Eurogamer: The Void Review
You may have noticed Quintin's enthusiasm about The Void. It really is a remarkable game, and we've certainly not heard the last of the analysis and attention it deserves. Me, however - I didn't fall in love. Which made it an interesting one to review. Well, you can see what I thought of it over at Eurogamer. Then there's some new bits and pieces of interest below. It starts like this:
"The Void makes me feel stupid. I'm more daunted by writing this review than I have been by any other. Perhaps not surprisingly, the last time I felt this terrified about writing a game up it was Pathologic, the previous game from Void developer Ice Pick Lodge. This is a game that's an awful lot smarter than I am. Or perhaps just weirder. See, I don't know. A review is designed to provide the reader with a description of the game, and then act as a buyer's guide. This will fail on both counts, since The Void is so far outside of the realms of helpful description that I might as well phone you up and make animal noises at you, and since I honestly couldn't tell you whether you should buy this or not. Instead let's fumble along together, and at the end you can decide for yourself."
Some interesting bits and pieces about The Void have emerged today. In the comments on the EG review, Ice-Pick Lodge developer Alex mentions the Bonus material, a whopping 4GB of goodies to accompany the game available via this (legitimate) torrent. It contains hundreds of pictures, along with videos, music, pdfs and poems. I can't tell you much more just now as I'm only 5.5% through the download, but those ahead of the game will likely report details below.
Alex also comments on some options being released tomorrow for those - like me - who found it stupendously difficult:
We'll be releasing cheats tomorrow for those of you, who just want to play for the story, beautiful design and music - no need to push yourself to hard. We overdid it with the difficulty a bit this time. :(
If you're interested to learn about the differences between the English language game The Void, and the Russian game it was based on, Tension, you can find all those details on the Ice-Pick Lodge forum here. It's a very honest explanation, including any negative changes that occurred. Well worth a quick read.
Oh, and in the spirit of bonus materials, here are a couple of images I took from the game that make rather splendid desktop backgrounds (icons on the left, of course). One and two.
