“Alt-tabbing out between runs to take notes, I find my fingers are rattling”
POST VOID is an assault on the senses—in a good way
This is the kind of game you don’t describe so much as circle around, making occasional stabs with the ol’ metaphor-knife in the hope of hitting something solid. I could tell you that it’s a retro-shooteradjacent roguelike, where you sprint around randomly-generated hallways blasting baddies and desperately seeking the exit… but that wouldn’t capture the way it feels to play. And it certainly doesn’t explain why, when alttabbing out between runs to take notes, I so often find my fingers are rattling against the keyboard.
It’s easy to reach for the substances, comparatively speaking. Not least because of the way Post Void looks: All woozy edges and bright colors and men in suits who have something wrong with their faces. But, the best parallel I can draw from personal experience is: Have you ever had three espressos within half an hour? Post Void is the can’t-sit-still jitters, crystallized into a 4.68MB executable.
And that’s all down to the glass idol held in my left in-game hand, a glowing liquid sloshing around inside.
The idol is a brilliant mechanic, one lifted straight from the (sadly non-existent) videogame adaptation of Crank. You know Crank, right? The Jason Statham movie wherein they inject him with a poison that turns his heart into the bus from Speed, meaning if he slows down for a second, stops doing action-movie shit like shooting people or crashing cars, he’ll die? Yeah, that.
See, the liquid inside is your health—getting hit will send some spilling to the ground—but also the idol’s a bit leaky, meaning it doubles as a countdown timer, like one of the water clocks they use in the Crystal Maze. You need to keep pushing forward, killing enemies to top yourself up, all the while praying you’ll find the white light of the exit around the next corner.
Add to that the whirling soundtrack, and the strobe effects, and the cacophony that greets you on death, and the way the floor undulates so that just running ahead is a ride on a rollercoaster, and you’ve got a game that goes for all of your senses simultaneously.
SCREAMAGER
But it works because Post Void is a short, sharp shock. At the end of a decent run, seeing less than three minutes on the clock just feels instinctively wrong. This is, I think, because it cuts straight to the feeling that, in most games—the dying moments of a hard-fought deathmatch or narrowly dodging through a new world of traps in Spelunky— would take 20 minutes or so to tap into. Post Void gets my heart racing almost immediately. And for as long as I can stand it before jumping out to the safety of a Word document for a breather, I feel alive. Which, let’s be honest, is a rare enough sensation here in 2020.
THE IDOL’S A BIT LEAKY, MEANING IT DOUBLES AS A COUNTDOWN TIMER