#zettel #gaming sourced from: [[Void Stranger]] Void Stranger Understands that it is impossible to replay puzzle games and get the original experience, so it instead recontextualizes its puzzles to create a new experience # Void Stranger on Learning and Replaying Puzzle Games Void Stranger is a cool game because it's a game that acknowledges that puzzles games are built on learning, and that replaying puzzle games is a flawed experience because you've already solved the puzzle once before. After getting to the bottom of Void Stranger the first time, the game tells you to try again with a few new pieces of context. then the game is about finding a new way to travel through the puzzles. This might be as simple as tapping the treasure chests in the back three times to get three locusts instead of just one, or falling through pits while in front of the smirking statues. These things were all technically possible beforehand, you just didn't know that this was possible. And even this information is still very surface level. You might now know that these actions are possible, but now the game expects you to try and use this mechanic to your advantage in solving puzzles. This is further compounded by solving the puzzles of the mural rooms to enter the secret rooms and obtaining the Burdens: the ability to speak to the inanimate objects, the ability to float on a void space for one movement, and a sword. Each of these do not entirely trivialize the rest of the puzzles in the game, but instead reframe a lot of the puzzle that the player had previous encountered. Now the player can mindlessly cross over single gap pits and only need two blocks to navigate horizontally or vertically. The sword allows the player to avoid the block pushing with careful movement. Especially if the player has already reached the deepest part of the void, they should know how to solve the puzzle already. Void Stranger knows the player has already solved these puzzles and says "okay, now try them this way.". Even just talking to the boulders and the statues provides some invaluable context. When I might want to replay other puzzle games, most of the puzzles are static (not changing from playthrough to playthrough). To some degree, this is also true of Void Stranger. However if I had stopped playing after reaching the bottom of the void for the first time, and then returned to the game later, I'm sure I still would have discovered a few new things. I suppose that means that eventual replays of Void Stranger will eventually reach the root of the knowledge tree. Eventually I'll know how to solve each puzzle, how to access the secrets within the puzzles and then how those secrets lead to even more secrets. But that's why I've got to keep playing! that's why I keep digging deeper into the void! To find the truth, no matter what! ## Burdens as a Reward for Replaying the Game I do feel like I'm cheating myself by using the burdens in Lillie mode. There are a lot of well-crafted and difficult puzzles, and I feel like sometimes I'm cheating myself from the whole challenging experience by using the wings and sword to make rooms simpler. There ARE definitely some rooms that still present their own puzzles which cannot be trivialized with the sword and wings which made for some pretty challenging processes. But even then, it wasn't the complete experience. That said, I have to imagine that there are minimal overall gameplay and story differences when not using the burdens. The KEY thing is to not turn on infinite locusts, or at least get rid of them when you can. In general the burdens are there to help speed up the game once you've EARNED it. If you've already solved the puzzles and paid enough attention to the game, the burdens are the game's way of giving you permission to speed through some of the harder puzzles. Especially because there are DEFINITELY puzzles which have the burdens in mind too (see Cif's mode),