Ratings
The Void2008
developed by Ice-Pick Lodge
published by Atari, Inc., Techland
Released
10.0avg of 1 rating
A first-person game in which after starving to death, the player wakes up in the Void, a dying land housing numerous Sisters and long-absent Brothers, all of whom subsist on Color, the essence of life in the Void. With the player's arrival, a resurgence of Color is observed in the Void, prompting the Brothers to return and subject the player to various trials so that he may also become a Brother by using and sharing Color.
Screenshots
- Open reviewTrying to understand this game is a strange process in itself. The game doesn’t really try to explain itself, and most of the time it doesn’t even seem interested in doing so. Yet you still find yourself trying to make sense of it. What stood out to me as I kept playing was this: the system works, but it doesn’t feel healthy. You learn it, adapt to it, progress through it, but everything you do comes with a cost—and that cost usually undermines the very system you’re trying to navigate. At some point, even the feeling of “playing well” starts to feel a bit off. At first, Color looks like a standard resource. You gather it, spend it, optimize it. But over time, it becomes clear that it’s more than that. It starts to feel like the weight of your decisions. When you spend it, something changes—but you lose something in the process. When you hold onto it, you don’t lose anything—but you also don’t move forward. The game constantly leaves you stuck between these two states. The distinction between the Sisters and the Brothers feels more defined. The Sisters lean more towards emotion, desire, and potential. Helping them feels like you’re nurturing something, but at the same time you’re making them dependent on you. The Brothers, on the other hand, represent order and control—but not a healthy kind of order, more like something trying to preserve decay. Both sides make sense in their own way, but neither of them feels “right.” This is where the game is at its strongest. It doesn’t tell you what’s right or wrong. It simply places you inside the system and leaves you alone with your actions. As you progress, you start to question what you’re actually doing: are you really solving anything, or just sustaining the same cycle in a different way? Despite all this, the game doesn’t stay in a purely bleak place. You’re still doing something, still moving forward, and that movement doesn’t feel empty. It’s uncomfortable, but also genuinely impactful. The one thing the game does very clearly is this: it doesn’t give you an answer, but the question it asks stays with you.