Void Sails Review - Gamecritics.com

A Whisper From Beyond The Veil

HIGH The distinct 2D art.

LOW The experience often feels like a prototype.

WTF The Man In Yellow.

If there’s one thing about Void Sails that I can say with absolute certainty, it’s that every member of its three-person dev team gave it their absolute all. This is no grift, and no quick asset-flip — the developers are clearly passionate about the world they have created, and the potential to remix established sci-fi and fantasy tropes into truly novel forms.

In some cases, this passion directly translates into aesthetic success. Overall, however, I ended up feeling that Void Sails’ ambition exceeded its grasp. Most of its elements ultimately felt more like sketches than finished work… but these are intriguing sketches, that stimulate the imagination!

The world of Void Sails could be best described as ‘Treasure Planet meets Lovecraft,’ which is a compelling pitch if I’ve ever heard one. Humanity, still in a sort of primitive Renaissance phase, has spread out across the stars, its various interstellar holdings connected by flying ships. The protagonist is given charge of one of these ships, and tasked with finding their missing father by an enigmatic figure known as ‘The Man in Yellow.’ Their father was a researcher, investigating the mysterious ‘Veil’ between ordinary reality and the incomprehensible dangers of the Void.

With all the necessary exposition out of the way, Void Sails begins in earnest, with gameplay almost evenly split between 3D space combat and 2D, text-based storytelling sections with RPG skill checks. Both halves of the gameplay have their merits, yet both feel let down by brevity and simplicity.

First, the space combat. Sure, the ship feels appreciably weighty, with a slow turning radius successfully providing the illusion of controlling a huge, complex machine. By zooming in, the player can take control of their side cannons or their forward laser, which takes time to charge but deals a massive amount of damage. Charging the laser draws energy from the same pool as the ship’s boost power and its shield. Naturally, mastering the careful use of this shared resource is a significant part of Void Sails’ combat.

Overall, the combat feels satisfyingly finicky at first — maneuvering to hit enemy weak spots with the WSAD keys while aiming with the mouse provides a delightfully odd sensation, like mastering an old flight sim in miniature. Unfortunately, this sensation doesn’t last. After getting over the learning curve of the controls, it’s ultimately simple enough for anyone to master well before the end of Void Sails’ scant runtime. This simplicity is compounded by the fact that Void Sails offers up an extremely small slate of enemies, most of which operate on predictable cycles of behavior that are easy to solve. One of the main baddies, for example, is a robotic thingy that can only be damaged from behind, so it slowly spins at a regular pace, allowing the player to take potshots at their leisure.

The storybook segments are slightly more successful, I would argue. The 2D art is lovely, and despite some clunky sentences here and there, the prose does a decent job of evoking a larger world on a small budget. The short story encounters the player finds while exploring the cosmos are often effective enough (alien hatcheries, weird cysts, etc.) and the NPCs possess a certain amount of personality and charm, despite being little more than sketches in most cases.

That’s the critical flaw of Void Sails, however — the fact that nearly every element feels like a sketch. All of its mechanics, archetypes or aesthetic ideas deserve more attention. Despite their evocative nature, the story sections, for instance, feel barebones from a mechanical perspective. Void Sails only possesses three different stats for skill checks — Perception, Knowledge, and resolve, yet the player can only determine their preferred skill distribution by answering three different background questions at the start, narrowing the potential roleplay possibilities.

But even if these stats could be freely determined by the player, the skill check system would still feel somewhat unsatisfying as many of the skill check moments don’t have any real mechanical or narrative consequence, and many more only allow the player to test their lowest stat — unfortunately, failing checks sometimes permanently lowers one of the player’s stats! Naturally, I found myself straight up unwilling to risk attempting some skill checks, even if the chance of success was decently high, as I didn’t want to get caught in a miserable spiral of losing points in an already-low stat, leading to worse results in future skill checks, leading to even lower stats, and so on.

Despite how thinly-sketched I found many of these elements, I have to admit that I was surprised when Void Sails ended as abruptly as it did, with an ending that largely focuses on the protagonist’s relationship with the characters met along the way. However, it wasn’t a well-rounded wrapup, things simply… end. It felt like listening to someone tell an interesting story for a few hours, only for them to suddenly stop mid-sentence and walk away.

Given the clear talent and passion on display here, I firmly believe that Ticking Clock Games are capable of building Void Sails into something a bit meatier, or perhaps crafting a different, more fully fleshed title in the future. They’re a studio to watch.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Buy Void Sails – PC

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Ticking Clock Games. It is currently available on PC. Approximately 4 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated by the ESRB. This game contains mild fantasy violence, and references to somewhat frightening sci-fi horror scenarios, but for the most part there isn’t any objectionable content more drastic than that.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. All the dialogue segments (and the text adventure segments, of course) are delivered with subtitles, and the combat features visual cues alongside sound cues. Thus, the game is fully accessible.