It is possible I did not start out in this reality. It is possible I have somehow travelled here, to replace this universe’s version of me, who started playing Post Void and vanished without a trace. Asked to explain, I can only go by the notes she left behind. They start out lucid enough, but, well. “Post Void is an FPS that feels like Devil Daggers had a fever dream about Hotline Miami while drowning in a vat of caffeine. It is magnificent. “In my left hand, I had an idol. In my right hand, a gun. I knew that the idol would constantly drain my health until I died, but I could fill it by killing… things. The corridors were random but always led to the pool, the precious pool where I could get a better weapon, or bouncing bullets, or reload faster. I ran and I dodged and slid and fired and ran.
“I do not know what I was fighting. I remember some of them wore suits, but they were not men. I remember the sensation that they had heads, but they did not have heads. Some of them had legs, and were a devouring, hissing mouth. I learned that if I aimed, I could kill them faster. But there was rarely time to aim, and it was just as possible to keep shooting. A hit would slow them for long enough to hit them again. My gun needed to reload after six shots, but only if I stopped firing. If I needed more than six shots, I would get them, as long as I kept shooting, without pausing. I survived one full level firing constantly, without a single reload. But there were better options.
“The floor was red. The floor was green. The floor was blue. The walls were pink and they were orange and they were black. The monsters had guns, but some had gnashing teeth or whirling blades. Most exploded into a pink gore that stuck to the ceiling, but some left a writhing, bleeding tentacle when shot. There was not time to think of these things, and yet I thought of them, somehow. I died and was reborn. I was shot and killed by hovering, whirling blades. I ran out of time, a countdown invading my vision, warning that I had but a couple of seconds to kill, kill, kill. I had an uzi, and a shotgun that I survived long enough to load with four shots at a time. At one point I had a knife.
“There would be an end to this. The suits became white. Hands crawled along the floor to do something, shot in my now-fanatical state before I could find out what. At least once I paused, but still heard the dripping of fluids and the tinny sounds of that relentless looping soundtrack, endlessly escalating. The jangly guitars urging me on, the music as if instead of having a good time, Dick Dale had wanted me to roll in knives and fling myself at the police.
“Skittering footsteps and yelping, howling creatures with vague purple masses where heads belong. Gunfire and stretched guitars, gore and glowing orbs and glimpses of oddly ordinary furniture. Doorways made of faintly sexual flesh, but neither titillating nor outright horrific. Violence and chaos and yet no malice, no distaste. A fever dream with no fever. A void that gives. I do not remember.” The notes stop there. Your guess is as good as mine, frankly. Post Void is out now on Steam for a ludicrously cheap £2.33. You should play it.
