Void Stranger has pulled me further down into its fathomless depths. With each new revelation and every new answer, the questions only grow, and I can do nothing but delve further. Even now that I’ve seen one of Void Stranger’s endings, I’m not even close to finished playing.

Void Stranger is an old-school, pixel side-scroller where you dive deeper and deeper into a labyrinthine maze known as the Void. As the game progresses, the nature of this place slowly unravels. This game guards its secrets zealously. However, through trial and dedication, I’ve managed to start to glue together the pieces of this confounding puzzle.

The secrets of the Void are not for the faint of heart. Tread carefully as you advance, or the Void’s mysteries will swallow you whole.

Starting With the Ending

My last time with Void Stranger, I ended with “The Carcass.” Accessible only by breaking the game’s interface and deleting the floor level, The Carcass can only be found by following its howl. As you advance through black screens, your only guide is the crescendo of its ceaseless wail, propelling you forward.

“The Carcass” does not offer any answers for those who do not pursue them tenaciously. The first time I encountered the monolithic corpse, I fled, restarting the game. Through continued experimentation, I attempted to enter a secret code that the game had taught me previously. My persistence was rewarded with a tolling echo that summoned me.

What I witnessed after I answered the toll only perplexed me further. A strange scene depicted a scientist being ambushed by guards. After the attack, a mysterious woman speaking from a monitor summoned a terrifying titan to seemingly destroy them all. 

The credits rolled, but I had learned something important. This ending gave me vital information that might be the key to unraveling Void Stranger’s greatest mystery: its story.

The Princess, The Comet, and The Photographs

Void Stranger opens with a cutscene depicting the destruction of Earth. A strange black orb streaks through starry space, surrounded by a star of bright light, touching down with the horizon of Earth. There is an explosion of light, and the surface of the planet becomes shrouded in darkness, where a strange symbol shines where once there was land and seas.

This opening scene is a perfect example of the way Void Stranger doles out its information. Everything is incredibly piecemeal. Nothing is given for free, and many times, you’ll be left to connect the dots yourself.

As confusing as Void Stranger’s story is, I’m enthralled. There seem to be many narratives happening all at once, involving what appear to be different versions of the same characters.

The Princess and the White Knight

The first prominent story in Void Story is that of Grey the Destroyer and the Princess Lily. Told in dreams you experience under birch trees in the Void’s safe rooms, the story of Princess Lily and Lady Grey appears to be quite simple at first. Lady Grey serves as Lady in Waiting to a stubborn and childish princess who cannot be tamed and refuses to marry. Then, along comes a charming white knight unlike any of her other suitors, and to be honest you barely need to hear the rest, right?

Wrong. The story of Lady Grey reveals secrets through its details. For example, Lady Grey wears a familiar pendant, which is the subject of the only achievement in the game. The achievement’s description suggests that it is a wedding gift. However, the story does not reveal who Lady Grey is married to, if anyone at all. Perhaps it is a gift yet to be given in the story.

Grey the Destroyer

The more dreams I have beneath the birch trees, the clearer the picture becomes. A sequence depicting an ambush while on the way to Lily’s latest suitor reveals that Lady Grey is a fearsome warrior known as “Grey the Destroyer.” It’s this cutscene that gives us some crucial information. The outfit “Grey, the Destroyer” wears is the same one your character has worn since the start of the game. The world of the Void may seem entirely disparate from the medieval world portrayed in dreams, but this sequence confirms the playable character and Lady Grey are one and the same.

I have yet to finish the story of the Princess Lily and Grey, the Destroyer, but it poses some ominous questions. As the Void seems to be a place for lost souls, why has Lady Grey ended up in this place? Did she arrive here on purpose, or did she wander here? Why does Lily’s suitor, “The Knight of the Heavens,” wear armor worn on statues in the Void? Why do the soldiers in the futuristic “Carcass Ending” wear the same armor? Finally, and most pressingly, why does the doctor who stands down the guards have the same name as the Princess?

The Good Doctor

Dr. Lily’s cutscene during the Carcass Ending tells us a lot about the story of Void Stranger. Dr. Lily is a scientist on the run from the government. She’s studying the black box of an alien ship and the sudden appearance of a comet. According to Dr. Lily, the black box hints at an imminent crisis so calamitous it makes bombs the least of their worries.

The Carcass Ending at last explains what is happening in the opening of “Void Stranger: Grey.” A comet is hurtling towards Earth, and from the looks of it, it hits. However, the Earth might not be destroyed. Instead, Dr. Lily’s comment about bombs being the least of their worries seems to allude to when the strange symbol suddenly overshadowed the world.

Dr. Lily’s story is the first step to piecing narratives together. However, we are still left with questions. We now know that Lady Grey and our playable character are one and the same, but are Dr. Lily and Princess Lily the same character? What time period does Dr. Lily’s story take place in? Is the Void simply the black box of an alien vessel that has captured the world? Lastly, is Dr. Lily the second version of Princess Lily we’ve seen, or is she the third?

#90’s Kid

As you progress through the Void, you’ll have the chance to collect strange gems that unlock photos. These photos are explicitly referred to as memories and prominently feature a young girl who bears a striking resemblance to Princess Lily. One photo in particular features the girl jumping from a swing, dated 06/07/95. That’s July 6th, 1995, since this game uses Day, Month, Year for its date conventions.

Each of the photos shows this young girl, henceforth referred to as Proto Lily, as she grows up. The first photo with Proto Lily shows her when she is quite small, walking alongside what appears to be Grey. The most recent photo I’ve unlocked presumably shows Proto Lily in her teenage years, seemingly dressed for Halloween as a magical girl. Proto Lily clearly lives within our real-world timeline since she draws characters like Kirby and dresses like anime characters.

It is possible that Proto Lily and Dr. Lily are the same people, just at different points in their timeline, but for now, it’s hard to tell. Proto Lily’s story seems very grounded in the real world, with almost nothing relating to the game, while Dr. Lily’s story echoes motifs from the Void and Princess Lily’s story. For now, I’ll have to keep searching for answers.

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Crossing the Streams

Each of the stories I’ve uncovered appears to take place in three drastically different environments. Princess Lily’s story takes place in a medieval realm, though certain characters, like the Knight of the Heavens, display magic. Dr. Lily’s story takes place in what appears to be a far-flung future with weird tubes, computers, and biomechanical titans. Likewise, Proto Lily’s story takes place in a more modern timeframe. The tissue that connects all of them is the Void.

Grey’s journey through the Void appears connected to multiple timelines. She has dreams from the medieval timeline, as well as her outfit from that timeline, but unlocks memories of the modern timeline. Curiously, it is not possible to collect memory shards after becoming bound to the Void, though you can always dream whenever you encounter a tree to see the medieval timeline. It seems that Void has the power to stop you from gaining more memories.

It’s possible that the timelines that reference the Void, Princess Lily’s and Dr. Lily’s, are simply conjured by the Void. In this case, they might not be real. The Void may be trying to keep Grey from returning to reality by conjuring false worlds.

Finally, the Void has a story of its own. Eight Void Lords once ruled over this place, with the floors being divided into different realms for each of them. However, a great battle was fought, and now most of them appear to be gone or dead, though a few may still haunt your steps. Despite all the information I’ve learned about the Void, nothing about it seems to connect with any of Lily’s timelines explicitly. Yet.

Brand New Game

Getting the Carcass Ending ends the game, but it doesn’t leave you with nothing. As you travel through the void, there are certain items that you can discover by solving puzzles and taking leaps of faith. 

Recovering those items lets you learn special brands in a new game to start with your loot. This makes starting again much easier as each item fundamentally breaks the game in some way and makes progressing through early halls trivially easy. 

And yet, even here, there are secrets.

Down the Memory Hole

The very first floor of the Void that you encounter bears a mysterious mural with blocked-out squares you can’t decipher. As you progress through the game, more murals appear with different arrangements of squares. Some murals are even damaged. 

The murals are hiding a secret. On certain floors, altering the pattern of the floor to match the preceding mural opens a secret passage. This passage can lead you to items and to more secrets. I affectionately call these secret passages “Memory Holes” since the first item I received was called Void Memory, and each item in the game code is listed as “Mem #.” Void Memory, for example, is Mem 1.

Starting the game anew after the Carcass Ending, I realized that the special brands I received are very similar to the patterns that open Memory Holes. In particular, the Wings Brand matches the floor where I received the Void Wings items. 

However, the same wasn’t true for the Memory Brand. This brand does not match the pattern on the mural. So, I got the Carcass Ending again so I could restart and enter the pattern for the first mural. When I did, the game told me, “you can’t use that one.” 

I’m not sure what this means yet or how many more brands can be found. There is a mural for each realm and each Void Lord, which may mean there are eight brands. However, the Burdens tab on your menu, which contains your items, only has spaces for three items, so there may be only three brands. Furthermore, one Memory Hole I ventured into led to a secret area that once had “a seal” but is now devoid of any items. Once again, there are still some lingering mysteries.

Mural, Mural, on the Wall

Void Stranger never just hides one secret. It tangles them all together like a gordian knot of mystery. So, it shouldn’t surprise me that the murals are the subject of not one but two secrets.

After receiving Void Memory, I gained the ability to read the murals. Reading the messages allows you to get a better sense of what Lord’s domain you’re entering and what defines the lord of that realm. There are some murals that are partially broken, which will display a random jumble of letters “probably not worth deciphering.” So, I tried to decipher them.

Simply put, Void Stranger gave me too many pieces of partial script for me to believe its language wasn’t important. So, I put together a collection of all the murals I’d collected, as well as a graffitied message from a Memory Hole and set to work. I even pulled in one of my friends to help me decode the language since I know he loves a good puzzle. Together, we spent a good two hours decoding “Void Speech” and were finally successful!

Code Breaking with Friends

The first secret of “Void Speech” is that the blocks on the mural are not important to decipher the language. Instead, the letters are made up of the tiny bright and dim dots around each block’s edge. After this realization, we used the first mural, which reads “Only a Memory Remains,” to find which symbols were repeated multiple times. This first sentence only has three unique letters, since six sets of letters are present twice in the sentence and only one letter, “M,” is present three times. Sure enough, there were six sets of symbols present twice, and only one symbol present three times. We had found M.

After getting our first sets of letters, we used the broken murals to confirm which letters were which. From here, we found “A,” “O,” “E,” and more. Eventually, these partial murals lead us to our next revelation: which direction to read Void Speech.

In its complete form, Void Speech is read top-to-bottom and right-to-left. It turns out that the line “it’s not worth deciphering” actually implies that it’s not worth properly reading an incomplete message, so the letters in the broken mural are read from left to right.

The Cipher

Finally, after hours of deciphering, puzzle solving, and code-breaking, my friend finally created a copy of what should be the complete alphabet of Void Speech. There are, however, a few interesting features. The language appears to be a “bad version of binary.” Each letter follows a pattern that allows you to find the next letter. It’s a bad version because, as my friend noted, the letter A isn’t in what “first position” would be given the pattern.

My friend believes there may be secret characters in Void Speech, and I do, too. I’m not sure what will come out of this, but I have my suspicions that one day, I’ll have to leave behind my Void Memory at the start of a run. After all, the Void Stranger’s own menu calls it a Burden, and using the brand to retain it at the start of a run displays the message “I hope you know what you’re doing.” There may come a time when having the complete alphabet of Void Speech may come in handy. If nothing else, this was an extremely fun time spent with my friend that I wouldn’t pass up for anything.

Remember Me

One of the questions that’s plagued me throughout Void Stranger is: what does this game remember? With the advent of games like Undertale, which remembers your previous playthroughs even if you delete them, games that remember your misdeeds have become more commonplace. Void Stranger seems to be one of these games.

Memory is a huge part of Void Stranger. The first mural you find says, “Only a Memory Remains.” When you choose to go to the beginning of the game, the statues say, “Only a Simple Memory will Remain.” Starting from the beginning via the statues doesn’t actually reset your game, however. The people you’ve encountered will still be gone, characters will remember and react to you differently, and you may encounter new oddities in the Void. It’s clear that this is not a “reset.”

I thought that after reaching an ending, the game would entirely reset, leaving me with a fresh file. It’s clear that it didn’t. 

It may at first seem that everything reset after the Carcass Ending. After all, you can redo encounters you found in previous runs and characters that used to remember you no longer do. However, I also still retain my previously unlocked memories from the menu and all of my memory shards. Furthermore, the second time I set out to find the Carcass Ending for a full reset, something new was watching me. A strange bug-like creature with a huge eye on its back darted off the screen so quickly that I couldn’t even take a picture.

What does Void Stranger remember? Does it remember how many times I’ve reset? Does it remember everything I’ve done to each character every single time? How does it interpret my actions? Is it judging me? Is it condemning me? I don’t know, but I’m excited to find out.

Unfinished Odyssey

So far, I have seen six murals and made it to six of eight realms. I have rested at five birch trees, and I have traveled over 140 floors deep. I have even traveled to Floor 0. Void Stranger has presented me with an array of fascinating characters and moral dilemmas, given me three spectacular items, tantalized me with countless secrets, and I still want more.

Void Stranger is a strong game to start the new year and may go down as one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. I don’t know what’s waiting for me at the end of Void Stranger. I don’t know if there are multiple endings or even multiple editions of the game. In a game full of mysteries, one thing is certain: I can’t wait to keep playing.