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junk-lion · 6 months ago

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i have to write approximately one thousand words about Void Stranger's bad ending before i explode

i recently started playing system erasure's sokoban masterpiece, void stranger, again after playing it a little on launch before getting distracted. previously, they made zeroranger, one of my favorite games ever, to the point where i got a tattoo.

i reached the bad ending in void stranger 2 days ago, and to say that i have been Affected is putting it lightly. the whole thing is very obviously incredible, but there is one aspect of it that i can't stop thinking about in particular: the song that's used, and how it ties into the themes of the game and the actual gameplay in this ending. so i want to break it down a bit and put down into words what i've been thinking about.

please keep in mind that i haven't finished the game yet, so please don't mention anything that may or may not happen beyond this ending so i don't get spoiled, thank you!

let's talk about void stranger's bad ending below the cut, as this contains heavy spoilers. i will assume that you have played this game before, so i won't go too deep into previous events of the game unless they're particularly relevant. i will also be mentioning some future events, particularly events during and leading up to the other ending, so i would not advise reading if you haven't gone past this sequence, or if you plan to play this game, which you should. please. i'm begging you

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when you reach floor b225 while voided, having given up your humanity after death in order to become immortal and live forever, the following sequence plays out very differently than if you'd reached there otherwise by keeping yourself alive. the song that plays during this sequence, Voided, has left a considerable impact on me, and i really, really want to talk about how it did this and why, and maybe how it also has had such an impact on you.

i'd like to examine three different aspects of the song and how it's used: the composition/instrumentation/structure of the song, the lyrics, and how these both tie into what's actually happening on the screen, as there's a lot to talk about in each aspect.

The Composition

the first thing i noticed when i started really thinking about voided: it's in a 3/4 time signature. this is the same signature used in waltzes; the type of song that lily and lady gray dance to earlier in one of the memory sequences. from the very first moment, this song is intrinsically about gray's motherly feelings for lily, albeit in a very subtle manner. voided doesn't feel like a song that's in 3/4 to me, which is part of what made this hit me so hard. subtly and quietly, the song accompanying gray's descent is about lily.

the next aspect that is far more obvious about the song is the fact that it has vocals. this is a totally new element for void stranger, with no songs previously having vocals(i believe). initially, the song presents itself without them, feeling like a very normal, if rather somber, area theme, revealing its vocals around the time you've completed a couple of floors. with the introduction of vocals, voided lets you know that this is clearly a point where something big has changed, and very quickly it becomes apparent that it isn't good.

to begin with, voided begins very simply with a lot of clarity. a bare, quiet droning synth note that slowly gets a little louder, with it cutting out to give way to void stranger's signature basic sine wave providing some blips and bloops. shortly after, the vocals begin accompanied with some occasional bass notes. gray is still focused and determined without much else on her mind, all she's thinking about is lily and reaching her, communicated by the sparseness of the instruments. even in the first chorus, the chord progression is just some simple left hand piano chords. at this point, there is a slight hint that something is going wrong, as some of the notes are chosen very carefully to add tension, which slowly ramps as the song progresses.

at the end of the first chorus, a very tense, unnerving ascending synth note accompanies a break of silence with just echoing delay, which gives way to the song's first percussion, a single kick drum along with heavy bass notes - the song is becoming heavier and darker. when the second verse begins, the piano's left hand becomes slightly more complex, with soft strings in the background providing a sense of melancholy. the kick drum grounds us even as things become tenser and heavier.

the chords used at this point are a fairly simple minor progression, which is a large part of what adds that tension. the 6-7-5-1 used in the first half of the chorus is very, very determined, with the following 4-5-6-7 ascending progression that doesn't resolve itself to the root note until after the brief silence capitalizing on that determination while providing some more tension. the second half of the second verse("in this state of oblivion..."), there's a similar progression, a 1-6-4-6-7, which gives a similar state of tension and determination. however, it does something a little different here. one bar after the 7th chord, right after the vocals on "my walls stay strong" fade out, it ascends by one semitone to a note that isn't in the natural minor scale, one semitone below the root note(note: i am not knowledgeable enough about keys to know if this is in an uncommon minor key, so i'm working under the assumption that this song is in D# minor). this isn't extremely uncommon, especially in the songs in system erasure's games, but it is a move that adds a huge amount of tension to the song, aided by the chord change happening after one bar rather than two as in the rest of the verse. this is further amplified by the song not resolving to the root note as the second chorus begins, going back to the 6-7-5-1.

in the second chorus, a new percussion element is added; a set of sleigh bells. outside of christmas songs, i find these add a very cold, lonely feeling to songs, especially songs like this that are slow, sparse and in a minor key. final fantasy x's "out of the frying pan" is a great example of this. they're also placed exactly halfway between kick beats, subtly increasing the pace of the song along with the left hand piano increasing in complexity in terms of rhythm and melody.

as the breakdown begins, all elements besides the piano fall away briefly, providing a brief moment of quiet and clarity, before the other elements come back gradually. the droning synth in the backround bends up and down, a very uncomfortable sound, as the vocals come back, reusing clips from earlier but with heavy delay and reverb, giving them an otherworldly sense, as though she is calling out from somewhere far away, somewhere expansive yet empty. they're processed enough that you can just about tell which lyrics they are, but the wailing fades in and out and blends into itself. gray is becoming more desperate, losing her clearness of mind as she goes on and on without end. in terms of chord progression, the breakdown starts at the root note and just descends down the scale, repeating that over and over - a literal descent for gray, mental and physical. in the last 4 measures of the first part of the breakdown, there is again a double time chord change - until this point, the chords have changed every bar, but on the last bar of every measure, the chord changes twice, once at the start of the bar and again halfway through. for the first of these, it remains in the scale, but on the last three measures, the final chord change is a single semitone down, mimicking the technique in the second verse, but descending rather than ascending. things are becoming even more hopeless as she descends.

going into the second half of the breakdown, there is another, larger break of quiet, permeated only by the echoing delay of the synth and distorted vocals, with a piercing ascending drone cutting through. then, every instrument comes back at once. contrasting with the calm but distressed silences earlier in the song, it is a wall of sound, abundantly chaotic, and it makes clear how bad things have become. by briefly pulling back and fully reintroducing everything at once, it juxtaposes gray's previous calm and focus with her internal chaos and panic as everything comes back all together.

at this point, the chord progression changes to a purely chromatic descending progression, that is, a progression that descends by one semitone every change(D#, D, C#, C...). it also has the same usage of a chord change halfway between bars at the end of each measure. this progression repeats over and over, almost bludgeoning you with its weight. the percussion also becomes more complex again; the kick pattern intensifies, including triplets for a somewhat offbalance feeling, as thought you're being dragged along by the hand, along with a few different types of cymbals. the contrast between the different types of harsh cymbals add a lot to the chaotic feeling.

going back to the chord progression, the chromatic bass notes and left hand of the piano contrast heavily with the melody, which stays purely in key. notably this is a leitmotif that plays at several points in the game(i'm not quite sure where, but it is definitely one that's been heard a lot at this point). while the chords clash extremely harshly with this, the melody feels like it's barely holding onto what gray once was. both are repeated over and over, the remainder of gray's determination and lucidity fighting with the chaos and her urge to give up.

after several repeats of this, the progression and melody stays the same, but the vocals from the chorus are reintroduced, albeit with more reverb and delay(though not quite as much as the barely coherent vocals from earlier). she cries out from that far away void, literally begging herself to hold on over and over as she descends repeatedly with the chords, out of key, dissonant and chaotic.

as we reach the last line of the chorus, the progression changes to a 6-7-6-7, regaining a little bit of that determination. she cries "my loss is mine" in a new way, a more mournful, forlorn way, almost through gritted teeth with a wavering voice. with the determined, but still chaotic and desperate chords and the declaration of ownership of loss, she is determined to hold onto it as everything falls apart within her. in the very last bar before the lines about her grievance and sadness repeat for the last time, there is again another chord change halfway through, another ascending chromatic note that ascends one more semitone at the start of the next measure, resolving itself before going back to the descending chromatic progression, which plays one more time. they are accompanied by dramatic string chords which cut through now. for the final measure, we get a 6-7 chord progression, one last little bit of determination, before everything except the vocals abruptly cuts out. "my loss", she wails, painful vocals layered on top of each other, transition to a much gentler, painful exhalation of "is mine". it's sang with only one voice. with the distress and chaos cutting out, almost like she has snapped, the very last thing that gray is left with in the silence is her loss of lily, her loss of her life, her loss of self. but, it is hers, and that's all she has left to hold onto.

wow! that's 1592 words about the composition alone! my title is totally fucking wrong now! let's talk about the lyrics and vocals and how they relate to the composition.

The Lyrics and Vocals

i don't think i have a huge amount to say about the lyrics, but i also thought i didn't have that much to say about the composition. let's get started.

"There's a safety locker, inside of me, out of your reach, and I hold the key."

gray has compartmentalised her suffering, and her life before becoming the lady in waiting. so much of what goes on inside her she doesn't let lily see at all. i think this also alludes to the suffering she is currently going through in the void. she has packed it away, keeping it from lily and herself.

"It's sealed with layers and layers of irony, what's within, I refuse to see."

my interpretation of the irony here is the fact that lily has traded her soul to protect gray, and in the process of getting here, gray has died and traded her soul to become voided so she could reach lily again. her protectee has become her protecter, but she's recklessly tossed the protection aside to try and reclaim her position as lily's guardian. the other angle here is that by becoming voided to try and get to the bottom of the void to rescue lily, she ironically cannot reach her, no matter how hard she tries. she literally refuses to see this fact, her suffering packed away inside her safety locker, because acknowledging this would make it all meaningless. yet another angle is the irony that she cannot save lily and her child both, she must make a choice, and ends up saving the child rather than the person she went there for.

"I hold on, I hold on, I hold on, 'cause that's the only thing, the one thing that I can control."

fairly self explanatory - gray has lost it all in her quest. without lily, without being able to protect her, and having failed to protect her, she's lost everything. all she has left now is her refusal to give up, and the pain that comes with all of this.

"My grievance is mine, my sadness is mine, my loss is mine."

grief, sadness, loss. these are the things she has left, the last things guiding her to give her determination to go on, and they're all painful, terrible things, but they are hers, the last thing she has agency over, the last thing the void hasn't taken.

notably, at this point i think there is a sense of deep and desperate denial in these lyrics, especially in the way it's sung. the chorus of the vocals are almost a wail, a literal repeated declaration that she's holding on because that's the only thing she can do now. she denies that the void has taken everything from her, denies her failure, denies that she must give up as she pushes forward endlessly through this bizarre and ever changing labyrinth.

"One toss and I'll forever be blind, toss the key, oh please be kind."

she begs to let go of that compartmentalised suffering and grief. she wants to let go of her failure, begging herself to forget it so that she can "forever be blind" to her inability to protect lily and the impossibility of her task ahead.

"In this state of oblivion, my silence goes on, My bearings stay stored, my walls stay strong."

out of all the lyrics in voided, this sticks out the most to me. gray professes that she is strong, silent, protected internally, her "bearings stay stored" so she knows where she needs to go and isn't lost. but how can that be true with the way she repeatedly professes she's holding onto because it's all she can control? how can she still be strong when all she has left is grief and sadness and loss? you may take it as truthful and her just being that strong, but to me, it reads as a denial of the hurt she feels. she feels she has to ignore it in order to go on, but ironically it is also the one thing keeping her going.

as the music gets heavier and tenser, so does the singing. the vocalist, eevamari, wails slightly more desperately and painfully as we progress. her voice cracks ever so slightly on "bearings", letting the underlying desperation and the lie of her unwavering resolve shine through just a tiny bit. but it's enough for us to know.

the chorus repeats, and the cries of holding on start to feel heartbreaking when combined with the strings, the lonely and cold sleigh bells, the sad and determined piano. she holds the final "mine" for a significantly longer time as the song gets quieter, as though not wanting to let go, clinging on as hard as she can to her loss in this period of relative calm. perhaps she feels that if she lets go of it, she won't be able to bear grasping it again.

as stated earlier, the vocals in the breakdown are repeated clips from earlier, but jumbled, distorted and in a random order. they get more processed with delay, reverb and a filter in the second half of the breakdown, as gray loses herself more but seems to want to hold onto those declarations of strength and agency of her pain to keep her moving forward.

in the last section of vocals, the normal vocals are overlayed with some of those clips, giving a very otherworldly effect to the voice. gray isn't fully human anymore, with the implication to me of her brand earlier that she's become part of the void, and the effects on the voice sell that to us. as well, against the descending chromatic progression, as the song reaches its crescendo of dissonance and chaos, she yells over and over that she holds on again, cries out that her pain is hers. she holds onto all of this in the face of everything falling apart in the worst possible way, internally and externally.

right before the last repeat, eevamari again proclaims "my loss is mine", with what seem to be clips of "my grievance is mine" and "my sadness is mine" vaguely overlaying it. her pain has blended together into one, and is all she has left now.

that's about all i had to say about the vocals. it's a truly stellar performance, full of anguish and desperation and quiet determination that's slowly lost despite her desperate attempts to keep it.

so, this is obviously a fantastically composed song with great regard to the themes of the game. but why has it left such an impact on me that i've spent two and a half hours writing this insane post about a relatively short part of void stranger? let's talk about the most striking part of this sequence, what ties it all together; how it synchronises with the gameplay.

The Gameplay, or how my life has been ruined and I can't stop thinking about this

floor b225 is a brand room - the intermittent rooms with murals that you initially can't decipher. as you examine the brand, the game tells you:

[It is your brand]

ominous. something isn't right. we later learn that the brands belong to each void lord, so the implication is that gray has become one too when she became voided. we don't know this at the time, but something is obviously very off about this immediately. when we progress past b225, the ending sequence begins and voided starts to play. floor b226, where a void lord statue would normally be, contains nothing, and notably there is no void lord encountered on this path, adding to the unease.

on b227, we're given one of the chests that usually contain a locust idol without having to do a puzzle. rare, but not unprecedented. however, this chest is empty. to the best of my memory, the only time this happens earlier in the game is the segment with the thief, and there is no thief encountered here, or any npcs at all in this entire segment for that matter. another anomaly. there are a few accessible chests in this segment, but there's nothing in any of them. the very first chest has a note inside from bee saying that she left the recipient's favorite snack inside. maybe the void gods don't venture to this part, especially since it doesn't lead to the end of the void, and this layer belongs to lady gray now.

the pacing of the song is such that the vocals are likely to begin on b228. this floor is still fairly normal, but something notable happens when the vocals begin: the hud changes to display the lyrics. the hud is a white bar at the bottom of the screen that displays some important information, but all of that is removed with the song's lyrics imposed on the hud bar line by line. this is a huge departure from normality for the game, and our first big clue that Something is happening. when i realised what was happening at this point, i gasped because it was just so unexpected, with no indication there will be vocals until eevamari begins singing. zeroranger contained no vocals at all, so it was doubly unexpected for me.

sometime between the second half of the verse and the chorus, the sound effects disappear completely(i'm unsure whether they gradually fade or just stop suddenly). the music has totally overtaken the focus of the game and demands your attention both aurally and visually, along with the strange gameplay differences that are about to get worse. as the sound effects disappear, gray begs herself to hold on, hold on, hold on, as things begin to change and fade from what she's come to know and expect.

i'm not sure how many floors you can progress here before the game does its thing. at the end of the first chorus, timed with the hit of silence at the end of the ascending synth note, the screen cuts to black and we get a leitmotif played on the sine wave and piano, a somber and lonely moment in the dark. right after this, the first percussion appears with the singular kick drum note, and it becomes quickly apparent that something is very, very wrong.

this puzzle is impossible.

you cannot solve this puzzle. gray has made a significant jump offscreen to floor b288, implying a large degree of time passing from her point of view, and is now faced with an impossible puzzle. the mimic in the room to the right is standing on the stair tile, with the switch to unlock it in the room gray is in. you cannot get to the stairs, no matter how hard you try. this is timed with the music growing more grave, more tense, and seeing this impossible puzzle in tandem with that lends it this air of desperation and shock as the reality of gray's situation begins to make itself apparent. after a little bit, everything but the synth and piano cut out again, there is another black screen, and when it comes back, somehow gray has made progress.

offscreen, gray has progressed to floor b451, a detail you could easily miss in the midst of everything else going on, which is quite frankly overwhelming. a jump of 163 floors. for comparison, getting to floor b225 took me about 6 hours or so. somehow, she progressed through the impossible puzzle above. for reasons that you probably understand if you've done this ending, i don't think we can trust that the puzzle is truly impossible, but to our eyes, it is.

this puzzle is also impossible. the one tile wide hallway means you will only be able to push the rock onto the stairs and never reach them. after a moment, another cut to black.

something strange happens again. it's the same floor, but the rock has been replaced with an enemy. in truth, these "rocks" are eggs. tail, the first resident of the void we meet and a former void lord, tells us they're eggs that fall from above, but to our eyes, they are rocks, and it's reasonable to assume such. gray has spent such an indeterminably long amount of time here that the eggs has hatched. in the previous cut, she progressed 163 floors. how long did she spend here? there's another black screen after a second.

when the game comes back, gray has progressed to b???, a floor that has the exact same layout as the previous one we saw but with a different enemy. gray has either ventured so deep that there's no longer any point in numbering them, or she's forgotten how many floors she's passed. additionally, every impossible puzzle we've seen so far has one of the black statues above them. this adds an extra layer of impossibility to them, as we find out at the end of this sequence that entering stairs in front of one of these statues will reset our progress to the very beginning of the game, and only a simple memory will remain. i'm choosing to interpret this as us no longer being able to trust what we see, as gray's mind begins to fracture and she sees puzzles that appear to be impossible. she is also seeing those black statues above the stairs, a subtle cry for redemption, to start over and do things right. as the vocals come back here, there is no cut to black, but we do cut to another impossible puzzle. the lyrics are back on the hud. we linger for a little bit, and then cut to another puzzle that is even more impossible than the ones before it.

the stairs are gone.

the stairs are just gone. more than not being able to reach them, there is just no way to progress at all, even if we could get to them.

at the line "my walls stay strong", we get to this impossible puzzle. gray is quite literally surrounded by walls. while she professes her walls stay strong despite growing more and more desperate, she is trapped in this tiny corridor with two leeches that will reach her no matter what - to me, a clear metaphor that her silent, strong walls have already been breached by suffering. this is also where we get the first chromatic ascending chord to the second chorus, introducing more dissonance and desperation in the music, as we return to "i hold on, i hold on, i hold on".

we get to another impossible puzzle, but the stairs are back, albeit with the black reset statue above the stairs. notably, as gray professes that holding on is the one thing she can control, the player is quite literally having control slowly taken from them as we're faced with puzzles that we can't complete, and we're rapidly being torn from them and forced into new situations that we can't possibly escape. however, it gets worse.

as the instruments except the piano fall away, we cut to this puzzle(which is, unbelievably, impossible). the hud is back as gray has a quiet moment of clarity amidst her desperation. something is wrong, however. in the top right, there's a piece of the wall that's just missing, with a graphic of the side of a tile floating in the void in its place. more evidence of gray's failing mind and unreliability.

the next puzzle we cut to appears to be possible, but isn't, due to the pit to the left of the stairs actually being a wall. there's a statue above the stairs anyway. quite a few more of the tiles are illogical now. this is where the chromatic descending progression comes in, the music becoming more harsh and dissonant as things become stranger and bizarre.

we cut through a couple more illogical puzzles as the distorted vocals come in, and more and more tiles make no sense. the chromatic descending chords become more dissonant with more offkey notes as gray's desperation and despair grow, and she loses herself more in the internal turmoil.

as we hit the drop in the breakdown where everything pulls away before coming back all together, this is the puzzle that faces us. i think this one is possible, but you have about 8 seconds to see this, process all the information, and find the solution. even then, there's a statue above the stairs - even if you reached it, you couldn't progress. to me, this is a hint that gray's mind isn't totally gone yet, she's fighting to stay conscious in the monotony of these never ending puzzles that she can't properly percieve, but still begs for atonement.

the next three puzzles we see are increasingly bizarre and alien, with odd geometry, enemy arrangements, chests, annd then several sets of stairs, something never seen before. as the music grows more desperate and chaotic, so too do the puzzles.

as the vocals come back and gray calls out that she holds on, we cut to this puzzle where she stands over a pit, with no ground beneath her. surrounded by the denizens of the void who seem to watch, if she takes a single step in any direction, she'll fall. quite literally, all she can do in the darkness, the total pitch black of this ever shifting dungeon that is now beyond any form of reason to her, is hold on.

the next puzzle is a variant of the same concept. stuck on a singular tile along with other creatures in the void and statues. they are all in the same situation. there is no escape, only holding on.

as we cut to the next puzzle at "my grievance is mine", the tiles are now placed totally randomly. on top of this, control is wrested away from the player. we can no longer input anything, and this comes directly after the line "cause that's the only thing, the one thing that i can control". quite literally all that gray and the player can do now is hold on as void stranger drags us quickly by the hand through all of these random, illogical puzzles that are now changing twice every bar. the final part about this section is that gray is flashing from invincibility, implying she is taking damage constantly, as she loses everything, unable to hold on.

as eevamari wails "my loss is mine" for the penultimate time, the puzzles become smaller and smaller, this continuing over and over as the puzzles rapidly change, until gray eventually has only a single tile to stand on. notably, at the end of this, we go straight back into "my grievance is mine", skipping "i hold on". gray cannot even hold on anymore, she has lost all control. all she has left is grief, sadness, loss.

"my loss", eevamari cries as there are no tiles on screen, nothing in this black void, even lady gray, as the only thing we can see is the hud with the lyrics superimposed over it. "is mine", she breathes out as even that disappears, the music falling away, leaving us with just her voice, and then silence in blackness. all that remains is loss, literal loss of the way forward, of any sense of ending, of resolution.

once this segment ends, we rest in silence momentarily before reaching a floor with a birch tree. but unlike every other birch tree, should we rest under it, gray is unable to dream. we know from the end of the void ending that she still has more to recall and dream about, so it's reasonable to surmise that she's lost her ability to even dream by now, or perhaps has forgotten everything before coming to the void. in any case, it has all been for nothing. as noted by the atonement statue ahead that you're forced to reset with, she's lost something important, her promise. she can't even remember lily, her reason for coming here.

all she has left is her loss, but she doesn't remember what she has lost. but the loss is hers nonetheless.

jesus christ i wrote over five thousand words when i thought it would be one thousand

i didn't think i would write for four hours about this. i have been thinking about voided for two and a half full days at this point, and i think it shows. this five minute long sequence has affected me so deeply, because i feel it's a complete masterpiece in synthesis of music and gameplay and visuals, and how music can be used to make us feel things, and compliment other art to make them more than the sum of their parts. i really hope that it helped you understand why you're fucked up and insane about void stranger too.

thanks for reading! show your friends who played void stranger!

thanks to system erasure for making this incredible game that's ruined my life without even having finished it, and to eevamari for her astounding vocals that went a huge way to making this moment as impactful as it was.

#void stranger #system erasure #i feel so fuckingn insane dude #and i hope you do too #Youtube

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