I need to know
What is this? A minimalist soulslike with a triangle in the main role.
Release date November 12, 2024
Expect to be paid $20/£17
Developer Studies in finite reflections
Publisher Modern wolf
Review on Gigabyte G5 (Nvidia RTX 4060, Intel Core i5 12500H, 16 GB DDR4-3200)
Steam deck TBA
To combine Official website
Oh god, damn it. I couldn’t wait to start this review with “Void Sols?” More like To avoid Salt! and then went down in history as the funniest game critic who ever lived. But then the selfish creators of this clever little soul had to ruin it all, creating yet another great game in everyone’s favorite/most inescapable genre. Whistle!
You play with a diminutive white triangle, which I like to see is the ship from Asteroids after a very unfortunate crash landing. Because a sinister collection of bitter shapes is occupying the land, seemingly leaving the Geometric Wars to instead spend about a dozen hours trying to kill you. Thanks to this game, I now know what the hexagon that hates me looks like. It’s great fun.
Geometric animosity aside, the first thing that really impressed me was the game’s phenomenal lighting. Void Sols is a dim game that can plunge you into inevitable depression on an OLED monitor. Your job is to brighten things up – well, a little – by lighting the torches you find as you carefully navigate the mazes. The age-old soul-like trick of hiding enemies behind corners gets a much-needed refresh here, as now the paths of delicate are your true enemy. Sometimes your stupid triangular body blocks the delicate, hiding the enemy right in front of you. Move too quickly around the pillar and you might discover that the darkness on the other side hid several irate squares armed with daggers. Eep.
You enter each fresh area completely backwards, with no map or hint of what’s coming. Progress happens inch by inch as you delicate the torches, which also gives you a diminutive amount of text telling you where you are (e.g. Prison Cell, Torture Chamber, Somewhere Else Horrible, etc.) which is about the surface level of the story you’re getting. Hiding enemies in the past is necessary at first, but the combat is fierce and satisfying when you have to draw your sword. Hopefully you’ll eventually find a map of the area, giving you a fighting chance to see exactly where you are and plan an escape route.
But whoever drew these maps clearly drank from the school of cartography. They only show basic information about the area and the locations of items that seem impossible to obtain by following the paths. This is not a complaint. I love a game that gives you enough information to survive, but still knows how to keep it a secret. Basically, each area is a maze full of dead ends, destructible walls with treasure hidden on the other side, and clever navigation puzzles that reward smarter strategies than just bashing infrastructure with your blade. I would have appreciated the ability to mark things on a map rather than relying on my terrible memory to recall a certain locked door. But who has ever heard of a triangle that allows you to scribble on a map? It would just be unrealistic.
Combat is all about dodging, although you can find shields later if you want to turn it into a more classic blocking/parrying experience. In fact, the more time you spend searching the areas of Void Sols for secrets, the more tools you’ll find that match your favorite souls. I found a relic that restored lost health, Bloodborne style, when I hit an enemy in the past and then couldn’t bring myself to take it down. Your starting sword is a decent shape buster, but the katanas, hammers, maces, oh they all have a variety… a variety of playstyles that are fun…… zzz…
…Huh? Oh, I’m sorry! It’s challenging to stay awake while writing a paragraph that could describe, well, practically everyone stuffy. This is another game where when you die, you lose all the currency you earn by leveling up and you have one chance to get it back. Where combat involves carefully observing the enemy’s behavior and waiting for an opportunity. Where goddamn multi-phase boss fights are somehow still seen as acceptable game design. Void Sols is more of a lick of paint on elderly staples than something truly revolutionary.
But it’s a very nice splash of paint. Prisons, forests, mountains – I’ve explored these locations in video games countless times, so it’s a great credit to Void Souls that they look so striking and feel a bit novel again. The frigid, dim mountains, where you can occasionally see the distant orange glow of a campfire, but more often only see your immediate surroundings and the descending red stripe when the frigid is harmful to your health, are wonderfully atmospheric. It’s nice to be reminded that the mountain should be a hostile challenge again, not just a pointy point on the world map.
His prisons are evil mazes of closed doors and senseless roads leading nowhere but to pain, and when overcome, they give great satisfaction. I saw a presentation document somewhere on the developers’ challenging drive that said “Top-down 2D Demake of Dark Souls”, but towards the end it gets more surreal and ambitious, based on your perception of how a game looking like this is intended to behave.
I just wish there was more of it. It’s not Void Sols’ fault that there are more souls like this than there are people on Earth, but it does mean that more conservative ideas are very Very too familiar. Even if some clever quality of life improvements were made, I would like to see the entire species covered by the law. I despise finite items in these games because knowing they’re gone forever discourages you from using them and means you’ll never master them. Here, every item you find and utilize will be replenished every time you find a rest point. You can enhance speed, strength, dexterity and health, and all four stats can also be reset and reassigned. Likewise, all your weapons are upgraded at once, and you can swap out stat boosts and buffs as you see fit. I wish this was the industry standard.
Void Sols threatens to boil over towards the end as the excellent pacing and difficulty curve start to climb nastily. Oddly enough, the third last boss fight is the hardest. It’s an absolute multi-phase combat pig (ugh) that really enjoyed my computer constantly crashing during the second phase (ugh!). Just when I was about to win too! OK, no, I wasn’t, but the fact that this fight happens immediately other a boss and then an area that mercilessly throws enemies at you seems suspiciously like a game that extends its runtime.
It recovers in its final stages, still providing a meaty but fairer challenge that remembers what plays best – pushing you into a pitch-black maze and watching you fumble around, slowly solving its mysteries. I can’t wait to thoroughly search it for anything I’ve undoubtedly missed as I head out for my next run. Empty salts? More like Void worth checking out! HA!