Void Sols review

Oh God dammit. I was so looking forward to opening this review with ‘Void Sols? More like Avoid Sols!’ and then going down in history as the funniest game critic who ever lived. But then the selfish developers of this smart little soulslike had to spoil it all by making yet another great game in everyone’s favourite/most inescapable genre. Boo!

You play a little white triangle, which I like to imagine is the ship from Asteroids after a very unfortunate crash landing. Because a sinister collection of bitter shapes occupy this land, seemingly having deserted the Geometry Wars to spend around a dozen hours trying to slay you instead. Thanks to this game, I now know what a hexagon hating me looks like. So that’s fun.

Geometric animosity aside, the first thing that truly wowed me was the game’s phenomenal lighting. Void Sols is a dark game that may plunge you into inescapable depression on an OLED monitor. It’s up to you to brighten things up—well, a little—by lighting torches you find as you cautiously move through its mazes. The ancient soulslike trick of hiding enemies around corners gets a much needed refresh here, as it's now paths of light that are your true foe. Sometimes your stupid triangular body is blocking the light, hiding an enemy right in front of you. Move too quickly around a pillar and you may discover that the darkness on its other side was concealing several angry dagger-wielding squares. Eep.

You enter each new area completely on the back foot with no map or hint of what’s coming. Progress is made inch by inch as you light up torches, which also give you a teeny-tiny amount of text telling you where you are (e.g. Prison Cell, Torture Chamber, Somewhere Else Horrible, etc) which is about all the surface-level story you’re getting. Stealthing past foes is essential at first, but combat’s sharp and satisfying when you do have to break out your sword. Hopefully you’ll eventually find a map for the area, giving you a fighting chance to see exactly where you are and plan out an escape route.

Except whoever drew these maps clearly drank their way through cartography school. They show you only the very basics of an area, and item locations that don’t seem to be obtainable by following the paths. This is far from a complaint. I love a game that gives you enough info to get by but still knows how to keep a secret. Essentially every area is a maze, full of dead ends, destructible walls with treasures hidden on the other side, and clever navigation puzzles that reward smarter strategies than just smacking your blade against the infrastructure. I’d have appreciated the ability to label stuff on the map rather than relying on my horrible memory to recall certain locked doors. But who ever heard of a triangle with the ability to doodle on a map? That'd be just plain unrealistic.

Combat is all about dodging, though you can find shields later if you want to mould it into a more traditional block/parry experience. In fact, the more time you spend scouring Void Sols’ areas for secrets, the more tools you’ll find to fit your favoured soulslike. I found a relic that restored lost health Bloodborne-style when I hit an enemy back in time, and then could never bring myself to take it off. Your starting sword is a decent shape-slayer, but katanas, hammers, maces, oh my, all have vari… varied playstyles that are fun to… to… zzz…

…Huh? Oh, sorry! It’s hard to stay awake when writing a paragraph that could describe, well, practically any soulslike. This is yet another game where you lose all your levelling up currency when you die and have one chance to get it back. Where combat is all about carefully watching enemy behaviour and waiting for an opening. Where god damn multiphase boss fights are somehow still seen as acceptable game design. Void Sols is more a lick of paint over old staples than something truly revolutionary.

But it's a very pretty lick of paint. Prisons, forests, mountains—I’ve explored these videogame locations countless times, so it’s to Void Souls’ immense credit that they look so striking and feel even somewhat novel again here. The cold, dark mountains, where occasionally you’ll see the distant orange glow of a bonfire, but more often be only able to make out your immediate surroundings and a plummeting red bar as the cold digs into your health, are wonderfully atmospheric. Nice to be reminded that a mountain should be a hostile challenge again, and not just a pointy bit on a world map.

Its prisons are evil labyrinths of locked doors and nonsensical routes to nowhere-but-pain that are immensely satisfying to overcome. I could see a pitch document in the developers’ hard drive somewhere saying ‘Top-down 2D Dark Souls demake’, but towards the end it gets more surreal and ambitious, playing on your perceptions of how a game that looks like this is meant to behave.

I just wish there was more of that. It’s not Void Sols’ fault that there are now more soulslikes than there are people on Earth, but it does mean that the more conservative ideas are very very overfamiliar. Even if there’s some clever quality-of-life improvements I’d like the entire genre to have to incorporate by law. I despise finite items in these games because knowing they’re gone forever discourages using them and means you never get to master them either. Here, any item you find and use is replenished whenever you find a resting point. You can level up speed, strength, dexterity and health, and all four of those stats can be reset and reassigned too. Likewise, all your weapons are levelled up simultaneously, and you can swap the stat boosts and buffs out as you see fit. It's the kind of stuff I wish was industry standard.

Void Sols threatens to go off the boil towards the end as the excellent pacing and difficulty curve starts spiking nastily. Bizarrely, the third-from-last boss fight is the hardest. It’s an absolute pig of a fight with multiple phases (ugh) and that grew really fond of constantly crashing my PC during its second phase (ugh!). Right when I was about to win too! OK, no I wasn’t, but the fact this fight is immediately followed by another boss, and then an area that chucks enemies at you remorselessly, feels suspiciously like a game padding out its runtime.

It recovers in its final stages, presenting a still meaty but fairer challenge that remembers what the game does best—sticking you in a pitch black maze and watching you fumble around, slowly solving its secrets. I can’t wait to scour it properly for everything I no doubt missed as I embark on my next run. Void Sols? More like Void So-Worth-Checking-Out-ls! HA!