I impulse bought yet another indie roguelike last night, and I have no regrets in this particular instance. The name of the game in question is Voids Vigil, and it’s the work of caiys, the indie developer behind Boneraiser Minions.
Boneraiser Minions is an excellent little auto-shooter about a cute necromancer who raises the dead, and I wrote about it recently in my round-up of games like Vampire Survivors. Both Voids Vigil and its predecessor share some common themes, yet they’re also both quite different interpretations of the burgeoning bullet heaven genre.
I think Voids Vigil might be better compared to another very good video game: Brotato. In both games, your weapons are positioned around your avatar, and you must then navigate confined arenas while taking down your enemies and picking up the resources they drop.
Voids Vigil the auto-shooter-shopper
While it’s kind of like a bunch of games, Voids Vigil also feels distinct because it does a few things differently. This individual flavour is delivered via a series of design decisions that work together nicely.
The most obvious is the game’s gritty sci-fi aesthetic. I love the colour palette and the retro style of the pixel-art designs. Despite the futuristic setting, you can tell it’s from the same person who made Boneraiser Minions, and I like that game’s visuals a lot, too!
One of the key differentiators is the economy and shopping system. I mentioned that you’re picking up resources from fallen enemies, and in this instance that means “cogs”. Between combat rounds you’ll be invited to a veritable shopping mall of vendors. You can buy passive improvements, weapons, and item upgrades, giving you an additional degree of freedom in terms of how you develop and progress.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a stingy thing
The other thing to say about Voids Vigil is that it feels really good to play. The controls already feel great, and it took me no time at all to become completely immersed in what I was doing. That means shooting, dodging, strafing, and grabbing up cogs.
The rounds are shorts and sweet, and they’re made interesting by mini objectives where you have to float over rewards for a time to claim them. It’s all about crowd control, until you get to the boss battle at the end of each run, and then it’s more of a bullet hell.
There are multiple difficulty levels to work through, and I’ve already been able to create some quite diverse builds (not all of them successful, I should add).
Having said that – and perhaps I should have noted this earlier – this is an Early Access game and it’s not finished (for example, there’s a campaign mode being teased). There’s going to be more content and continued refinements made over an estimated 3-4 months of EA.
There’s definitely enough to get you started, though. In fact, I think Voids Vigil is already in really good shape and I’ll continue to keep an eye on it as it moves through Early Access on Steam, where it is currently available to buy for less than two quid (which is underpriced, frankly).
