The Void – a survival adventure game, in which your soul has to stay alive in the hostile world and to get out from it as quick as possible. The choice is either to support life in its horrifying Brothers or its mournful Sisters or strip them of it. The way you pass through The Void is the way it changes. The way it reflects upon you.

The surrealistic world of The Void is based on a single resource that grants the ability to live and act – Colour. Each Colour possesses its own character and unique properties – both useful and dangerous. Only Colour gives life, but it can take it back as well. Brothers’ blood, captured creature, gracious Sisters, tree brought to life, just everything is the source of Colour. Any action you take: battling an enemy, talking to a Sister, hunting, searching, traveling – Colour is the price in exchange.

"A game where you play a soul who finds themselves in an afterlife with no memory of the person they once were. We all have our hopes, fears and preconceptions of what the afterlife is meant to be like. The Void takes all of these in both arms and fumbles them into a bin, preferring instead to deploy all of Ice-Pick Lodge’s imagination and creativity in creating something fantastical, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. In other words, a place that’s actually worth exploring.

Desolation is the word, and the word is whispered. If an area isn’t blasted and blackened then it’s been twisted into a useless shape, and everywhere is still and sterile as a full moon. To call a game eerily beautiful is fast becoming a cliché so I’m going to sidestep that, but I will say that the Void musters up both the ugliest and most beautiful imagery I’ve seen all year.

The sound design lurking behind these barren vistas is similarly haunting. Percussion is slow and aimless, voices are never raised, but sometimes seem too loud. There is dripping, clunking, grinding. And in those few areas where the soundtrack does become excitable it seems to have no idea what to do with itself, always repeating or giving birth to confused-sounding solos.

A recurring theme in the Void is hunger, and that has a hand in the way areas are designed. At the very least an area will hint at bare cupboards, while most regions appear either farmed into oblivion or torn apart by some omnipotent brutalist in search of sustenance. Your own character, your soul, must constantly be fed if you want to survive. Likewise, passive NPCs must be fed if you want to progress, hostile NPCs roam the Void consuming what they find, and even the mindless Predators that sit in an area will pluck away at what’s available there.

To take some words from the mouth of one of the The Void’s characters- “There’s only hunger, slumber, and waiting for the end to come.”

So what is it, this substance everybody needs? What is it that’s lacking in such great quantities to have rendered the world exhausted?

Food? No. Water, perhaps? No.

Colour."

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Buy the game through Steam.