It is strange, opaque, mundane and terrifying, and bears all the hallmarks of a deeply, beautifully self-indulgent project.
I think the best way to describe it is to describe the first-time player experience. You boot it up and get a little content warning screen—gore, flashing lights, disturbing images, yeah, good to know—and moments after you click the little continue button, a cluster of slightly dusty pattern-recognition neurons lights up like a christmas tree.
Hey, do some of these UI sounds seem... familiar?
You check out the tutorial. As the game loads you into a level that looks like a low-effort Counter-Strike Source map circa 2005, a message flashes up, front and centre:
Node Graph out of Date. Rebuilding...
Wait a goddamn second.
You alt-tab out and check the files on the disk. No doubt—that's Unreal engine. This is an Unreal engine game masquerading as a Source game. It sounds like Source, it feels like Source, and if you ignore some of the nicer effects, it looks a bit like Source too. I don't know what the legality is of lifting Half-Life 2 sound effects wholesale and populating your entire game with them, but I'm not a cop, y'know?
Whatever. Weird, but understandable. You progress through a few gently lit rooms reminiscent of a fy_pool_day remix, in which the game tries and largely fails to explain the byzantine inventory system, the various hotkeys and shortcuts, and the important distinction between 'Grab', 'Hold', and 'Collect'. In a room half-full of pool toys, you digest several dense paragraphs of instructions and eventually figure out how to operate the enormous bank of computer consoles that could arguably be called the core of the game. Scan the skies for radio signals, zero-in on them, record them, and process them. It's the search for extra-terrestrial life, baby. It's slow and fraught with errors, but it's all worth it for that five second clip of white noise that communicates nothing of value whatsoever.
Then you start the game proper, and discover you have bigger problems.
Your home base is a boxy concrete building in a lush, forested valley, high in the Swiss mountains. Gargantuan satellite dishes line the landscape, silently saluting the boundless heavens. You approach the front entrance, suitcase in hand (remember: hold, not grab), and find the note for the keypad code. 1, 1, 1, 1.
It turns out that 1, 1, 1, 1 is not the most secure keypad code. Your new home is a dump. Every room is piled high with garbage, every surface is stained, and some practical joker has left a bunch of wooden mannequins hidden behind blind corners, just for shits and giggles. You find your living quarters—as filthy as everywhere else, but at least there's a mattress—and, god willing, eventually find some of the light switches too. There's a burger on top of the toilet cistern. You pick it up, and get a fraction of progress towards an achievement that simply says 'Burger'. Hey, a meal's a meal.
There's more Source energy leaking through here. I've played far too many mods that took Half-Life 2's grimy, rusty, dystopian assets and tried to shoehorn them into a setting that was supposed to be contemporary and everyday. The filth is inescapable, and to a degree you just have to accept it, to understand that this is a part of the aesthetic you need to look past. But in Voices of the Void, you do in fact have the capability to clean. So, if you're like me, you put aside your dreams of extraterrestrial contact for the moment, and you pick up a broom.
Then a hallucination scares the bejesus out of you and sends you to the kz_ map dimension, because you've been sweeping for thirty-six hours and haven't slept a wink.
Day to day, this game is a mundane experience. You wake up, check your daily tasks (Dr Bao wants three level 2 signals now? Do I look like I'm made of hard drives?), check on your equipment, do some maintenance, and maybe manage a bit of cleaning. Take the ATV out to one of the dishes and write down a hash code. Fix a transformer. Eat a reheated MRE (don't heat it too much, or you'll burn yourself) while panning back and forth across the skies. How's that signal? Not bad, not bad. Let's tune those filters and pull something down.
And yet, it puts me on edge. It feels like loading into an empty Garry's Mod map by yourself, exploring empty rooms and workspaces, working away at some project while the quiet ambience slowly worms its way under your skin. Unexplained X-Files-ass phenomena occasionally punctuate the experience, reminding you that you are not, in fact, alone. A distant explosion echoes across the valley. You wake up and hear footsteps rapidly receding somewhere outside. You park the ATV around the back of the transformer building, and notice an inexplicable pile of meat lying on the grass, without any signs of a struggle. You take measurements from a lonely dish terminal in the dead of night, and suddenly a green flash envelops your body, depositing you miles away in the middle of the pitch-black woods.
And with every new signal you process, there's that little pregnant moment of anticipation as the output crawls across the screen. Noise. Noise. More noise. There's gotta be something. There's gonna be something. Every time, you can feel yourself mentally tensing up, preparing for the moment when the infinite cosmos reaches down and deposits something groundbreaking, something beautiful, something horrifying into your hands. And eventually, it does.
This game is a lot of things, many of them eccentric and confusing (in a good way), but above all, it's a game in love with space—something else that's mundane and terrifying in equal measure. It wants you to know that you're small, that you're clueless, that you're blind and fumbling around in the dark for things you don't even understand. But it also wants you to just take stock of your surroundings, take care of yourself, and carve out a nice little home amidst the chaos.
It's also unfinished, technically. Not that you could really tell by looking at it, and from the sheer amount of game that's already here. There's a healthy serving of jank and a few troublesome bugs (like the distressingly opaque error message that comes up if the game tries to autosave while you're on your ATV), but it's nothing that'll stop you if you find yourself clicking with the broader experience. I almost want to stop playing now, just to ensure I'll still have an appetite when there's a definitive, final version to sink my teeth into.
Maybe they'll even swap out the Half-Life 2 sounds at some point.
