Post Void is a barrage of garish visual information parading through the interface of a first-person shooter. As either an act of mercy or a concession to humanity, modest roguelite trappings force all of Post Void's noise and fury into manageable dosages. This leaves Post Void as a wonderful party drug, provided you can sustain the party and handle the drugs.
To the untrained eye, some works of genius could easily be mistaken for the rambling menace of a lunatic. Without an appreciation for form, an ear for melody, or command of a specific history, anything from a magic eye poster to an abacus could be perceived as incomprehensible and useless.
If you pull someone off the street and administer Post Void’s fifty-three second trailer to their eyeballs, they won’t know what they’re looking at. What appears to be an optical assault of bright colors, casual ultraviolence, and cacophonous, interminable shredding is revealed to be barking out syllables from the most spoken tongue of Gamers, the first-person shooter. A closer look shows Post Void operating under the rules of a roguelite, where successions of quick rounds through procedurally generated levels have taken priority over a sustainable and plotted campaign.
After the genre is acknowledged, we can begin to examine its finer details. The protagonist appears to be clutching a skull while they simultaneously fire a pistol. That skull, or idol, is full of blood and the blood is always draining. Killing fills it back up. This means you have to kill to keep the skull full of blood; going around five seconds without killing anything will drain the idol and kill the player. Oh, and you also have to avoid getting killed by any of the maniacally aggressive opponents roaming the ostentatious hallways that compose each compact level.
At this point, Post Void could pass for a parallel universe branch of Doom or Quake, as it appears to be operating under the simplified geometry and spartan interface of mid 90’s first-person shooters. Your objective is to survive (by killing) and find the exit (by running) through Post Void’s eleven levels. The birth of this genre valued speed and applied skill over precision and meticulous planning. Post Void pretends that ethos never faded, and AI routines never advanced in complexity, as we approached our current era.
This is as good of a time as any to reference Post Void’s story. As best as I can tell, the player is pulled from a state of nonexistence, the void, and is fighting through these levels in the pursuit of returning to a state of nothingness. This is silly, but, as I enter my late thirties and experience some kind of existential crisis at least once a week, it is also relatable. Not existing seems like a preferable option to blasting my way through hell, especially if I have to outsmart hell. As a surrogate to this process, Post Void feels accurate to its stated objective.
Roguelite mechanics make Post Void bearable. Reaching the end of a level grants the player one of three upgrades until the end of a run. Perhaps you’d like to trade that starter pistol in for an uzi or a shotgun? Maybe you’d prefer bullets bounce off walls or explode on contact. Would you like to run really fast, but only backwards? Do you think faster reloading or more blood in your skull would work out better, for you? Life (even a life post void) is all about choices, albeit I found anything that let me fire bullets faster to be the most valuable option.
I was trash at Post Void for the first twenty minutes. I couldn’t line up a shot, I was too focused on speed, and I never even made it out of the first level. With a bit of practice, and moderate use of the slide mechanic, I routinely blew the doors off the opening level and usually burned out somewhere around the fifth or sixth. One time I made it all the way to the tenth level, at which point Post Void is regularly deploying enemies with flash bulbs to further obstruct the player’s vision. Making sense of what’s happening is as valuable a skill as basic shooting proficiency. Reading the visual language is the practice that the player is required to make perfect.
By design, Post Void isn’t out to challenge champions of the roguelite movement. Dead Cells, Binding of Isaac, and its closest cousin, Strafe, are all equipped to better service a long term commitment. Instead, Post Void subsists on the attraction of leaderboards and the draw of its utterly unique presentation. It bets its audience will fondly recall a past age in a collective fashion (this logic also powered Devil Daggers to modest success in 2016), which, with its $3 price tag, feels absent of a significant risk.
Traditionally, publishers and developers agree on the point of not creating a game that alienates a prospective audience. Post Void, on the other hand, operates as an epilepsy induction apparatus, resists the temptation of difficulty options, refuses concessions to the player, and embraces a weirdo aesthetic untouched and unwanted by anything other than the pair of Hylics games. I am bad at Post Void and I will probably never play it again, but I am thankful for the two hours I spent inside of its vibrant and boisterous shades of digital hell.
Post Void is a barrage of garish visual information parading through the interface of a first-person shooter. As either an act of mercy or a concession to humanity, modest roguelite trappings force all of Post Void’s noise and fury into manageable dosages. This leaves Post Void as a wonderful party drug, provided you can sustain the party and handle the drugs.
