The Void

“Be broken to be whole. / Twist to be straight. / Be empty to be full. / Wear out to be renewed. / Have little and gain much. / Have much and get confused.”
– Tao Te Ching, “Growing Downward” (Ursula K. LeGuin's version)

The Void is a game that I have been meaning to review for a long time, but have found it hard to know where to start. It isn't an easy game to categorize. It appears to be a survival horror game, and maybe it is, but the principle horror to survive is a kind of slow starvation (which is a lot more compelling than it sounds). It also appears to be a FPS, and it does involve combat, but it's not a “twitch” game at all. It appears at times to be a sex game, but the role of sexuality in the story is complex and ambivalent, not at all “sex for sex's sake.”
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The Void is a game about environmental devastation, hateful and backwards dogma, unavoidable conflict, and the issue of what “altruism” and giving mean. It is a game about relationships and trust, lies and misunderstandings, power differentials, gender roles, and human nature. It is deeply but subtly philosophical. Steam describes it as “action adventure,” with is inaccurate at best, and one well-meaning reviewer said about it that “The Void makes me feel stupid.”

The Void makes me think of the concept of that name in Eastern Philosophy, called wu-wei (“not doing” or “effortlessness”) in Taoism and Zen (“nothing” or “emptiness”) in Zen Buddhim. (Note that the game's original Russian title means “Tension.”) It is a game of strategic resource management in which, surprisingly, hoarding and excessive accumulation are punished. Call it a Surrealist Tantric Resource and Relationship Management (STRRM) game, to coin a genre.

The fact that this isn't a “twitch” game doesn't mean that the challenge level is low. The Void is hard – this game eschews the contemporary game-design “wisdom” that a player shouldn't be allowed to make mistakes that will be fatal later. Miscalculations, errors in judgment, and even honest ignorance can leave you scrambling for a save many “cycles” ago in game time. Thankfully, the game keeps an unlimited number of autosaves. Even so, you'll probably hit need to re-start from scratch at least once. There is a patch for easier gameplay.

Anyone expecting either run-and-gun action or straight-up porn should be warned off by the game's opening cinematic, which features Soviet residential architecture, a lazy swooping camera, and a cautionary voiceover in a hypnotic cadence: “all you see around you evolves […] and as the end draws near, you fear / the world will turn, but never change.” Icepick Lodge, the game's creators, describe themselves as ”well-known in Russia as one of the most non-standard and original developer[s], and if it weren't for the fact that academics can be just as prudish as anyone else, this game probably would already have attracted an “art game” following.

The protagonist of The Void is a complete cipher – a “lost soul” who is, by the nature of his existence in this world, mute. The explanation of the world comes a little at a time and is intentionally incomplete and ambivalent: the game might be set in the afterlife, but it might also be set in the subconscious of a dying man, or even literally in the neural pathways of a brain that is shutting down.

In any case, the world is stange and hugely varied in character but mostly dull in color, rendered in greys and browns, with sources of “Color” precious. You collect “Lympha” of color, and then process them through one of your hearts (you start with one and acquire more as you play) to produce “Nerva” which you can use to give color and life to your world. You both give and take, and absorbing color diminishes or destroys it's source. The game has an ecology of Color, which you unavoidably alter by playing, and your actions have consequences for the surreal flora and fauna of The Void.

There are also two kinds of people in the Void, strictly divided by gender: beautiful “Sisters” each responsible for their part of the world, and bound to that same part of it in a bizarre synthesis of nature spirit and serfdom, and monstrous “Brothers” who have escaped from “the Nightmare” and conquered the Sisters, denying them the Color they crave. The Brothers are hideous, but remind me of the people in Ryan (full film here), where psychic trauma shows up as physical damage. They also seem like war veterans, their disfigured and amputated bodies filled in with spars and struts, their paranoid defensiveness reminiscent of PTSD.

A simpler game would come down categorically on the side of the Sisters - The Void refuses to do that. The Brothers may be monstrous tyrants, the rear-guard of a failing regime, or battered and broken refugees, but the only compelling evidence that they are wrong is that they are trying to keep their world from changing, to enforce “commandments” intended to but incapable of keeping the Void, their “heaven,” in stasis. This might be a critique of the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, or a nod to Tony Kushner, but it makes them surprisingly sympathetic. More effort is put into the personalities of the Sisters who, as is often the case with conquered peoples, are more fractious and are often in conflict with one another. This can also be read as a consequence of patriarchy, that women become second-class citizens, forced to ally themselves with the men who exploit them, and backbiting with one another.

If this seems unduly speculative, let me note that the eldest Brother is known as Patriarch, a word that is the title for the head of the Russian Orthodox Church (similar to Pope – other Orthodox Churches have their own Patriarch), and the origin of the word “patriarchy” to mean “male dominated.” This also explains why the protagonist, a mystery in almost every way, must be male: a woman would be instantly confined by the Brothers, not treated as one of their own.

Each Brother or Sister has his or her own agenda, and then there are the bodiless voices you hear, with their own conflicting messages. Deciding who to trust is a major part of gameplay, and not-so simple survival is perhaps the largest part. If all of your hearts are empty of Color at the same time, you die. Place Lympha of color in a heart and it begins transforming it to Nerva. Nerva can be given to other things (for example, causing dead trees to blossom beautifully into new color that can be harvested later) or used to attack them, but it cannot be placed back into a heart. Nor can it be hoarded: if you accumulate more Nerva than your “palette” can hold, it bleeds off into the Void: not only is it lost, but it causes ecological damage (more dangerous predators) in the process. Using Color to kill predators also causes damage, as do several other easy-to-commit sins.

One of the things you can do with Nerva of Color is give it to a Sister, which strengthens her. This is where sex, or at least sex appeal, comes into the game. When you give a Sister Color, she luxuriates in it as she absorbs it, which is shown as a semi-nude animation. Giving Color to the Sisters weakens the Brothers' hold on them, and allows you to explore more of the world as they give you access first to their realm, then the ability to leave it. Some Sisters are suspicious of you, but none of them ever refuse Color. They seem starved for it, a dynamic explicitly paralleled with physical hunger, but in some ways more like the jonesing of drug addiction.

A Sister's bonds are both abstract and concrete, represented visually by spots, bands or patches of color that restrict her movement and partially obscure her body. The more Color you give a Sister, the more she is able to wiggle, dance or pose when you give her color, and the closer to completely nude she is. In short, it's a striptease. But anyone trying to build a harem will be disappointed. Trying to give too much Color to a Sister too quickly is a fast track to a game over, as is trying to meet the demands of all the Sisters. There are also the Brothers to be considered – they insist that, if freed, the Sisters will become savage killers, and are prepared to enforce their laws with violence.

More interestingly, there are questions raised about giving the Sisters color: one of them experiences seizures when given color, and these very much of the “grand mal” rather than orgasmic sort. Another sister, whose brother is especially paranoid, is imprisoned in a “pit and the pendulum” trap: giving her color clearly brings her closer to destruction. And there is the subtler issue of whether it is ethical to give color to the Sisters who ask, even beg, you not to.

So, playing The Void as if it was (primarily) a sex game is a good way to loose the game, and playing it as a “capitalist” (hoarding and overharvesting) is also self-defeating. Some characters in the game are looking for a savior or a liberator, and see you as it, but trying to play martyr or the big damn hero is also a fast route to defeat. There is an element of the Prisioner's Dilemma to this game, in which trust is dangerous but essential.

It may be strange to hear it said of a game with nudity and semi-explicit sexuality that one should play it with an open mind and a cool head, but not only is this a strategy for success in the game, it also seems to be the designers intent. In any case, the best way to appreciate the world ofThe Void and its characters is by deferring judgment about them.

The darkness and the potential for despair in The Void, is mitigated by doing this, and while this is a “survival horror” game at least in the specific sense that, even in the best-case scenario, only a few characters will survive, it is also a game about acceptance and flow. The Void is Tantric in its approach to sex and relationships – viewing them as flows of energy that can be cultivated but must be respected, and Taoist in its view of nature and leadership: that inner balance allows one to give endlessly the way nature does: not selfishly or altruistically, but in cycles that are eternal and yet eternally new. That, it seems to me, is the central mystery of The Void and one that it does not diminish or “spoil” the game to share:

“To give birth, to nourish / to bear and not to own, / to act and not lay claim, / to lead and not to rule: / this is mysterious power.”
– Tao Te Ching, “Techniques” (LeGuin version)