Voidwrought

I have a soft spot for games that lead with atmosphere before they lead with explanation, and Voidwrought does exactly that. You crack out of your cocoon as the Simulacrum - a shapeshifting being made of black ichor and borrowed form - and the world does not pause to welcome you. That sink-or-swim opening divides people, and I think rightly so: this is a game that trusts exploration to do the work that cutscenes usually handle. The movement is the first thing that clicks, and when it does, it clicks hard. Double jumps, mantling, air dashes, spike-pogo bouncing, projectile-deflect bursts for extra speed - the traversal vocabulary builds steadily and every new ability retroactively opens earlier corridors in satisfying ways. Biomes run from the star-scorched Surface down into biomechanical ruins that read like ancient Egypt dreamed by a machine, and returning to them with upgraded mobility feels genuinely earned rather than obligatory. Combat leans toward a melee-forward hack-and-slash rhythm: your claw swipes are the backbone, while over 50 equippable Relics and Souls cover everything from spectral ranged weapons to area spells and passive buffs, recharged by dealing damage in the field. Mixing and matching those Relics is where the build personality lives, though several reviewers - and I think fairly - noted that a handful of standout Relics make the rest feel redundant, and that enemy difficulty skews easy in the back half once momentum compounds. The shrine-building system is the sleeper mechanic. As you gather followers and materials, you excavate the Gray City around your base, unlocking new abilities, narrative threads, and secrets in a loop that feels distinct from standard hub upgrades. It does not run especially deep - the scale is relatively compact inside a 10-to-15-hour runtime - but it gives the world a sense of consequence that pure combat progression alone rarely achieves. The map system also deserves mention: manual pin placement instead of auto-markers forces a kind of quiet attention to the world that I find meditative. Some players will find it opaque. I find it honest. The weakest pillar is story. Lore comes through scattered stones, brief NPC exchanges, and item descriptions - all assembled by the player rather than delivered. The broad premise (collect ichor, hunt the false gods, watch the Red Star rise) carries thematic weight, but the named characters leave almost no impression, and the "why" behind your crusade stays blurry even by the credits. There are two endings, which rewards completionists, but the narrative infrastructure holding them together is thin. The soundtrack, composed by Jouni Valjakka (known from Vigil: The Longest Night), compensates enormously - a layered mix of Tuvan throat singing, choral passages, Middle Eastern instrumentation, and full metal surges during boss encounters. It is legitimately one of the better scores in this genre in recent years, and it does the heavy lifting that the dialogue cannot. Voidwrought will be compared to Hollow Knight for as long as it exists. The hand-drawn aesthetic, the melee focus, the sparse storytelling - the debts are real. But comparison is not condemnation. What Powersnake built here is tight, atmospheric, and genuinely pleasurable to move through, with a shrine system and a soundtrack that carve out their own identity. Genre veterans may feel the familiar grooves a little too smoothly. Everyone else who has been waiting for something to fill a particular dark-corners-of-the-cosmos shaped hole: this fits.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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