:04.52 Steve Yeah, it is. It is so painful and ah for me. It wasn't clear. It took me a while to like. understand that the game was drawing a distinction between I've reset you to floor one and I've reset your save because you can do both of those accidentally basically in this game. 01:28:17.41 Dave yeah 01:28:22.84 Steve And so it took me a little while to realize that that was something I should be using as a tool to navigate around the floors and not just something that I should universally be avoiding. 01:28:36.16 Dave Yeah. I definitely like it. I guess if I was playing the game optimally without a guide. that would have been one more complication to like you know keep an eye on like when you start a room identify the bad statues and like don't don't mess with those when i got to like the harder parts of the game i i just couldn't solve the puzzles by myself so that wasn't a huge issue because i was just using a guide to see what the game had left for me and that kind of 01:29:11.57 Dave Really started when im when i was doing this quest to get the upgraded scepter. I wouldn't have figured out like hey i got to floor zero by myself but then i was like what is all this you know and i don't even remember the ways to get to the places where you have to fight. 01:29:30.71 Dave all the bosses like there's one where it's like the big head sitting in the room and you have to stab kill the head what it asks you to kill it and you're like alright sure so you do that um there's one where you have to kill tail um which you need I think you need the special scepter to do that to build yourself a platform up to Maybe you don't I don't remember. 01:29:55.32 Dave um But you need to remember you need a hint to like bump into something 26 times and then sit or some weird shit like that and like a rock will tell you that or something you know. 01:29:56.75 Steve You. 01:30:00.12 Steve Yeah. 01:30:09.05 Steve Yeah, I got that hint. And I don't even remember where I got at some point, I just had a bunch of notes that were like, here's things I've learned or need to try. 01:30:15.41 Dave Yeah. 01:30:17.17 Steve And I don't even remember what the end result of all of them were. But yeah. 01:30:21.75 Dave Yeah. Um, what'd you think of boss fights? I did not expect this game to have boss fights in it, but there's a handful. 01:30:32.59 Steve I think they're actually really well done. Like, 01:30:36.95 Dave Yeah. 01:30:38.00 Steve I was expecting, because in a very early story scene, you ah do like a turn-based RPG battle as Grey. 01:30:45.58 Dave Yep. 01:30:46.29 Steve And so you're like, okay, this game's having some fun in mixing genres. So in my brain, when it came time for any moment like that, that's how they would do it. But you end up doing the boss fights. 01:30:57.54 Steve almost all of them are in tile puzzle mode. And even though they're designed with a certain level of randomness to them, they all felt like the, to me, the perfect difficulty. 01:31:12.19 Steve And it was actually kind of nice because for some of the later ones, I was already in like full on guide mode, like tell me what to do. And that was one of the few chances for me to like minimize that browser tab and be like, okay, 01:31:19.20 Dave Yeah. 01:31:24.72 Steve This is just me versus the boss now and I can go at it and have some fun. 01:31:26.89 Dave Yep. Same here, yeah. um There was the Centipede boss, which I thought was, ah you know, kind of tough to figure out, you know, how it works and things like that. But I had a great time with that one. um And that one's in the, like, you take a step, it takes a move, kind of like turn based format. And there's another, I think the Spider boss is like that too. 01:31:53.54 Dave ah where it's like a spider and then flies shooting out from the sides of the room. 01:31:56.76 Steve Yeah. 01:31:58.14 Dave I think that's also in that turn-based mode. There's another one that's in like real time, which feels wrong whenever that puzzle section of gameplay turns into like real time and you can walk outside of a grid and all of that stuff. 01:32:16.40 Dave um So, yeah. 01:32:18.29 Steve it it becomes undertale in that moment very much like suddenly you're just like dodging around in this very limited space and it's it shouldn't feel surprising because every run of like a new file starts with you doing a floor and a half of free movement like you know that you 01:32:26.90 Dave Mm hmm. 01:32:38.32 Steve the game isn't like strictly adhering to this tile grid, but because it really never messes with that again. When some system comes back up at the very end of the game that does mess with it, you're like, Oh, I was not expecting this at all. 01:32:53.09 Dave Yeah, and I like you thought, OK, puzzle section and then story section with JRPG turn based combat like that first one. 01:33:03.72 Steve Yep. 01:33:05.18 Dave And it never happens again until the very end of the game. And deep neither of those are like serious battles, like they're both presented like that, but they're not 01:33:08.86 Steve Yeah. 01:33:17.50 Dave ah I think there's one against the Prince too, but they're not like, you have to beat this boss fight in order to continue the story, I think. 01:33:28.19 Steve As far as I know, It almost feels like none of them can even be lost. Like it, it might be that you need to like to use the right moves, but a lot of times it felt like I could do whatever I wanted to in those turn-based fights. 01:33:42.11 Steve And then the same story would progress onwards, or at least I always got the outcome I sort of expected to happen. 01:33:45.58 Dave Yeah. 01:33:48.32 Dave Yeah, same here. um So the the next like big discovery is getting the ah upgraded void rod, ah which you can pick up as many tiles as you want, which like if you have the sword and the fairy wings, and you can just pick up all the tiles you want and just like make yourself a bridge, no problem, to the ah to the end of the levels, that's like that's this game's a version of ultimate empowerment. 01:33:59.39 Steve yeah 01:34:18.92 Steve Yeah, but by the time you get that, and for me, it was very, very late. 01:34:19.24 Dave feels good. 01:34:22.79 Steve I mean, it kind of by definition has to be with the order of the runs. By the time you get that, it felt like I could just do whatever I wanted at that point. And you've learned so many other systems by then to navigate up and down the floors that it's like the last puzzle piece you need to be like, okay, I can just do whatever I want, go wherever I want. 01:34:31.11 Dave Yeah. 01:34:42.77 Steve ah I'm the boss of this now. 01:34:44.87 Dave Yep, until ah you're not because the last, so you did the last layer of DIS, D-I-S, right? 01:34:55.04 Steve Yeah. 01:34:56.17 Dave Yeah. Did you like it? Did you try it without a guide? 01:35:02.12 Steve ah So like the very final set of dungeons or the very final boss fight? 01:35:07.61 Dave The set of puzzles. 01:35:09.95 Steve I think I did maybe one or two without a guide, but at that point, I was like, no, these are so hard that I just need to look it up. 01:35:17.75 Dave Yeah, they're. 01:35:19.04 Steve They're fun because they're, they kind of mess with the, the rules of puzzles a little bit. They get a little bit more like metagamey for some of them where you have to like pay attention to what one floor is laid out like to solve another floor, or you need to like do unintuitive things like open and close the pause menu several times to solve one of them. 01:35:26.32 Dave Yeah. 01:35:39.01 Steve And so that part's kind of neat, but most of them I had to just ah guide my way through. 01:35:44.86 Dave Yeah, I took one look at the first puzzle and like, cause I think throughout the course of, no, that's a lie. I was going to say throughout the course of getting the scepter, you'll go to a room that gives you 99 crickets. So I was like full of crickets, but during one of those boss fights is the spider one. If you die once you get automatically voided, which is again, just like a, 01:36:10.96 Dave the game kicking you in the shins just for fun. um So I was voided by then so I wasn't afraid of actually no that's that's a lie I was afraid of dying because I had done all of this shit to get to this point I was like if I lose a run does this ultimate rod go away and I have to go do all those boss fights again like you never know with this game 01:36:33.38 Steve yeah 01:36:34.09 Dave So I think you had written somewhere in the notes and I wasn't sure if we had, we had mentioned it, but like there are many points in the game where you are like the game's encouraging you to, to go explore and try stuff, but you are feeling discouraged to try stuff. 01:36:50.88 Dave Cause if you get, you know, slapped on the wrist too many times, you're just going to stop doing it or you're going to feel uneasy about doing it. 01:36:57.60 Steve Mmhmm. Yeah. In hindsight, I imagine very silly examples of that, but one of them was, as you start to get those items, we talked about things like the sword and the wings and things like that. 01:37:12.07 Steve It opens up this like section in your menu where you can turn them on and off because on some rare occasion, it will be handy to not have one of them enabled in order to help you navigate the way you need to. 01:37:22.99 Dave yeah 01:37:25.13 Steve And they're just labeled burdens. 01:37:27.20 Dave yeah 01:37:27.38 Steve And and so when i i I didn't like notice that menu as soon as I got an item So sometime later, I noticed that suddenly there's this thing called burdens in my menu And I was too afraid to toggle it because I was like if I turn this on or off or whatever. 01:37:40.44 Steve It's not Like is this gonna you know nullify the last two hours of me running down through these floors or not? And so I didn't even bother Messing with them until I was in a very safe environment. 01:37:48.26 Dave Yeah. Yeah. 01:37:52.97 Steve Like I had just started a new run on floor one. 01:37:54.98 Dave Yeah. 01:37:55.49 Steve I can't undo anything 01:37:58.81 Dave Well, your intuition was right because I think one of the criteria for getting to this ending dungeon is you have to have all the burdens on. 01:38:08.51 Steve Mmm. 01:38:08.53 Dave ah So like, because you can't solve these puzzles without the sword and the wings and all that stuff like that. So it's the game making sure you have all of those things. But if you happen to have turned them off in the menu, 01:38:21.08 Dave I, maybe the game would have kicked you back to floor one or something like that. So yeah, you never know. And like, there is a certain point where I'm like, I'm afraid to die, even though I'm in voided mode. 01:38:35.09 Dave Void mode taught me earlier that it's okay to die, but now I'm in this weird new dungeon, I don't know what's going on here. And the game is also trust has also taught me that it's going to punish me sometimes for experimenting. 01:38:50.09 Dave So, like there's one time when, I think, I don't remember the room, but like, 01:38:51.17 Steve yeah 01:39:00.11 Dave It might have been the cricket warp statues. It was like there was an NPC or a rock or something that hinted like, hey, ah fall down the hole in front of that statue. 01:39:12.57 Steve Yeah. Hmm. 01:39:15.96 Dave And there was something else in that room that I wanted to do. but I was like, okay, it told me I'll go jump in the hole and see what happens. And it warps me away from that room. And now I can't do the thing that I was in that room to do in the first place. 01:39:30.43 Dave And I was like, come come on. 01:39:30.74 Steve Yep. 01:39:31.79 Dave Like what the, like I get, like you, you just taught me how that, where now I know how those statues work, but like, couldn't you have done that in a room with nothing else of incident, you know? 01:39:42.66 Steve Yeah, exactly. It's like, that's why I ended up taking so many screenshots and like they're all labeled like 193 secret exit questions, you know, like murals never solved things like that. 01:39:49.00 Dave Yeah. 01:39:55.64 Dave Yeah. 01:39:56.57 Steve ah It became so ridiculous that it got to the point where like I was so simultaneously afraid and conspiracy brain with like, this game is always two steps ahead of me. 01:40:08.88 Steve um When you change the color palettes in the menu, for some reason, the names of the colors are like starred out other than the first letter of the color. 01:40:20.29 Steve And I was fully convinced at one point that changing the color palette is going to become relevant to the story or to solving or navigating these environments. 01:40:27.00 Dave Yeah, yeah. 01:40:31.43 Steve And so I. you know every now and again, I would not know what to do somewhere and I would go start flipping color palettes to be like, you know is this gonna suddenly reveal tiles that weren't visible before or something like that? And at least in all the time points I tried it, it never was the case. I suppose it still could be, but that's where your head gets. 01:40:52.35 Dave Yeah, it does. ah It does make you question because it's already established. It's doing meta things with UI and stuff like that. So like, you know, fucking around with some things in the, in the menu. 01:41:04.54 Dave And like you said, there is a puzzle that's like pause and unpause the game six times, or there's one that's like, you know, bump into this thing 26 times and then wait 26 seconds and, you know, really just weird stuff like that. 01:41:15.91 Steve Yeah. 01:41:18.14 Dave So anything could be a puzzle solution for sure. 01:41:22.33 Steve Yeah, it's a very message-you type of game, even down to this is like a kind of non sequitur, but sort of related to a really neat thing that the game does that I've never seen before. You said you never checked the steam achievements for the game. 01:41:37.07 Steve but right at the start of the game, there's only one achievement in this game, and it's just a pendant. 01:41:38.04 Dave Mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:41:43.43 Steve Right at the start of the game, it's Gray's pendant, so you start the game basically as soon as the first cutscene done, that achievement pops and you have that achievement. 01:41:51.39 Dave Yep. 01:41:52.29 Steve When you finish Gray's route and you now are playing as Lily, Steam takes that achievement away from you, which I've never, I didn't even know was possible, but the achievement disappears. 01:41:58.34 Dave Uh-huh. Yeah, same. ah so 01:42:03.85 Steve And then for, you know, a story scene later, she receives that pendant and as soon as you receive it, then it repops the trophy for you again and gives you the pendant back. And I was, and that's like a game messing with you on like a whole other layer that I wasn't expecting. 01:42:19.66 Steve So threw me off even more. 01:42:22.88 Dave Yeah, absolutely. When it took the achievement away, I was like, kid yeah, it's kind of like you said, like, can you even do that? Like, did I, did I screw something up? Like, was I cheating? Am I banned or something like that? 01:42:34.96 Steve I was gaslighting myself. I was like, did I ever have that achievement? I thought I did, but maybe I never earned it. 01:42:38.58 Dave Yeah. 01:42:41.56 Dave yeah Yeah, maybe you didn't. um This is a good music break spot. let's ah Let's talk a little bit about the story and then we can kind of wrap up um with what happens at the end, talk about what comes up and how we feel about that. ah The events of the story, I will say, um I 01:43:07.82 Dave was always intrigued by what was going to come up next. And the story went in some cool directions that I thought. But for a while, and like even right now, I'm still not positive on what happened in the story in this game. 01:43:22.30 Dave But um the story of, you know, Gray losing Lily, ah Lily is like, 01:43:23.03 Steve Yeah. 01:43:30.65 Dave If I remember right, the prince had a bargain with those demons from the void dungeon. And Lily was kind of sacrificed as like a soul to go in to help the prince fulfill his bargain or something like that. 01:43:46.64 Dave And that's why, like I didn't know for a while that in the dungeon, you're playing as Gray. I didn't put that together for quite some time. 01:43:53.32 Steve Mm. 01:43:55.14 Dave And so Gray is just, I don't know, has a feeling that Lily's down there. And that's why she's going through this. And um you find some cool stuff in the dungeon, like there are those NPC type things that mirror your movements. 01:44:11.42 Dave But if you're ever able to tell them that those are also gray, which I thought was weird. 01:44:16.38 Steve Yeah. And they like to encourage you. 01:44:17.40 Dave So yeah. 01:44:18.51 Steve They're like, keep pushing forward. You, you've got this. You also come across a bunch of others, like random other people, that it's very easy to accidentally shove into a pit, but you don't necessarily have to. 01:44:31.08 Dave Yes, it is. And I don't know if there's a reason, like, I don't know if you're rewarded for saving them because there's, there's like a couple levels where there's like a snake moving toward one of them and you have to, you have to block the snake from getting to them. Like, I don't know if there's a reward for saving those people or not. 01:44:51.52 Steve i I don't know if there's a really tangible reward. I did get a couple of like images in the credits following like the dis-ending of one or two of the people I had met in that route and not pushed into it the void. 01:45:04.72 Dave Okay. 01:45:08.41 Steve Um, so I don't know if it's like, they'll show you like the happy lives of people that you saved from certain doom. 01:45:14.96 Dave That you saved. Yeah. So along those lines, ah what's your take on like what this dungeon is? Because that's one of the things that they give you like most of the answer to, I think, but not the whole answer, I don't think. 01:45:33.99 Dave And I can go first if you want. 01:45:34.09 Steve it and ah I'll give you my like blurry theory and you can hopefully maybe correct it or clarify it for me. But it seems like sometime in the distant past, there was some sort of 01:45:42.68 Dave Maybe. 01:45:48.58 Steve This all started as some sort of technology-based research station or you know server farm or whatever it might be. 01:45:58.05 Dave Yeah. 01:45:58.10 Steve And at some point in the past, something happened to like ah basically like an apocalyptic event of some kind. And it becomes one of those things were like the system doesn't know the humans are gone and just sort of keeps running in perpetuity. 01:46:08.01 Dave Yeah. 01:46:15.72 Dave Yeah. 01:46:15.94 Steve But then that also seems to tie to the various void lords that you meet are also like the demons also seem to have some relation to wanting to protect the system, which I don't know if that is like a, you know, like they, they have founded this place and it's like a religious item to them, or if they had a connection to it previously, I'm not super sure. 01:46:40.51 Dave Yeah, so definitely on the same page with it being like an old research facility, the game mentioned that ah the record stopped 70,000 years ago. And you know like you said, some cataclysm or something probably caused that. um And it's an interesting theory that the demons that you deal with, and then like there's some that you don't deal with, but you just like hear about, 01:47:09.32 Steve Yeah. 01:47:09.68 Dave could have been like researchers there or um some kind of like programs or something like that that are there to protect it. um Like you said, 01:47:24.49 Dave Or maybe you didn't say this, I remember. there's what i got the sense i think there was one I think there was one part where they said that the demons are there fulfilling a purpose that they don't remember anymore. 01:47:39.44 Steve Hmm. 01:47:39.62 Dave And they're just like going through doing their job, but they don't know what. And they're trying to figure that out at the same time. um And there's like this other thing who likes giving them instructions but won't give them enough instructions. So like you're in the dark for a while and it seems like they know what's going on, but then you get to a point where they don't really know what's going on either ah when you get like you you know conversations between some of those characters together. 01:48:09.73 Dave Um, I think that's the one before you start playing as Sif, where it's like Sif talks to another character and then they're like, Oh, fuck B is still in there. And so Sif's like, all right, I'll go get B. 01:48:21.92 Dave And then Sif goes out into the dungeon to find them, but I don't, yeah. 01:48:26.03 Steve Yeah. and That's all complicated too, because there's like, and they reference some sort of tension or like, I think they call it like a civil war or something between different characters. And so it seems like they had competing, either knowing competing purposes, or like some of them wanted to break off and like to stop. 01:48:49.91 Steve doing whatever it is that this computer system has been having them do and so there's tension between certain groups of these demons and I didn't follow it to the point where like, I followed it enough to be like, Oh, this is fun. 01:49:06.12 Steve This is cool. But I was not following the particulars. 01:49:07.15 Dave Yeah. 01:49:08.70 Steve And then very, very late came. There's like a reveal, like, ha ha, it was me all along. And I didn't even know. 01:49:14.13 Dave Right. 01:49:14.99 Steve I was like, who are you? 01:49:15.20 Dave Yeah. 01:49:17.08 Steve Like, should this be a dramatic reveal? 01:49:20.37 Dave the the little bat demon that gives you the fruit that turns you voided turns out to be like the big bad um its name is Lev and this is one of those parts where it's like I think this game wants you to care about these characters and I didn't really you know like this I was always interested in what was going to come up 01:49:23.54 Steve Yeah. 01:49:40.08 Steve Yeah. 01:49:43.66 Dave but like when you had a conversation um with two of the demon lords or you know one of the demon lords is in trouble i didn't care about that in the same way that i cared about you know hoping gray and lily could reunite at some point and that gray would find her or something like that um and then there's there's like these weird fake out endings where it's like gray gets there but Lily is, Lily's pregnant, not, you know, however that happened. 01:50:13.31 Steve Yeah. 01:50:14.34 Dave And like, you can't take both of them out. Like one has to stay behind. So Grey takes the baby out. Like I was more invested in that storyline. And like, so for as cool as the revelation, the like, oh, this is an ancient high tech facility. 01:50:30.75 Dave And the things you thought were trees are actually not trees. And the things you thought were murals are like covering up computer units. Like those reveals are cool, but like I don't, I, maybe I just didn't have enough or maybe I didn't think enough about it, but those parts just didn't hit the same. 01:50:48.14 Steve Yeah, I think that goes if you're the type of person where like this is your one game and you play it and scrutinize it for months or years, like it probably does have all that information buried in places we never saw or like is more clear. 01:51:03.49 Dave Yeah. 01:51:04.71 Steve Or it's just the type of game that's fun to put a wiki together and like to piece all this disparate information together. It was funny because, yes, so at the end of the gray route, um, you get to the end and you face this like tribunal, this like set of judges that are basically like, we've deemed your soul worthy. 01:51:23.16 Dave yeah 01:51:24.50 Steve You know, we grant you one wish and it's like, uh, be careful what you wish for that type of thing because she's, they say like, oh, you can free one soul. And so you choose Lily and that's when they reveal Lily's pregnant and Gray has to choose, do I save the baby or do I save Lily? 01:51:41.61 Steve And Gray actually chooses the baby, so every time we've been saying the Lily route, that's a different Lily from the original Lily. 01:51:43.39 Dave Yeah. 01:51:47.30 Dave Yeah, different one. Yeah. 01:51:49.07 Steve um And it's funny because the game then uses the same fake out a second time where when Lily gets to the bottom, she faces those same judges. And she wishes for her mother to be at peace. And she's referring to Gray, but her real mother is another Lily. And so when she wishes for her mother to be at peace, she actually is now freeing Lily, who remained imprisoned after Gray, to be free again. So both times, the characters end up like but not getting what they wished for in their direct way. 01:52:23.41 Dave Yeah, I also enjoyed the story so after you beat it with Gray and Gray takes baby Lily out of the dungeon, there is a bit of a story of Like they're not in fantasy RPG world anymore. 01:52:40.24 Dave They're like the modern day. 01:52:42.16 Steve Yeah. 01:52:42.21 Dave So Gray is like this fish out of water trying to raise a baby and like Lily is like growing up in it. So she adjusts better to like modern society. 01:52:53.57 Dave And so I thought that storyline was really interesting. And like every time we had a scene where ah like There's one scene where like gray freaks out and says like, you're turning out just like your mother or something like that and Lily's like, Oh, wait, if my mother, not you, why did you say that? So like when we have scenes like that, I thought that was really cool. 01:53:20.57 Dave um And I think it's at the beginning of the Lily route to where she goes home to visit gray. This is all told in nonlinear order. So I'm getting the, the order mixed up, but I guess at the end of this story, Lily goes to visit Gray, finds the pendant in a, uh, uh, an envelope and then like a pit to the dungeon opens up. 01:53:29.61 Steve Yeah. 01:53:43.92 Dave And that's when you jump in and you start her route. But so like all this to say, I thought that storyline was pretty interesting, fun to follow, setting up some themes that you can follow along with, you know. 01:53:57.84 Dave This person fishes out of water, isekai into the future, is trying to raise a baby, stuff like that. 01:54:02.64 Steve Yeah. 01:54:04.84 Dave Like I thought that was interesting, but it just turns out to be like just a chapter along the way rather than, you know, ah what I thought it was going to, I thought this was just going to be a story about these characters together. 01:54:20.41 Dave When it turns out It's a little bit about that, but it's also about this whole other like society and you know setting of this this future place, and I just couldn't really follow that. 01:54:32.92 Steve Yeah, but I thought the same thing where I was like, okay, this is just going to be like, it's a nice fantasy side story. By the end, I was grateful for those scenes because it was like something grounded that like I can actually follow along with like character progression and like, you know, seeing them at different points in their lives, as opposed to me trying to like keep track of a bunch of different like names and sprites and, you know, are the like, 01:54:45.88 Dave Yeah. 01:55:00.09 Steve There are different layers and like places that they live and floors that are tied to them and their brand. Like it was, it got very hard to keep track of. 01:55:08.64 Dave Yeah, and then there's a point where, I think if I remember right, Lily, baby Lily gets down to the bottom of the dungeon, asks for peace for her mother. 01:55:19.89 Dave And like the demon Lord that she's talking to, I wrote down that the mask cracks and you see that it's mother Lily behind the mask there. 01:55:25.09 Steve Yeah. yeah 01:55:28.73 Dave So it's like, whoa, but you get kicked out. You get kicked out to the ending card and then you start over again. But, um, All this to say you do get the reunion at the end of Grey and Lily and it depends. 01:55:44.85 Dave I think it depends who you beat the game with, like actually beating the final dungeon. You can beat it as Lily or as Grey. And that will change who's in this reunion at the end with Mother Lily. 01:55:56.89 Steve Okay. 01:55:58.46 Dave ah So it could be Grey and Princess Lily reuniting finally, or it could be baby Lily reuniting with her real mom at the end, depending on who you do the route with. I never crossed my mind to try and do the hard mode version of this. So ah gray Gray was the one for me. 01:56:22.22 Steve Yeah, same for me too. I wanted to avoid the hard mode. I'd like to tell myself there was maybe a little piece in my brain that was like, you know, it feels more appropriate to close this story out as gray too, but in reality, yes, I just, I wanted the normal levels. 01:56:34.18 Dave Yeah. 01:56:39.08 Dave if yeah If you didn't do this and like the canon version of events was that Gray went through all of this torment to try and find Lily and then just ends up getting lost in the void and never, you know, never has an ending to her story, that would be pretty ah pretty tragic. 01:56:53.21 Steve Oh. Yeah, pretty sad for Gray in the end, although I don't know, you also kind of get into the ending. You also, I think, learn that Gray is one of the demons. 01:57:06.46 Steve at the end. 01:57:06.66 Dave Huh. 01:57:08.08 Steve So like, you know, they're sort of like signified by all having horns, like a way to keep track of them. And when you reach that final ending, Gray has like a transformation and she loses all their clothes and gets like a stone embedded in her chest and she also gets horns. 01:57:25.77 Steve So I think the implication is that she is like one of them or a relative to one of them. 01:57:26.46 Dave yeah 01:57:33.59 Dave She merges with one of them because the demon Lev bursts out of the little imp thing that gave you the fruit and you have like one of those JRPG fights with it and Grey loses. um And then this other, because this this Lev is trying to use the power of Dis to rule the world or whatever it wants to do you know demon shit and then gray loses the fight and one of the other demons called called add merges with gray and that's when gray turns into this like 01:58:10.40 Steve Oh. 01:58:10.50 Dave demon thing. And then she combines with Lily to turn into the butterfly thing, which you then do that shoot them up section, which came out of shouldn't have come out of nowhere, ah knowing the developer's history with Zero Ranger, but came out of nowhere for me where I was like, Oh, we're doing a shoot them up section now. 01:58:15.86 Steve Yeah. 01:58:28.83 Dave ah In my head, I was like, I hope this is good. 01:58:29.10 Steve yeah 01:58:33.36 Dave not putting the pieces together. And I asked my, uh, some friends of mine who really like to shoot them up. It's like, what's the reputation of a zero ranger? And people are like, it's great. It's one of the best out there. 01:58:44.29 Dave So these people know what they're doing with this. 01:58:44.70 Steve Hmm. 01:58:46.83 Dave Now, of course, this is more of like a story thing than like a hardcore shoot them up, you know, final boss or something like that. 01:58:57.06 Steve Yeah, it's, it's not quite a victory lap, but it's close. I certainly took a bunch of hits and I was still able to get through to the point where I was like, unsure that it was even possible for me to lose. But at the same time, I guess I should ask you because you go through and shoot them up and you're like in outer space, you're shooting down like a bunch of human ships and stuff. 01:59:22.03 Dave Yeah, it's like space army and shit. 01:59:23.74 Steve Yeah. And so you get through all that and you kind of get up to Lev or what I assume is Lev. Yeah. And you like to fight this version where there's like a bunch of different weak points, you kill that. And then it goes into this legit like bullet hell mode where you're just controlling like this orb. 01:59:42.90 Dave Yeah. 01:59:43.11 Steve And you're like navigating through all these bullets and you got like this little sparkle coming off you that will diffuse some of the bullets around you. And I think you're trying to navigate to like the core of that thing, spitting out all the bullets. 01:59:54.69 Steve I ended up getting hit by one of the bullets and I like went like black hole supernova, but I still got an ending and it seemed 01:59:55.30 Dave Yep. So did I. 02:00:05.08 Steve enough of an ending where I was like, I don't think I'm going to play all those hard levels again and do the shoot them up section again, just to have one more shot at this to see if there's hopefully not another like route or two locked behind that. 02:00:13.27 Dave Same. 02:00:19.18 Dave Yeah, so I did the exact same thing. I died in that section where you're controlling the little, the little black diamond, because I didn't know what to do. 02:00:29.67 Dave Like it just kind of puts you there. 02:00:29.83 Steve Yeah. 02:00:31.80 Dave And like, okay, I can't shoot. I don't know what to do. And then like, you know, I touch something and you die instantly. um This part I yeah i was 02:00:45.87 Dave ah yeah they should have bet they should have signaled better what you were supposed to do if they're gonna pull you out of shmup mode and put you into something like vaguely related but it's it's different your goal is different and i just yeah didn't know what to do so i died um and that was the end of my game there is like if you look on the wiki the guide for this ending there is 02:00:49.91 Steve Yeah. 02:01:11.66 Dave pages and pages of stuff after this. 02:01:14.51 Steve ah 02:01:14.51 Dave Like more boss fights, more cutscenes, there's a ton of stuff after this. And so to have it, I think that once you get to this point, it should be a victory lap to the end. 02:01:28.60 Dave You know, give me the spectacle of the shmup part, give me the ending cutscenes, 02:01:29.30 Steve Yeah. 02:01:35.64 Dave It's one final kick in the shins to, to have this, to, to just one hit kill kick into an ending. Um, yeah. 02:01:47.29 Dave And then you like, if you go look on the Wiki, there's pages and screenshots and screenshots of like more boss phases and more cut scenes and stuff like that. And ah I didn't even, I saw this and I said the same thing as you. 02:01:59.98 Dave I'm like, I'm not doing this again. That was enough. 02:02:01.94 Steve Yeah. Yeah. It's like, even with all the knowledge you have and even with a guide, it's still like an hour of manipulating all the pieces to solve this ultimate mystery, to even just get back here and have one more shot at it. 02:02:16.30 Dave Yeah. 02:02:19.38 Steve So I was like, this felt like, this felt like enough of an ending for me. This is like the ninth time I've gotten an ending in this game. I think I'm pretty okay to call it here. 02:02:27.40 Dave And you know, the other part that made me okay with calling it is I read that the upgraded void rod is permanent unless you beat the game. 02:02:39.03 Steve Oh interesting. 02:02:40.06 Dave So if you start, I figured, I didn't check to see if I'm right or not, but I'm pretty sure I am. Correct me if I'm wrong, anyone out there. But since I've got the ending, if I were to start a new game, I would have had to do all those boss fights to get the upgraded Rod again to go back to Dis's dungeon and then do all this other stuff. So it was like, man, I mean, I like the game and I do wanna see what's at the end. I was compelled to come this far, even if I was just, you know, 02:03:13.70 Dave reading that guide, you know, keystroke by keystroke. This is it though, that I'm not going any further than this. ah So it's kind of a shame and I don't... 02:03:27.28 Dave I don't agree with the decision to make it, you know, especially with just how you start that section where you're controlling the little black diamond. And there's like seconds where I'm like weaving in and out of bullets, but I'm like, what am I even doing here? 02:03:41.90 Dave What am I supposed to do? Oh, I got hit. 02:03:43.30 Steve Yeah. 02:03:43.70 Dave Oh, it's the end of the game now. Okay. 02:03:46.94 Steve And there are parts of those bullets that you can't navigate through. And like I said, there's like a little emitter coming out of your seat. There must be timing and dodging at the same time. 02:03:57.75 Steve But yeah, just ah just a little bit too harsh for me to want to push through, even though I like 02:04:03.16 Dave Yeah. 02:04:04.91 Steve I like all of the knowledge and information you have to combine to get to that point. And I do like that it's the type of game where if you booted it up for the first time, like you're saying with the speedruns, with all of the knowledge on what to do, you could fast track on your first playthrough as gray directly to this true ending. um it still is It's a little too harsh to punish me that deep in. 02:04:30.43 Dave Yeah, yeah, for sure. So the ah the ending is kind of sweet. um You know, I failed, so Grey and Lily fell out of the sky like a shooting star and then a cutscene shows Grey reading like a bedtime story to Lily about the stars. So I wasn't quite sure if that was, you know, in the same timeline or if one of those was a dream or something like that. But at that point, it didn't really matter. It was just a nice, nice sweet ending. 02:05:03.71 Steve Yeah, it was enough of a closure for me to feel okay with it. I do wonder if because there's that shoot them up section and there's one or two other spots where the game like brings you into outer space or shows you views of outer space. 02:05:22.67 Dave Mm hmm. 02:05:23.02 Steve I wonder if this is ultimately and like if it is a connected story to Zero Ranger in some way and if it's one of those things where if I had played that game first I would I would see them drawing parallels between the two stories you know like their version of the remedy verse or whatever it is but um to me they they were kind of lost on me they were cool scenes but I was like I'm not really sure what this is supposed to mean okay 02:05:39.78 Dave Yeah. 02:05:47.49 Dave Yeah, I know they are connected in some way, but I don't know to what degree. Like I assume that the space army that you're shooting at in that last section is like something you're doing in Zero Ranger too. So probably like people who played Zero Ranger would like start that section and be like, oh fuck, it's it's it' Zero Ranger again. um So yeah, I'm interested in playing Zero Ranger. 02:06:13.77 Dave um i am You know, there's no using a guide to get through a shmup. You have to just do it. 02:06:20.09 Steve yeah 02:06:21.78 Dave So I'm not think I will buy it and I will try it, but I'm not confident that I can actually beat that game ah to see how connected this is. 02:06:31.74 Steve Yeah, if it's a, you know, you have to play on hard mode and not lose a credit and never use bombs to unlock your opportunity to try the true ending route. 02:06:37.78 Dave Yeah. 02:06:42.46 Steve It's like that might be a game where maybe I do take it to YouTube at that point. 02:06:47.58 Dave Yeah, well, in any case, um they've set up like a really interesting world at the very least. And they, because Zero Ranger apparently also has, you know, quote more to it than meets the eye. It's not just a standard, you know, shmup. So there's more stuff going on. I don't know to what degree. you know I don't know, ah you know, anything else really, but I do know that system erasure knows how to make an interesting game at the very least and so I'm gonna check out Zero Ranger sometime but like I can't wait to see the next thing they're working on. 02:07:19.83 Steve yeah 02:07:27.47 Dave i It's gonna be weird. I can almost guarantee that. 02:07:31.40 Steve Yeah, I mean, they've established a vibe for themselves that I'm very much down for. And I wonder if they feel, at this point, some obligation to keep changing the genre. I mean, to go from shooting them up to a block puzzler is about as drastic a difference as you can make. 02:07:46.86 Dave Yeah. 02:07:47.14 Steve So like, what's next? Is it a visual novel? Is it a simulation sports game? um' I'm ready to find out. 02:07:54.07 Dave Yeah. Souls-like. Yeah. It'll be interesting. It's interesting. Um, it makes me think of like the developers of rain world who, you know, another one of these games where there's like a ton under the surface for you to discover about that game. And then the new game they're working on is a racing game where, you know, maybe they're not interested in continuing the, uh, you know, the, the cryptic game full of secrets. And maybe they're just like, Hey, it would be cool too. Yeah. Make a soccer game or something like that. 02:08:25.97 Steve Yeah, and we want to put our feet up a little bit. and just Just design the one game and not hide you know two or three other games in our game. 02:08:33.53 Dave Exactly. Well, whatever it is, I'm up for it. um Void stranger was, uh, was certainly an experience. 02:08:36.49 Steve Yeah. 02:08:40.14 Dave And for all the, I like the metaphor we've been using all the times I got kicked in the shins. I was so glad to have played it and gone through and seen everything. Uh, cause even if I didn't get the, the top shelf void stranger experience where like, I think there are some people, like if you go on the subreddit for this game, there's, there's people who like. 02:09:01.56 Dave just to eat it all up. Even if I didn't get that experience, I still, like I said, respect the hell out of this game and the developers for making something so dense and rich as this game is. 02:09:15.53 Steve Yeah, I end it on a very positive note. Like I would I would always give the caveat and like to prepare people for how their time is going to get spent. But at the end of the day, I would definitely recommend people check it out. It is a game worth experiencing for sure. 02:09:32.94 Dave You know, you just reminded me, like, I feel this way about Rainworld. Have you played Rainworld? 02:09:38.51 Steve No, I haven't yet. 02:09:39.65 Dave Okay. I feel this way about Rainworld. It's the same type of game. Rainworld is full of unfair bullshit, but now that I'm through it, I can look back on it and just be like, I made it through. 02:09:51.03 Dave And like, when I see someone, you know, in the Discord playing Rainworld and complaining about the unfair bullshit, I can just laugh and be like, yep, I got through it. That's something that happened in my past and I love that game. And, uh, you know, if we see people out there playing void stranger and be like, I can't believe it reset me to level one for just trying this thing, we can just be like, yeah, sucks. Doesn't it? But, uh, it's a cool game. 02:10:19.03 Steve yeah Yeah. Yeah. I feel your pain. Enjoy the next 30 hours of your life. 02:10:23.97 Dave Exactly. Yeah. You know, you can't stop playing it. So you'll be back. 02:10:28.05 Steve Yup. Yup. It's only a matter of time. 02:10:31.17 Dave Well, ah speaking of being back, this has been a great time, man. I appreciate you coming on and talking about Void Stranger with me. I can't wait till the next time we have you on the show here. um Yeah, I appreciate you again. Thanks for, it's, ah we're over two hours now, so thank you. 02:10:47.90 Steve Yeah, thanks for having a really great time. Thanks for encouraging me to play a game that I wanted to play anyways. And yeah, appreciate the show and I love what you do. 02:10:58.24 Steve So I was very honored to be asked to come on and be a guest. So I'll come back anytime. 02:11:02.25 Dave Yeah, right back at you. 02:11:03.36 Steve Just let me know. 02:11:04.66 Dave For sure. um Maybe Zero Ranger, maybe not. We'll figure something else out, but. 02:11:08.93 Steve Yeah, we might need to taste that a little bit to see if it's in the cards. 02:11:12.58 Dave ah Yeah, come on the podcast and be like, well, I played 20 minutes and I suck, so ah fun podcast everybody. 02:11:17.55 Steve yeah 02:11:19.08 Dave But um yeah, thank you again and thank you to everyone who has listened to the end of the episode. 02:11:19.70 Steve Yup. 02:11:25.30 Dave We appreciate you very much and a reminder that down in the episode description. There will be links to Indie Quest and Polykill and everything that Steve is doing so you can go check them out. ah It's high quality stuff that's worth your time. And as always, tune in next week for the next game to come out of the backlog.