T
his is the kind of game
you don’t describe so
much as circle around,
making occasional
stabs with the ol’
metaphor-knife in the hope of
hitting something solid. I could tell
you that it’s a retro-shooter-
adjacent roguelike, where you
sprint around randomly-generated
hallways blasting baddies and
desperately seeking the exit... but
that wouldn’t capture the way it
feels to play. And it certainly
doesn’t explain why, when alt-
tabbing out between runs to take
notes, I so often find my fingers are
rattling against the keyboard.
It’s easy to reach for the substances,
comparatively speaking. Not least
because of the way Post Void looks:
all woozy edges and bright colours
and men in suits who have something
wrong with their faces. But, the best
parallel I can draw from personal
experience is: have you ever had
three espressos within half an hour?
Post Void is the can’t-sit-still jitters,
crystallised into a 4.68MB executable.
And that’s all down to the glass
idol held in my left in-game hand, a
glowing liquid sloshing around inside.
The idol is a brilliant mechanic,
one lifted straight from the (sadly
non-existent) videogame adaptation
of Crank. You know Crank, right?
The Jason Statham movie wherein
they inject him with a poison that
turns his heart into the bus from
Speed, meaning if he slows down for
a second, stops doing action-movie
shit like shooting people or crashing
cars, he’ll die? Yeah, that.
See, the liquid inside is your
health – getting hit will send some
spilling to the ground – but also the
idol’s a bit leaky, meaning it doubles
as a countdown timer, like one of the
water clocks they use in the CrystalMaze. You need to keep pushing
forward, killing enemies to top
yourself up, all the while praying
you’ll find the white light of the exit
around the next corner.
Add to that the whirling
soundtrack, and the strobe effects,
and the cacophony that greets you on
death, and the way the floor
undulates so that just running ahead
is a ride on a rollercoaster, and you’ve
got a game that goes for all of your
senses simultaneously.SCREAMAGER
But it works because Post Void is a
short, sharp shock. At the end of a
decent run, seeing less than three
minutes on the clock just feels
instinctively wrong. This is, I think,
because it cuts straight to the feeling
that, in most games – the dying
moments of a hard-fought
deathmatch or narrowly dodging
through a new world of traps in
Spelunky – would take 20 minutes or
so to tap into. Post Void gets my heart
racing almost immediately. And for as
long as I can stand it before jumping
out to the safety of a Word document
for a breather, I feel alive. Which, let’s
be honest, is a rare enough sensation
here in 2020.ALEX SPENCER
THIS MONTH
Gave himself an adrenaline
shot to the heart.ALSO PLAYED
Spelunky 2,
HadesPOST VOID is an assault on the senses – in a good way
“Alt-tabbing out between runs to take
notes, I find my fingers are rattling”
THE IDOL’S A BIT LEAKY,
MEANING IT DOUBLES AS
A COUNTDOWN TIMERBetween levels you pick one
of three upgrades. Like an Uzi!The décor is Ashtray Maze by
way of Wolfenstein 3D.NOW PLAYING (^) I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I DIARY I HOW TO I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I M U S T P L A Y
EXTRA LIFE