Yes, it's really turned off

Eurogamer... They're ... let's say.. strange.
They never rate game like other magazines do. Seems they are always between -25 and -5 or +5 and +25 to the average.
Critify.de says, on average they're rating 6 Points less than other magazines.


German c't rated 60%.

German
Google

I'm getting tired of the number '7' especially when it comes with such a positive review!

Like I said, and I stand by my opinion:

If a game is not a multi million franchise made by some big company, no mater how positive the review it will always have artificial defects to lower their score.

In theory 7 is a number of a good game, the problem is the infatuation of 9 and above to rate most of all multi million games.



Honestly IPL doesn't deserve that.

So, what does IPL deserve in your opinion? Were I given a task of reviewing The Void, I would probably end up with something like 68% or 73%. I would certainly not give it 9 out of 10, as it would come too close to making a statement that this one game is ideal, thus everyone want to play it and so on.

Given the rabid fanboy that I am, my opinion of course will skewed, but yes, I would give it a 10 out of 10.

Sure, it has glitches, sure it was flaw and I cried each time the game crashed. But for me what the game brings to the spectrum of the gaming world is more than enough to dismiss any coding flaw (being the programmer that I am, I understand that there isn't such a thing as a bug less program). Never before have I download a game soundtrack and eared it endlessly, never I have embarked on a personal quest to promote the game to friends, gaming sites, etc; never have I played a game in a foreign language (I bought it and started playing it without the English patch) just because I couldn't wait for the English release (and even at that time there wasn't any sure of a English release); few games have played with my emotion on such a deep level (being the other ones Planescape Torment and Another World) through story, level design, sound scape inside the game.

So yes, for me the game is 10/10, based on the original Russian version. Some changes in the international release didn't appeal me, but the nature of the human brain is that the first experience is always the best one, so if someone played the international version and then the original version, they would think otherwise than me.


Quoting you a bit, yes I believe that The Void is the ideal game. Why wouldn't it be? People tend to think that reviews have to objective, and they are right, but deep inside we can't escape the human element that makes all reviews subjective. Hence we several times get a broad spectrum in ratings, raging from mediocre to master piece.

Do you actually believe that the games that now a days get 9s and 10s are ideal games and masterpieces? Perhaps a small minority due to innovation, but most of them? Do all people really must play Gears of War? And Generic FPS #3000? I somehow understand your statement and I agree to some point. The Void isn't a game for everyone and I believe that that is something that you are proud and so am I and that those ratings of ~70% create a sort of statement of a great game, just not for everyone, but why should a game be detracted by that? Shouldn't a review review and integral aspects of the game and not it's mass appeal? Planescape Torment is considered one of the best RPGs of all time, and certainly got the ratings to match that tittle, yet, most of the today's gamers never played and even in the time it came out it wasn't the big sales it everyone expected, so it became the underdog best RPG that most people didn't buy and you can't really say it had mass appeal nor was mainstream.


That is why I like IPL. Here we have a team capable of small feats in the gaming industry (being innovation a great feat now a days), and developers and fans with which I can really have intelligent discussions about the state of the gaming art.

I think that the numbers that reviews give aren't really a measure of how much the reviewer liked the game, but how safe the reviewer feels recommending the game. As in: the article can be very positive, because the reviewer was highly impressed and feels that a certain game extends the concept of "gaming" in exciting ways, etc. But the score will reflect how much the reviewer thinks his readers will enjoy the game. If he gives a really high score to the game, meathead gamers might buy it because it got a 10/10 without reading the article, misunderstand the game, and attack the reviewer for "tricking" them into paying for a game they didn't enjoy. And journalists typically don't want to become unpopular amongst their readers. . .

It's a bit sad, but I can sort of understand why it happens that way.

hey there,
i've been playing the game (german version - of course) for now about 3 days and recently reached the point after the mining quest. after completing it one of the sisters (at least the questlog) told me i'm ready and prepared for whoping mantids a**.
so now there are 2 major questions i'd like to ask

-somehow i guess my use of lympha, either in the void or in the chamber (or both of 'em), is affecting the quality of the colours appearing after each cycle. example: i've been feeding the nameless sisters first heart only with gold. the second one only with emerald (green - in german version "smaragd"). after that it was actually impossible to survive throughout the following cycles due to insufficient nerva/colour regrowth and the only colours that i could find were azure (blue) but basically gold.
any clues?

-what's the deal with the playground hidden in the mine of the nameless? easteregg? or perhaps something special? i ain't able to use any of my nerva much less to draw glyphs

i love this game! it's deepth, it's design, the story and more important the way the story is told, the idea... fortunatly i'm in vacation so there will be a whole lot of nights filled with creepy music, scary bada**es and beautiful girls whispering in the athmosphere.
i alway used to turn of the game music while playing but here i got myself introduced to an experience of gaming i could only compare to the feeling re2 gave me back in the days. the music, and of course the truely excellent speakers, are producing the main part of the athmosphere.
all in all - we are in the presence of an excellent piece of work and everyone with an open mind to new things and ways to design should, no, has to take a look at this one.

a bit strange are the changes made to the german version compared to the original russion version. i'd love to play that too but sadly i would understand a sh** . I'd wonder if there is a way to implement english or german voices and text into the russion version

i've seen a video of the russion version. in it the girls had no "gloss" round 'em... how comes?

somewhere in this thread some told to use azure (blue) at the beginning to paint the path between the chambers. i don't know if anyone else recognized it but you can paint your path even without using any colour. just click an empty nerva container and paint your path. this way you can travel while saving nerva.
use at own risk i ain't sure if this is taking effect on any way to the brothers, sisters or the void itself.

so, well, thanks for reading and i hope ladys and gentlemen are willing to excuse my bada** english
who discovers mistakes should keep 'em i'm out for a bbq

Welcome

To answer some of your questions:
-Lympha growth per cycle is random.
-You can travel without expending colour, yes, but it is slow and the amount of colour you spend is minimal while travelling. You better concern yourself with time
-As for the girls butterflies (it is what is called those lights around them), they start to disapier while you raise the sisters level, and eventualy will be all gone. The German version isn't censured.
-The playground is a Easter egg
-It is possible to play the original Russian version with English text, but if you think the German version is hard...

Thank you for the comments, it is good to see people appreciate the game

you are right... i just took my first visit at imas tower (i like her lips ) and gave her a load of nerva (azure i think). after that some of her chain butterflies have started to uncover her blossom
i never thought it it is some kind of censorship. in fact - in my opinion - this butterfly stuff fits superb into the atmospheric setting.

what makes the difficulty to me is the way the game mechanics are explained. less the lyrical style (i really like this one) then the fact that most stuff is getting told way after i figured it out by myself. at the very first couple of hours i felt a bit like being "exposed" to the game.

i took a look at your hint about the time management related to the use of nerva to draw my path. did some experimenting with and without lots of azure in my hearts and i have to say i can't see any difference in speed while moving. the only reason i used to make use of nerva within the void was not to waste nerva while my lympha is draining.

right after my bbq yesterday evening i had a few minutes ingame and visited the garden of the sister right hand to uma (forgot her name). somehow i was amazed about the word choice taken to explain the use of purple - "open your soul and show me your hearts". blazing! i spend the night over at a girlfriends place who i, just besides, love for being this kind of human who has no fear of expressing and talking about the wierd things synapses produce day for day. so, i had to tell her about the special ingame experience and in order to that we entered a long and good discusion about... stuff

hey, uhm, is there any artwork you could provide to use as wallpaper? found some but my hunger ain't satisfied yet

To get a greater speed while navigating from chamber to chamber it doesn't matter how much blue you have in your hearts (those only affect walking speed inside chambers) but the colour with which you draw your path.

As for artwork, I have upload most of the official artwork to here GiantBomb, so perhaps you can find something interesting to use as wallpaper.

2Bluntastic: Hello there and welcome to the forums!

Happy to hear that you liked The Void - and that it leads to discussions of... stuff.

A quick note - Azure doesn't actually speed you up on map - it's known bug and will most likely be fixed in the patch. (Possibly, unofficial ) But there is a difference between when you use a lot of color, and when you don't use as much. You move the slowest, when you don't use any color at all.

As for the wallpapers — dude, the disk contains a shitload of bonuses! Including all the artwork in print quality (poster anyone? ), the complete game soundtrack in lossless quality (that's about 140+ tracks!) and all the videos ever released. Try the Bonus folder on the disk, or select Bonus from the autorun menu. Of you can get the same stuff from the link Thordax kindly provided.

Wait a second. What is/will be unofficial?

However, is there already a date for the patch?

Don't let it get to you - the important thing is - there will be some sort of patch. No date yet though.

ah yeah, should start to have a look at discs content before asking stuff big thanks for advice

as for the patch thing. for now i fortunately didn't recognized any bug yet. but the way the amount of lympha spawning at the different chambers could be more specific. sometimes the map shows up a big amount of a specific colour - so i enter the chamber just to find out it contains a small amount of another colour to go for. too small to be seen from outside the chamer. therefor, at least at the beginning, i'm browsing around every single chamber to gather all i can get - even if i can't see anything from the outside.
a numeric way will be the most accurate but would destroy some of the games atmosphere. i'd rather like to have enlarged preview pictures of the chambers and/or the barely visible colour marks on the chamber (i hope you digg it ) enlarged.
furthermore a possibility to scroll the void by right click while holding ctrl would ease the navigation.

by the way: hey, the pangolins chamber contains more than one heart good to know

once more - appreciation to this masterpiece!

i don't know if it's known yet but i deleted all of my savegames prior to start a new game. during the first cycle i've done a mistake and tried to load. of course there were no savegames to load -> empty list (of course). but now i was stuck in the load menu. the back butten had no funktion anymore and pressing escape or any other button was useless. i had to tab out the game and cancel manually.

guess i was a bit hasty

Actually, this shouldn't be the problem - it works ok, when there are no saves. Can you reproduce this error and post game.log here?

So... June has gone by and no sign of The Void, English Release...

hey there
sorry, i tried to empty my savegame folder and went to the load screen but the problem being stuck at the menu doesn't seem to appear again. i will let you know by the time it happens again and provide you with logs and stuff

another question: i've been looking around the net and did some experimenting ingame to figure it out but i'm still clueless - what is the inner ring meant while fighting with the pangolin/worm/water-splash-grab-ugly-thing? i guess i'm right if the outer ring implys the colour my enemy is more vulnerable to. so that's what the manual says

The inner ring is the same, means by the time you get there, he is only vulnerable to one colour.

yeah thats it thank you!

since i finally whoped the pangolins tree climbing a** and two more cycles have passed by i had to return to the pangolins chamber due to (enormous ) lympha regrowth. to exit the chamber i jumped down into the abyss and closely failed one of the big trees. after that, somehow, i must have been falling through a leak of the map and missed the (invisible) exit of the chamber.

i've attached a screenshot and (even while i think it won't be necessary) the game.log

Thanks for the feedback. Will try to fix it.

hey there,
while i was playin through the 25th cycle ive noticed 3 more or less minor bugs.

#1 shows me stuck in a a sisters chamber (i think her name is iva) due to waler who exhausted ava's hearts while i was traveling through the void. im not really sure if this is actually a bug but it forced me to load an earlier safegame.
#2 shows a miscalculated value of nerva. this happens every time i values of 1-2 units of lympha from or to one of my hearts. i have not yet figured out whether this is a real miscalculation or its just displayed wrong. anyway, i just like to tell you.
#3 is a shot of what happend as i entered the top left handed garden. i wasnt able to draw any glyth - not even to enter the drawing mode by pressing ctrl - or to interact with anything. thathow i couldnt leave the garden. once more i had to reload and, even worse, i cant make use of the sh**load of lympha up in this chamber which is vital to me at this point of the game.
and hey, maybe somebody has a hind to share on how to defeat the brother with all the guns on him (i forgot his name) more easily than just drawing loads of nerva on him?

have a nice day!

Ironclad?

If so, shell and hit him with shit loads of lympha