A game that you probably need to buy...

So I was looking into artistic games and I think I may have found something on par with Portal, Shadow of the Colossus, and Braid. Another commenter on Kotaku suggested I look into a Russian game called The Void. It's on Steam and it's in a holiday bundle package that only costs $5 (which includes a couple zombie games and the ham-fisted but intriguing retelling of red-riding hood, The Path).

Well, I have to say that after an hour or so of play, it seems to be unbelievably good. I mean seriously. It's subtle, mysterious, it has innovative gameplay, and it's actually well programmed.

The best description I can give is an open-ended first person adventure with an Okami-esque paintbrush system and a mysterious plot. It seems to draw inspiration from a lot of sources including Legend of Zelda, Bioshock, the Sims, and Super Mario Brothers 3 but it feels most similar to Myst to me. You definitely get that same plot setup of being thrown into a world with its own pre-existing story and its your job to figure out what is going on.

I definitely recommend checking it out. If you buy this game on Steam for $5 and you don't think it's worth it, I will re-imburse you. No foolin'. (by you I of course mean the people I know on this blog with me, not you creepy Joe lurker who doesn't actually exist because no one else reads this blog)

What follows is me trying to further explain the plot (or what I got of it in the hour+ before I lost the game; my loss was fair and square though).

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The plot, from what I have gathered thus far, is that you (or maybe "you?" would be a better description since you have absolutely no clue who or what you actually are) are a new arrival to a sort of limbo/purgatory. Hauntingly empty and withered are good descriptions of the landscape (which still manages to have a lot of character despite being pretty bleak). You are tasked with survival by maintaining "Color" in your body which is the only separation between this limbo place and true death. The only other living being (initially) is an unnamed member of a group of beings calling themselves Sisters (seemingly human females, though the likelihood of that seems pretty slim). She sort of guides you and is trying to prepare you for the return of the Brothers who are the Sisters' protectors/keepers/jailers and the de facto rulers of the Void. Of course, from jump she is of questionable trustworthiness and that only seems to dwindle as the game progresses. Where I stopped (read "lost the game") the Brothers had shown up, they gave me a warm welcome as their new apprentice and I promptly violated that and got a bunch of super beings super-pissed at me. Anti-climatically I then ran out of color and died because I am apparently a bad manager of that resource.

What was so great about all this is the real sense that you are totally alone and you must rely upon yourself. As much as I was just playing through the tutorial, I never felt that safe coddled feeling of tutorials these days. There is a really well achieved balance of giving you what you need to survive and keeping you totally in the dark. The game also has follow through you don't normally see. When the Brothers showed up, in relatively friendly terms they told me to follow their rules which boil down to "don't waste color." Well, I was fiddling around trying to get the hang of the starter spell (my one gripe is how hard it can be to use the most central spell) and cleaning out some of the parasitic enemies in the game when an angry voice talks into my head telling me I broke the rules. I brush it off, keep fucking around, and two minutes later I get a really threatening message from one of the Brother's telling me that he or one of the others is on the way to beat my shit out in the next time cycle...

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble now, but I really really like this game. It's impressive and it's regretful that isn't more widely talked about because it seems to be among the games which show how video games really can do more than just be "fun." I doubt that my description of it really did it justice, so please, if you have a spare $5, buy this game. I don't think you will be disappointed.

*As I say above, my one and only gripe is that it can be really hard to paint the primary glyph. If you have problems as I did, I suggest giving it a quick Google or Youtube search since there are a couple things explaining the trick to it.