If you know what this game is (read below) and still think you'd be interested, there is literally nothing I'd recommend more than this. The Void is pretty much unique. The visuals are striking, though the screenshots don't really do them justice. The story, once you actually know what it is, is highly ambitious and philosophical in a way very few games attempt, though I'd hesitate to recommend this purely based on that, or as a story game, because you're not really going to find a conventional narrative here -- instead it is a minimalist allegory told through hints and implications. The gameplay (often brutally and unfairly difficult) is an intriguing and original spin on resource management that, in typical Ice Pick Lodge fashion, is somewhat hampered by buggy or unfinished implementation that nonetheless manages to achieve a degree of gameplay-story integration that surpasses most games out there. It's rough around the edges, it doesn't hold your hand in anything -- gameplay or story -- and it's definitely the kind of slowburner game that you won't get into without a bit of patience, but if you don't mind that and are down to experiment with something very different, you're in for something special. It's cliche to call a game 'atmospheric', 'beautiful' or 'heartbreaking' these days, but, if you're the kind of person who wouldn't immediately hate this game to begin with, chances are you'll see how those apply to The Void more than most games they get attached to.
Kentucky Route Zero is a game that could have been a masterpiece if it had been a little more consistent. As it is, this review comes with the caveat that while I 100% recommend Acts I to III, I can't say the same about Acts IV and V. At its best, this is a beautifully sad game with great, subtle writing and a strange and wistful atmosphere. You have to go into it expecting a deliberately slow experience where your choices only really have to do with the characters' personalities and the tone. But if you like the idea of a sleepy dreamlike story whose high points rely on indirect implications, you'll probably like the first half of the game. The problem is, Acts IV and V finish a different story than Act I began, and I don't mean that in a good, cool experimental sense. Somewhere there is a shift in narrative/themes (not a huge one) and presentation (a bigger one), and the game loses its magic. It makes sense: the game took 7 years to make, and Act V alone took 4 of those. In a sense, the people who started the game are probably not the same people who finished it, and it shows. There's also a general decline in quality. By Act IV, the game bludgeons where it previously would have implied and the beautifully sparse and subtle writing has become grandiose. There are no more "wow" moments which elevated the previous acts so much, and the visuals going in a weird direction is part of that. Act IV manages to hold on to some of the atmosphere, but it's lost almost completely in Act V. This makes everything after Act III sound bad, which it isn't. It's decent. But in KRZ, 'decent' is a disappointment. I hope more people choose to take that as praise for the first half of the game, because it's definitely worth experiencing. Ultimately, you won't lose much if you stop at the end of Act III, maybe IV. Personally I was all for the longer wait if the devs thought it was necessary, so it really sucks that the development time seems to have hurt the game in the end.
