The Void, also known as Tension or Turgor, is an adventure…horror…survival…thing made by Ice-Pick Lodge, the same people who made Pathologic, which you’ve probably never played either. Unfortunately, though it improves on almost all of Pathologic’s faults, I do not have nearly as high of an opinion of it. (Also, naked women herein.)

To start with: the presentation of this game is gorgeous.

Every area’s design is bizarre and dreamlike, with bones of colossal creatures forming platforms and arches, tree branches forming a complex web over an endless drop, and structures that look manmade but are clearly warped and rundown. Almost every area is an endless barrage of dreary grays and blacks. In most areas, the sky overhead is pitch black, and fog obscures your vision. Others are lit by light that doesn’t have a clear source, but all the areas look run-down and desolate. The world feels empty and alone – oftentimes your only company is unintelligible monsters. Color is used sparingly, and when it is, it immediately sticks out from the normal gray. Every feature of the world conveys its deadness and desolation, including its mournful, ethereal music.

And why is that so fitting? The Void is set in, well, the Void, which appears to be some kind of afterlife. The protagonist is a mute spirit – as he was falling into oblivion, a resident of the Void saved him by giving him one of her hearts. She explains that she is one of the Sisters, beings of the Void that seem tied to its wellbeing. At one point, the Sisters ran free, and the Void prospered – however, sometime in the past, monstrous creatures known as the Brothers enchained the Sisters to prevent them from using their powers, supposedly for their own good. However, now even the Brothers have disappeared, and so the Sisters are terribly frightened, confused…and hungry.

Because you cannot survive in the Void without Color. Color is the Void’s lifeblood – it appears to be a kind of viscous, bloodlike substance, but also appears in the form of flowers, trees, and mineral veins. No one knows what it is exactly, or where it comes from, but recently, there has been no new influx of Color into the Void – which the Sisters take as evidence that the Void is dead. However, with your arrival, Color starts to appear again, giving your Sister hope that you will bring new life to the Void and stave off oblivion.

This brings me to what I believe is The Void‘s strongest point, and that is gameplay. Everything, and I do mean everything, revolves around Color. It is not just your health, as you may expect – it is also your ammunition, your stats, your currency, and your only means of interacting with the world. It is a vital resource, and so you must cling to it zealously. There are actually two “types” of Color (leaving out the different colors themselves) – lympha and nerva. Lympha is Color you pick up from the environment, and which you can place into your hearts. Depending on the color of Color you put in, you can increase your stats – azure will increase your speed, while emerald will increase your defense, for instance. It also essentially functions as your hit points. Being attacked will decrease it, and every second you spend in the Void itself will turn it into nerva. If you ever run out, you die.

Nerva is what you use to interact with the world. At any time in the exploration sections, you can press a button that will slow down the rest of the game, and will allow you to paint the screen with Color. Simply painting over things will tend to trigger interaction – talking to Sisters, for instance – but you can also create “glyphs”, learned by gaining additional hearts, that will produce special effects. They’re an interesting idea, but unfortunately I don’t feel that they’re well-executed. The game’s recognition of the glyphs is very finicky, and drawing a glyph wrong can cost you dearly. I think it would be better if you could just select them from a menu, like spells or something.

So, in order to move throughout the Void, you need lympha to survive. Many areas have little flower-like things spread throughout them that contain small amounts of Color, but they’re one-shot. To really guarantee your survival, you actually have to garden. There are a variety of areas throughout the game with trees – dead and gray-looking like the rest of the areas – that can accept Color if you give it to them. This will create an ethereal image of a tree, using the gray trunk as a scaffold. It looks really weird:

The tree won’t provide any immediate benefit, but if you wait until the next “cycle” (basically equivalent to an in-game day), it will yield to you a larger amount of Color than what you put into it. There are other ways to harvest major deposits of Color – mining, for instance – but I think this is probably my favorite type, and you encounter steadily higher-yielding trees all throughout the game.

However, if you hoard all your Color, you can never progress. You need to feed Color to the Sisters in order to open the way to new areas and to progress the story. Each Sister has four “hearts” that are unlocked at certain – very expensive – Color milestones, and each one yields a cutscene and a new path to more levels. I think this is an interesting portrayal of altruism and generosity – the game does exceptionally well at enforcing the feeling that Color is vital, and you are almost always teetering on the brink of oblivion trying to maintain your stores, yet despite all that, you are encouraged to give your Color up to those less fortunate than yourself.

Color even has its own personality, or a sort. Flavor text in the game’s information menu shows you what each color represents and why. It greatly contributes to the atmosphere and helps cement the weirdness of the game.

But furthermore, another major component of the gameplay is irreversibility. You are on a nigh-constant time limit, and, as mentioned previously, every tick of the clock drains away another drop of your life. Though time is paused in the levels themselves, on the “world map”, time is constantly passing as you travel from place to place. You are frequently given tasks and events with strict time limits, and waiting for new cycles is the only way to get more Color. However, even with the inevitability of time breathing down your neck, there’s a mechanic more insidious still: the Void is fragile. Every single time you use even a single drop of Color, the Void is irreparably damaged. Whenever you use Color, the benefits it originally gave come back to haunt you. For instance, crimson Color, which increases your attack power, makes enemies strike with greater strength when you use it as nerva. The world itself also deteriorates when this happens – if you use too much Color, your gardens will provide less and less Color until eventually they die entirely. I was constantly stressing out about this, but generally it doesn’t become a problem until the very end of the game. Overall, I think it does go a long way towards enhancing the atmosphere by emphasizing just how fragile and weak everything is, even the world itself.

The game is exceptionally difficult however – the developers have even stated that they think they overdid it. I cannot really speak for this, as I played using an “easy mode” mod, and I’d recommend any prospective players do as well. There’s very little hand-holding, and it’s entirely possible to make mistakes that can make the game unwinnable, but which are not apparent until you’re near the end.

However, I really do think that the mechanics of Color are the game’s strongest point. I have never seen a game have such a powerful central mechanic that exhibits such an effective sense of resource management, survival, desperation, and, yes, tension. You constantly have to worry about and evaluate your Color stores, especially in regards to your balance of lympha and nerva. It is tied in perfectly with the story, as well as its themes of weakness, hunger, and selfishness.

It’s such a pity it had to be wasted on a game that is terrible in all other respects.

The game’s plot is a disturbing train wreck. I really get the feeling that the developers ran out of time or budget – every single ending, of which there are many, is equally unsatisfying and pretentious, and there are many plot threads that are just never followed up on or unceremoniously dropped near the end. The only bits that remain coherent are very, very disturbing and told me a bit more about the developers than I want to know.

Let’s begin by pointing out that all of the Sisters – you know, the only female characters in the game, who are immobile and powerless – are naked. Reviews such as this one would have you believe that the nudity in this game is “artistic” and “tasteful”. In fairness, I will concede that artistic nudity does exist and that it can be used for legitimate artistic statements. But that is not the case here.

The first Sister you meet actually does seem to be decent on this front. She is constantly in shadow, and her default position is hunched up in a ball like that, so you can’t really see anything objectionable in the first place. Unfortunately, the other Sisters are not designed the same way. At all.

Oh, but no, it’s totally tasteful, because see, their naughty bits are obscured by the chains! …The chains that are conveniently not coded as part of the character model itself, causing them to flicker in and out of existence at random, and which are removed as a reward for progressing with the game.

Yeah, tasteful. Oh, but it gets worse.

Feeding the Sisters Color – you know, the thing that’s ostensibly the entire point of the game and which you have to do to progress – treats you to a (fortunately, skippable) cutscene where the Sisters writhe around extremely suggestively while the camera looks on lovingly. Some fans of the game, like the reviewer I mentioned earlier, jump through hoops trying to justify this as actually showing that the Sisters are in pain and it’s all deeply symbolic and no, it’s porn. Just accept it, people.

So, with that in mind, I suppose now would be a good time to explain that the plot is a giant male Nice Guy fantasy. It starts off so promisingly – when the Brothers inevitably return to the Void, we see them to be hideous, truly monstrous creatures that are rather explicitly abusive of the Sisters. Each Brother is ostensibly supposed to be “wedded” to one of the Sisters and take care of their needs, but they constantly make arguments which I’m sure many of you will find eerily familiar. They talk of how the Sisters had to be chained for their own good after they rose in rebellion against the Brothers. They revile you for giving the Sisters Color, claiming that if you give them power, it will awaken their savage nature and undo all the Brothers’ hard work in trying to keep them behaved. One of them even refers to his Sister as a “toy”. It all appears to be set up as a deconstruction of the male fantasy by showing the abuse that happens when women can’t defend themselves, and how messed up a patriarchy taken to its logical extreme can be. I expected the culmination of story to be about empowering the Sisters to allow them to stand up to the Brothers, but…no. Freeing the Sisters completely (and I was able to do this for every single one, thanks to playing on easy mode) just makes them gush about how wonderful you are, and then they just…stand there. Doing nothing. Even though they’re supposed to be free to do whatever they want. You have to defeat their abusers for them; they can do nothing to help themselves.

And at the end, the game essentially turns into a dating sim. You have to pick which one of the Sisters you want to ascend to the normal world, but you can only pick one. All of them have a variety of different personalities, hopes, dreams, and promises, but you can only pick one. All the others are doomed to oblivion. And…I really have no idea if you’re supposed to pick based on their merits, or whether you’re supposed to pick based on how much you, personally like them. They just don’t have any agency or personality of their own, it feels like – they’re just set pieces for your own personal fantasy.

It really feels to me that, although the developers realize there’s a problem with the current patriarchal system, they fail to realize it’s a systemic issue. They recognize that men can be horribly abusive to women…but they seem to think the solution is not to empower the women to allow them to stand up for themselves, but for the right man to come along and protect them. That’s not addressing the problem, just replacing it with a new one.

I’d like to add that the Sisters are really great characters in themselves, and I’m not sure how things went so wrong. Some of them are very sexual, but it seemed entirely performed – you have something they desperately need. Others are so depressed they barely react to you. One of them refuses to play the game entirely, making it clear she can’t stand you. And, knowing only one can be picked, she tells you to feed the Sister she’s watching out for rather than herself. Each have elaborate domains showcasing their different characters. They whisper their hopes to each other as you play and react to you and their situation in varied but always realistic-feeling ways. They all seem amazingly believable as people.