Recent reviews by lorgon

I have over 50 hours in this game, and the puzzles are cool, but I cannot recommend it.

Getting to a destination is just so infuriating. The game has many maps, some of which feel immense, and there is no in-game minimap and you're constantly being teleported through non-Euclidean spaces, and at random times various doors or passages may close, and many maps are explicitly designed to be mazes (occasionally invisible ones) and no matter how hard I try I just ending up wasting so much off my time backtracking and retracing my steps. I like the word puzzles but I hate the navigation, and I don't think it's fixable, it's just part of the game design/aesthetic. If you enjoy learning a mental map of giant 3D maze of non-Euclidean space, then maybe you can enjoy finding puzzles in the game in addition to solving them, but I do not enjoy the 'movement', and even though the 'visually distinct landmarks' have improved compared to the original Lingo, I feel like the maze-like-ness of it all is now even worse.

A thoroughly excellent puzzle game, borrowing from both sokoban and metroidvania genres for a very unique blend of mechanics that are both challenging and enjoyable. (I played the 1.2 release.)

(very minor spoilers to follow)

Like many puzzles games, I'd describe this as "sokoban-adjacent", due to the grid movement and block pushing. But whereas sokoban often has very tight constraints and precise solutions, this game features large grids that sometimes have plenty of open space, which facilitates a few things. First, screens often contain multiple objectives, so what looks like one large puzzle might in fact be three or four smaller puzzles with some small degree of interconnection. Second, the game is wordless/textless and has a lot of unique and interesting mechanics, and so the player has room to experiment on their own to discover how various elements interact, and find one of multiple solutions to certain puzzles. Finally, the game takes place in open-world maps that feel like older metroidvania/zelda games, and the large-grid screens make it so that many rooms can be multi-pass, as the player takes different exits and entrances to solve different aspects of a room (the in-game map can help keep you oriented).

The use of metroidvania-style powerups&secrets (which can 'gate' some areas or make previously-unsolvable puzzles become tractable) is rare for puzzle games, but worked really well in this one. In addition to figuring out the surface puzzles, the player will also be learning the 'design language' of the game to work out when it makes sense to put a puzzle aside to return to later, and the open world means there are almost always a number of puzzles available to choose from. Subtle breadcrumbs may also help players key into certain secrets, which can be nontrivial to uncover but always satisfying to find.

With something like 170 or so puzzle screens, I enjoyed the game's length; I got 100% completion in under 30 hours, and I expect most players would get 15-30 hours out of it. The game does not overstay its welcome, even if this means it probably did not fully explore the limits of its mechanics.

The soundtrack is nice (breezy island ambience), the pixel art is good, and the animated cutscenes and implied lore of the world all add to the game's overall experience.

I'd anticipated the release of this game for quite a while, and it exceeded my expectations :)

A very good 2D-Zelda-like game.

The combat is a little lackluster, the 1-bit color pixel art is occasionally hard to read, and the game gets off to a little bit of a slow start. But those are minor detractions for an otherwise great game, with a fantastic ever-expanding open-world map, a good set of both traditional and unexpected power-ups and mechanics, and a thorough sense of adventuring and puzzling throughout.

I'm about 15 hours in, and perhaps about two-thirds done? Always hard to tell with these games. It's been fun.

What an interesting game! I played it in 2024, some 11 years after it was released, and so I can only imagine how different and groundbreaking it must have been in its time, and can see a number of its influences on more recent game titles.

I found the game interesting and fun, and managed to get through about 75% of it before hitting a wall on difficult puzzles, and switched to using online info to play through the rest. By modern standards I can imagine some players might find this game's late stages unsatisfying, as there isn't a clear off-road delimiter for when the final puzzles and easter eggs get too difficult/obscure (and it's probably unreasonable for any one player to discover every object and easter egg on their own). But there was clearly an amazing, fully realized, world of puzzles and implicit lore, and a story and mechanic of seeing beyond the usual boundaries that makes this a real gem of a game.

"Vampire Survivors" meets "Gauntlet".

I'm having fun with it. It's been pretty tough (in 5 hours, I think I only made it past Level 2 three times - got to Level 5 once), but you collect money each run which you can spend on rogue-lite meta-progression items to make future runs go smoother.

I am about ten hours into this game, I don't know how much there is ahead of me, but I have seen enough already to recommend this game to anyone who has an affinity for grid-based puzzlers and enjoys games with weird lore and strange secrets. So far I am digging the art, music, and storytelling, as well as the bite-sized (surface-level) puzzles and fun mechanics.

I plan to edit a longer review later on, but based on what I have seen thus far, I think this game will attract at least a cult following to its niche, and for those who enjoy this style of weird-secrets game, I want to also recommend "No Anglerfish" and "Hero's Spirit" as two other relatively-unknown titles that (based on what I know thus far) are in roughly the same genre as Void Stranger.

I hope to be back with more to say once I have explored more of Void Stranger.

EDIT:

I'm not done, but I now have 50 hours spent in the game, according to Steam. What Steam does not say is that I have also spent about 20 hours outside the game on my own, trying to tease apart the incredible story (which is also kind of a puzzle?) that is told interstitially among the hundreds of surface-level puzzles I have solved to get here. The storytelling in Void Stranger is amazing, and reminds me of another very popular game from the past few years (which I won't name for spoilers reasons) that also captured me so much that I just wanted to spend all my free time trying to understand every last scrap of lore of the world. So uh, yeah, I am digging this game. Those of you who might also go wild about the story, there's lots to dig into, but for those who just want the puzzles, the puzzles have continued to be fun and challenging (if occasionally a little repetitive) and the storytelling is very fun, even if you just let the story aspect of the game wash over you without giving it much critical thought.

Void Stranger looks like it will be my game of the year.

I have been thoroughly enjoying this game. The puzzles are high-quality and there is so much content; two enormous levels each with hundreds of puzzles.

This seems to be the same game as the original, only with slightly improved mechanics and a new, unreadable UI. The visuals do not work for me; I can't plan a strategy if I can't even tell what I am looking at.

An excellent puzzle game. Rarely do I feel so consistently happy playing a puzzle game; it was always challenging but I never felt burnt out.

Nearly every puzzle has one (or more!) inflection points where you go from thinking "this puzzle is clearly impossible" to "this is easy" to "oh... wait..." A combination of both reasoning and the occasional insight are necessary to solve levels, but the small space of each puzzle and the small set of mechanics (which gradually expand as the game progresses) makes it 'reasonable' to find new insights when necessary, and make you feel really good when you are able to reason out solutions using your prior knowledge.

There is an in-game hint system, which I used once to help me on the one puzzle I got stuck on.

I think the only critical nitpicks I have with the game are that
- some of the puzzles are kind of 'hidden', after completing the first 40 puzzles you need to go thru the credits in the options menu to unlock the final 20 puzzles (EDIT: oh and then another "ten" after that too)
- the game occasionally has text between levels that's like "these levels are hard, be sure to take breaks!" which is maybe helpful advice, but which felt like an admonishment when I just wanted to play more of the game right now! :)

Anyway, if you like the block-pushing-puzzle genre, this game has consistently great level design.

If you enjoyed the first Elephantasy, or if you are just a fan of exploration-adventure games, then I think you will enjoy Flipside.

- huge world to explore
- a variety of interesting powerups to combine to unlock new parts of the maps
- various small platforming and puzzle challenges, as well as some deeper mysteries
- lots of collectibles, and strategic choices about when/how to spend them

The caveats I would mention are

- there is a short PDF manual that accompanies this game, I would recommend downloading and reading it
- the isometric 3-D geometry is sometimes hard to 'read', look at shadows to help you judge depth
- when you have herbs, I'd bind them to the secondary action button, so you don't accidentally consume herbs while pressing the primary action button to talk to NPCs and whatnot (I made a lot of button-oopsies)

I'm about 20 hours in and there's still a bit left to find, as far as I know. Very fun game.