sylvie

sylvie

@sylvie

beware of my sword

hello! i'm just a little sylvie, i like posting on this web site. meow meow meow

left half of love ♥ game, with @aria-of-flowers

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sylvie
@sylvie

stuff i like about void stranger

(this list does not contain anything i would personally consider a significant "spoiler" but don't look if you want zero information about the structure and content of the game)

click to meow

  1. it's an exploration game with a very unusual method of traversing the world

  2. the secrets lead to other secrets which lead to even more secrets

  3. no undo button means puzzles have stakes and tension

  4. there is a cool song with lyrics in the game that i'm listening to right now

  5. fraught, compelling yuri

  6. hidden mechanics often have multiple layers of depth beyond what you initially learn when you discover them

  7. testing out ideas is often time-consuming and repetitive, which spaces out discoveries and makes them feel more exciting and significant

  8. it's an incredibly bold game willing to throw out genre conventions and be hostile to the player for the sake of a unique experience

  9. there are so many things to investigate that it takes a long time to run out of ideas and get "stuck"

  10. it's not just sokoban-style grid manipulation puzzles, there are big riddles that involve piecing together hints from multiple parts of the game

  11. the sokobans are pretty cool too, some brutally tough ones in there for the puzzle heads but the game can be completed without solving everything

  12. good graphics

  13. the day i finished it i was having a mental breakdown because i couldn't get out of a hard puzzle area i had wandered myself into and when i finally got out and properly triggered the final credits sequence i started sobbing from the sheer catharsis

  14. from a design perspective, the ideas it explores deeply resonate with me and what i'm interested in exploring in my own work

  15. even after reaching the so-called "true ending" there are so many optional secrets and oddities you're likely to have missed, the depth of this game is staggering

a constantly surprising experience, crafted with love, made me deeply emotional, i'm in awe at everything this game accomplishes, i haven't stopped thinking about it for days

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in reply to @sylvie's post:

weeble
@weeble

Hi! I've been playing this game for about 12.5 hours and I'm about 110 levels in and I still don't feel like I've experienced 1, 2, 5, 6 or 9. I'm wondering... how far in do you need to get? The game feels really long and slow, in part because of what you describe in 3. I see that people are really passionate about this game and I really want to experience it, but I'm just not sure how long I have to keep plugging away to encounter this. I'm having a slightly better time than I was when I wrote this blog post but it still feels like a long distance from the game people are describing. It's not for lack of searching. I've spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the murals and their dot patterns. I think I missed some cut scenes earlier on at the first two trees that I don't have any way to return to. Have I missed large swathes of the game or do I just need to keep pushing for another hundred levels?

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sylvie
@sylvie

have you been choosing to "give up" and restart the game whenever you die? i strongly recommend choosing the other option and just experiencing the consequences of that choice. it's a bit of a commitment, you have to play through a little over 220 levels before (in my opinion) anything interesting happens. i didn't choose "give up" and it took around ~3.5 hours of solving fairly middling sokoban puzzles before i got to see something intriguing and cool. i ended up playing the game for 58 hours in total

mild structural spoiler for what happens after those ~220 levels, decode with rot13.com (the details tag isn't working in comments for me?!)

gur tnzr jvyy erfrg, ohg lbhe tbny fubhyqa'g or gb whfg ercynl gb gur raqvat jvgubhg qlvat. lbhe tbny fubhyq or gb rkcyber naq yrnea zber nobhg gur jbeyq naq vgf frpergf hagvy ernpuvat gur raqvat jvgubhg qlvat fgnegf gb frrz irel rnfl

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sylvie
@sylvie

oh i see why after looking at your most recent stream - you only get presented with the choice if you die with 0 locusts left. if you don't want to give up on the game, i suggest just trying to get through the stages as fast as possible for now, and not overanalyzing the puzzles to try to conserve locusts. i noticed while skimming your streams that you sometimes bring up an external program to help you solve levels or something like that? i think it'll go much faster if you just play recklessly and accept mistakes, and choose to "continue" when you run out of locusts. like i said, it took me maybe 3-4 hours to get through ~220 levels playing that way, and it's only after that point that the game started to hook me..

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weeble
@weeble

I think maybe I'm just really slow at Sokoban? Another 100 levels of the same stuff before anything interesting happens sounds like a lot to get through! It sounds like I'm playing... uh... six times slower than you? Given that I only play maybe once a week for a few hours at a time, and I have to get through another hundred or so levels it sounds like it's going to take me months to get to the interesting stuff. As much as I want to experience it, I think my odds of sticking with it are slim. :(

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sylvie
@sylvie

unfortunately i'm not sure it's a game that works too well if you can only play it once a week for a short amount of time.... even when it starts getting interesting, it demands a large time commitment and there's a lot of repetition and dead ends you can go down. i think the level of commitment the game asks for is an interesting aspect of it but it's not going to work for everyone....

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knutaf
@knutaf

Dangit you're selling me this game very effectively right now. Definitely need to play this next.

Here's a question... Do you think this would make for an enjoyable couch coop playthrough with someone else who hasn't played before? So you're both figuring it out as you go, with one person controlling?

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sylvie
@sylvie

i imagine it would be great to have someone to bounce ideas off when playing this! some of the puzzles are very hard or obtuse, and if you're playing solo you can't really look anything up without risking seeing spoilers for other stuff

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torcado
@torcado

Void stranger was a completely profound experience for me. I've been reading all your void stranger posts but I haven't replied to any because I'm weird and scared of interactions. I was constantly floored by just how much content was in the game, that was definitely the most impactful part to me. finishing a run, then having a single small thing change and trying that on a new run, and then seeing a whole new storyline and set of character cutscenes. I see that and I'm like "ok jesus that's so extra, I doubt there's anything else like that" and then it happens 5 more times. not sure what to call this kind of experience but it makes me go fucking insane, the kind where a game's depth goes so so far beyond what's shown on the surface. same sort of feeling I get with something like soda drinker pro/Vivian Clark, I think about that kind of thing all the time. it also makes talking about and recommending the game hard, because by even simply saying "this is an unexpected experience" I'm potentially ruining the reaction from the game. going in completely blind and not knowing any of this extra stuff exists is the best part to me, and it's completely antithetical to actually talking about or sharing the game. I'd otherwise only be able to say "it's a normal sokobon game" and hope they think that's good enough to try, to not diminish that kind of experience.

Anyway that's a lot of rambling, but it's been so fun watching you talk about the game and letting me get to relate to basically everything again hahaha

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sylvie
@sylvie

aw yay, i love reading about this game too, but yeah it can be hard to talk about or even just find people talking about it in depth because of the spoiler factor....

major super ultra finale spoilers (rot13)
v guvax bar bs gur shaavrfg guvatf va gur tnzr vf gur ibvq fgenatre yri gvgyr pneq snxrbhg, v ybfg zl fuvg ng gur zrer fhttrfgvba gung gurer jbhyq or n SBHEGU punenpgre nsgre nyy gung unun

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torcado
@torcado

ununun lrnu bu zl tbq. ohg rira whfg gur fubbgrzhc frpgvba nybar vf vafnar gb zr, fbzrguvat chg 40+ ubhef vagb n tnzr jvgu abguvat ng nyy fvzvyne hc hagvy gung cbvag, rkprcg sbe n pbhcyr obff svtugf xvaqn. (juvpu ogj ner njrfbzr, gur ghea onfrq obff svtugf ner fb fb fb pbby. naq gura v ybir ubj gurl oernx gur zbhyq jvgu gur pvs obff svtug abg orvat ghea onfrq, v ybir vg fb zhpu. vg frysvfuyl erzvaqf zr bs gur fnzr fbeg bs guvat v qvq jvgu gur svany obff va urpx qrpx unun)

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