Space Oddity: Eerie Wandering With Inside The Void

Stop me if you've heard this one before: several spaceships and their crews have gone missing around a remote alien planet and you're sent in to find them. Must an FPS, yeah? An action-RPG, maybe? Nah mate, Inside the Void [official site] is a first-person walk-o-explorer. It's a flipping gorgeous one too, and spookier than I'd expected. It's free t'boot so do have a look if you like a good wander.

Inside the Void visits a low-poly crystalline world littered with strange and huge alien artefacts. Oh yep, I bet those are something to do with the disappearances. So go on, have a look, clamber up that glimmering hill to investigate that pyramid and its rotating capstone and- oh god, how did I get here?

That's it, largely. Wander a gorgeous planet, get sucked inside alien machinery, and find diary entries from the last people who investigated these oddities. Now, usually I'm not too big on text logs in walking simulators (I'm here for the wandering, me) but these do succinctly explain what's going on. Which is a bit spooky. I had not expected spookiness. I was pleased by it. And briefly scared by it.

Anyhoo! I'm only here to tell you Inside the Void is out, not to review it (I would say it doesn't stick the landing). Creator 3D Methods has released it free for Windows, Mac, and Linux from Itch.

If you like gawping, here's some good gawping.

I'm still reluctant to use 'walking simulator' for games with text logs and goals - they seem a bit too, y'know, game-y. Maybe we need 'walking simulator' and 'wandering simulator'. Serious research at the bleeding edge of video games.