The Void (PC DVD)

"The Void" is utterly unlike anything you have played before. For a start, it begins with your death.

Your character is a soul that finds itself in a strange, bleak landscape called The Void, poetically described as "a desert on the threshold of death". The Void is dying, you are informed - the only source of life is colour, which you must collect if you are to survive. The game is split between rooms, where you interact with other characters and collect colour from the environment, and a map screen where you travel between rooms. Time spent on the map screen reduces your store of colour but also advances the storyline, while time spent in the rooms allows you to share your colour with the environment in various ways, most of which allow you to harvest more colour the next turn.

The story is driven by two groups of characters: Sisters, sad, beautiful colour-starved women, and Brothers, hideously deformed Cronenbergian fusions of flesh and machine. The Sisters beg for your help, the Brothers threaten you with horror and death. You have to decide how to balance the demands of the two, whilst retaining enough colour to survive.

Both the game mechanic and the creative setting are intriguingly original. The setting is enhanced by spot-on sound - music and voice-overs are note-perfect - and the fact that the world itself is utterly stunning. Even dead landscapes are hauntingly beautiful, full of arching rock and gently rippling water, and when you bring colour to an area it simply blossoms.

There's perhaps a mild irritation for those of us who care about these things that all the women are so highly sexualised - it feels a bit like a step back to the bad old days of gaming when female characters were really just so much fan service - but there is I suppose an artistic justification in that the more beautiful they are the more shocking the twisted bodies of the brothers seem by comparison.

The actual mechanics of the game deserve more explanation than I can give them here, but essentially involve exploration, combat, which is enhanced as you discover glyphs that allow you to use colour in different ways, and the eternal battle to balance your use of colour with the demands of the environment. In practice you will spend much of your time growing gardens of colour, battling predators and performing tasks set by Brothers or Sisters.

The game is hard, though - the constant battle between growth and decay means you are never far from failure, and your decisions (when to plant, when to harvest, when to donate and how much) have far-reaching consequences. As a result, it's horribly easy to paint yourself into a corner from which you can only escape by going back to the beginning of the previous turn, or the one before that. Autosaves at the beginning of each cycle help to reduce the pain, but this is certainly not a game for the easily frustrated. Exploring rooms is also fairly slow-paced, with combat far more cerebral than twitchy.

However, the joy of this game comes not from adrenaline-pumping action but from exploring the possibilities of a complex and beautiful environment. Above all, Ice Pick Lodge have created a world that is not only fascinating in itself but encourages the player to explore ideas about real-life experience - about what it costs us to live, and what we do to other beings to meet that cost. Like Tale of Tales' "The Path", "The Void" is unashamedly artistic in intention; unlike "The Path", it is also an absorbing, challenging and deeply rewarding game in its own right. As such it comes highly recommended.

'The Void' is an avant - garde 'Art - Horror' game, I will admit that the genre it is more of an aquired taste but, if you are looking for a totally unique experience unlike any game that you have ever played before, then I fully recommend it. The artstyle is inspired and the atmosphere is tense and chilling aided by a haunting yet beautiful musical score. The only reason that this game doesn't score full marks with me is its shear difficulty. Make no mistake, this is not a game that will hold your hand the whole way through. Now there's nothing wrong with a game being a challenge but, when the game is so difficult in parts that it becomes no longer fun, then there's a problem but hey, no game is without its floors.

Overall, The Void is a stunningly beautiful and well made game that's well worth your time and money. It's difficulty only adds to that rewarding feeling you get when you finally beat that one part you were stuck on for an hour and a half. It easily scores 4/5 in my book.

Much like Ice Pick Lodge's revious game, Pathologic, The Void is not for everyone. Indeed it may not even be playable by everyone because it is not only exceptionally hard, but also refuses to give you any direction beyond the most basic.

I'm not going to lie, I have yet to beat this game and I'm not sure I ever will without the use of cheat codes, but there is such amazing design and beauty in this game, not to mention truly haunting settings that it is worth playing just to experience them.

The Void is essentially a... um... I have literally no idea how to categorise it. It's kind of adventure/ resource management/ afterlife simulator rolled into one, you play as a nameless protagonist trapped in the Void, some kind of limbo realm populated by beautiful but powerless sisters and brutishly terrifying brothers. They each guard and hoard the precious lifeblood of the void: Colour.

Colour is your only reall ally in this game, it is your health, your shield, your means of communication and your weapon. You need to collect it in order to convert it into a useable resource, but to do that it must constantly drain out of your health, so it is important to also plant trees of colour in order to maintain a livable level.

It's a complex but strangely saisfying system and the interactions with this bizarre world are truly fascinating, the only thing that really bothers me is the combat. It could just be that I am not used to PC controls, but it is very difficult to damage an opponent and all your attacks seem to have minimal effect, to the extent that you may drain your entire being of colour to defeat a foe. Luckily dead foes imbue you with some colour upon defeat but you're often scraping by with a meagre amount of life, much like Pathologic.

If you like to appreciate games as an art form, this could well be your cup of tea. If you prefer games where you just like to have fun and shoot stuff, that's also fine, but this game is not really going to be something you're likely to enjoy.