I never expected that Void Stranger, a monochrome, Game Boy-styled block puzzler become one of my favorite games of the year, especially after Baldur’s Gate 3 and Armored Core 6 captured my heart back-to-back, but here we are. It lured me in with its striking trailer and simple, accessible puzzle mechanics. My brain has never been built for puzzlers, but I’d enjoyed the studio’s previous game so much I put my money down and went in blind.

I am now 24 hours deep into a nightmare, and my GOTY list is one game longer.

The hundreds of block-pushing Sokoban-meets-Cave Noire puzzles in Void Stranger are just the surface layer of what I can only describe as a five-dimensional fractal puzzle box tesseract. Puzzles wrapped in mysteries, tied together with secrets, and the end is nowhere to be seen. Whenever I close my eyes, I see monochrome mazes. The last time I was this obsessed with a game, it was Deltarune’s second episode.

I guess that’s what I get for underestimating tiny Finnish indie studio System Erasure. They debuted in 2018 with ZeroRanger, a vertically scrolling shmup that is one of the best in its genre. Not just a finely tuned arcade game, it also featured a surprisingly gripping story, plenty of secrets and surprises and a truly spectacular hidden finale that I dare not spoil.

They brought all that energy and then some to Void Stranger, which has been in development for more than three years. Despite the radically different genre and even more minimalist aesthetic, it shares much of its vibe with ZeroRanger:

Drum-tight design
Stylish and well-illustrated cutscenes
A fantastic soundtrack
And a barrel-load of anime melodrama and existential ponderings.
I just didn’t expect a fathomless labyrinth that has driven me to create multiple documents packed with notes, screenshots, fevered theories and plans—something I’ve not done since playing the original La-Mulana. I am obsessed.


At heart, Void Stranger is a mechanically simple game with bite-sized levels. The goal of each single-screen challenge is simple; reach the stairway down to the next floor of the puzzle-dungeon. You can push some blocks around, but mostly you’ll be using a magic staff to relocate floor tiles to create new paths and prevent monsters from eating your face, carefully working around the limitation that each turn-based movement changes your directional facing, forcing careful routing.

Every couple dozen rooms it mixes things up with some new enemy or puzzle mechanic, gently introduced then slowly ramping up the complexity, but no puzzle takes more than a minute once you’ve worked out the solution.

Forgive any vagueness, but I don’t want to spoil the journey that you’ll be going on if you pick up Void Stranger. Just taken at this surface level, after six hours of play and nearly 150 levels I was happy with it, and felt I’d had my money’s worth. But it’s not long before I started seeing glimpses of Void Stranger’s true form. Several seemingly contradictory plot threads are dangled, just waiting to be connected. Puzzle elements with seemingly no purpose and rooms without intent kept cropping up, and all I could do was walk on by. Occasionally, Void Stranger even takes a break from being a turn-based puzzle game to throw me a little curveball. It was another six hours until I saw the ending.

Japan vs Chile Live Free rugby

Japan vs Chile Live Free rugby

Japan vs Chile Live Free rugby