A Void Hope is a dark, narrative exploration game from Elden Pixels with contributions from Little Nightmares and Furi developers. You follow Gilda and Keegan as they explore their home city, trying to find a cure for a strange virus that is affecting the population.
A common early sign of infection is memory loss, which one of our main characters shows early on, and it’s this that spurs on the search for a cure and hope that life can get back to normal sooner rather than later.
You guide your character through a number of different stages, starting out at the cabin lodge where you went to ride out the pandemic, slowly making your way closer to the main city centre. Each stage has objectives to complete, which are clearly labelled before you start the stage. These objectives rarely change and usually consist of finding the exit, seeking out a vault computer, and recovering a lost memory that you trigger in a certain area of the stage. There are a couple of stages with slight variations to the objectives, but don’t expect a long list of varied tasks, as these just don’t exist here.
Finding the computer vault and the exit are the most important tasks that you will need to complete, as these are needed to finalise the narrative and expand the overworld map with more stages. There is a computer vault in most stages, and when found, it presents you with a mini game that will need to be completed. This mini-game is a “snake light” where you guide a moving arrow, which gets longer the more it moves. You have to guide this arrow snake to collect the data needed for the cure and avoid the virus cells. These computers are also needed to complete the end game, so they are an important part of the narrative.
When an exit is found, it opens a new trail to a new stage on the overworld map, in similar fashion to Super Mario World when you find a secret exit, and I label these in the same fashion. One thing to note is that you don’t always need to find an exit to leave a stage and move to a new one, with a stage ending as part of the narrative. Don’t worry too much if you feel that you would want to explore more, as backtracking is necessary as you will need to revisit stages to gain access to parts that were not accessible to you the first time around.
Gaining access to these areas is done through items hidden throughout the different stages. These range from a crowbar, which helps you remove wooden barricades from doors, a rope to descend large drops, or a petrol can, which you’ll need to complete a task. These were a welcome addition and gave the game some much-needed depth. Though I welcomed these items, I did not welcome the poor vagueness, as when you pick them up, you are not told what they are or what they do, leaving it up to the player to figure this out. They are not even labelled in your inventory, so in some instances I was left scratching my head as I couldn’t work out what the item was, not even from the small picture that appears in your inventory. I managed to figure it out eventually, even if it was blind luck in some places. I’d like to state that only two or three items were unclear as to what they were; others were very clear on what they were.
A Void Hope is mostly about exploration; you need to search the entire stage to complete your tasks. You not only explore the outside but also inside buildings, basements, and other structures. With the mentioned back tracking, you will need to return to certain areas with your newly found items to gain access to those restricted sections. It’s here that I had one of my biggest issues with the game, as you are not supplied with a map for any of the stages. This led to me being unsure where I had been and where I hadn’t, having to search the stages again to remind myself where that one door was that I couldn’t access on my previous visit. A simple map with red squares showing where I hadn’t been would have fixed that instantly.
Another slightly underbaked area of the game are the enemies. With only three separate forms, you will not come across a varied cast of creatures trying to turn you. Also, you will never find more than one at any one time; this makes them more of a hindrance than a scary thing, getting in your way when all you want to do is get to your goal. I was often found getting frustrated and making mistakes in my rush to get past them, often dying because of that. You do find a gun near the beginning, though I think it’s a flare gun (not sure as it wasn’t labelled or explained), so this immobilises them instead of destroying them. Give it a few seconds, and they will return to their hunt, which by that time is too late for them to be a threat. As I mentioned, you are armed with that flare gun, and the way you aim is an interesting mechanic. You have to press and hold the R button, which brings up a crosshair. You then aim this crosshair over your target with the left stick, and then press A to fire. Another intriguing decision here is using the left stick instead of the right (which I kept automatically going for), and this system makes for slow progress with targeting and slowing down your enemies.
A more positive side is the presentation and music of the game. A Void Hope is absolutely gorgeous, with beautiful pixel art mapping out detailed buildings and characters. The aforementioned enemy design is pretty cool, with this glitchy effect making them feel like they are not completely in our dimension, and I did jump a couple of times thanks to some great design work. I often found myself stopping just to enjoy this side of the game, and while I was there, I was also feasting on the music. The developers collaborated with Waveshaper, who have filled the game with gorgeous synth “Stranger Things”-esque tracks that fit the narrative and aesthetic perfectly. I was lapping up these tracks, and one I will be revisiting when it’s available on streaming surfaces.
A Void Hope is a game that will take you around an hour and a half to finish, and to be honest, they have packed a lot in that time. I had fun exploring the game and helping Keegan and Gilda with their task, even with the basic narrative and unhelpful labelling of items. I would have loved to have explored the lore more to find out how this virus came to be and what it was actually doing to the infected, but it was just trying to be too much of a mystery. A Void Hope does nothing new for the genre, but if you enjoy these types of games and need an itch scratching, then this will do the job.
A Void Hope
Release Date: February 29, 2024
Platforms: PC & Nintendo Switch
Price: £14.39
Many thanks to Plan of Attack for the chance to review this game.