“The Void” by Ice-Pick Lodge Analysis
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Have you ever thought about how mundane dreams are? It’s not that they can’t be shocking or fascinating, but you’d think a kind of perception completely untethered from the actual world would be a bit wackier. I dream of people and other sentient beings, objects I’m familiar with, the language I was raised to speak. Even my most out-there dreams don’t involve me being plunged into a world of shapes and sounds and colors arranged in ways I can’t categorize.
Why not? Why so derivative? Why are dreams all confined to that which we can already see?
Well, you could think of it another way. Not as dreaming of what exists in our waking life, but rather, our minds endowing the world with the shapes and colors and sounds that it dreams of. Maybe it isn’t that we’re unimaginative, but that we create the world to adhere to our imaginations.
Think of a snowball, right? It isn’t inherently round, white, and cold. It’s round, white, and cold because humans perceive roundness, whiteness, and coldness when observing it. We give the snowball those attributes because our bodies looked at it and touched it and that’s what they perceived.
This may seem like a mundane observation, but it’s kind of revolutionary. At least, John Locke thought so. After all, if human perception is the only thing that gives shape to things in the world, our knowledge is bound to be pretty flawed, us being humans and all. We can’t arrive at the truth from authority, because even if those authorities are interpreting the words of a perfect being, that interpretation comes from a human’s perception, which can be wrong or incomplete.
But another consequence of this is that once we take in an experience, we teach ourselves how to perceive the thing in the future. Memories of experience eventually become so fluent and pliable, becoming tinged with other memories and our own soul-stuff that we can’t help but dream: manipulate that which we remember into forms that are brand new to us. We aren’t unimaginative: we’re bursting with so much creativity that our own waking lives can’t even contain it all.
Isn’t that strange? To a baby, the world is all arbitrary shapes, but with time and learning, we train ourselves to see these constructs in the way others do. How do we seem to overlay our own realities over the world that exists? Turning infinite light into distinct colors, or turning soil into countries, or people into identities, sounds into names? And what does a world without these boundaries look like?
There’s only one way to find out, right? At the moment of death, those boundaries disappear. You lose your name, lose your desires and memories and fears. All the matter that held you together begins to lose it’s grasp on itself, and you dissipate. What would you see then? Would there be a ‘you’ to perceive anything at all?
What is the Void?
At the moment of death, a soul finds themself in the Nightmare: the Lower Limit where they decompose atom by atom.
Usually.
Very occasionally, a soul awakens to find themself in a desert on the threshold of death. These deserts, called voids, can sustain the soul for a period of time, so long as there’s Color to drink. But if there’s no Color, the soul faces a destiny worse than the Absolute Death down below: the Hunger of the Soul. Beings need “pure Color,” or Lympha, in their hearts in order to survive in the Void. But doing this changes the Lympha, turns it into Nerva, a far more volatile substance than can damage a void irrevocably. The famine that follows such damage causes unimaginable suffering. Voids are delicate and dangerous places.
It’s on one such threshold that the Spirit finds himself after being lost by his master. That’s what the player character is called: the Spirit. He has no name, because he has no voice with which to name himself. The one who had his name is dead, and the Spirit has lost him forever. But even if he could speak, he probably wouldn’t care enough to name himself anyway.
Welcome to The Void. For the next 35 cycles, you will help the lost soul navigate the desolate and dying world below the Surface. You’ll help him cling to life, or some cheap imitation of life, by scouring the Void for Color. You’ll keep him moderately safe by cravenly guiding him through the instructions of the hideous Brothers, who will throw him into the Nightmare if he disobeys. You’ll help him open the hearts of indifferent or hostile Sisters, often against their will, so he can pass through their chambers and access new places to suck dry of the precious Color.
Do you feel like a hero yet?
Tension is a 2008 game from Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge. Coming out just a few years after their cult darling, Pathologic, Tension dove headfirst into the grim and esoteric subject matter that Pathologic is known for today. It asks unanswerable questions about death and perception and meaning, and doesn’t particularly care of it’s fun or easy to digest. But that’s not to say it doesn’t care if you understand- it desperately wants you to understand. It just knows that understanding needs to come from struggle.
In 2010, the game was released in German and English under a new title: The Void. The style is a bit cleaner, the environments are a bit more polished, and the mechanics sucks way less. The Void opens with a short cinematic sequence with a few nice visuals that gives the player a chance to move around and find their bearings, while Tension throws you right into a dense, loooongg conversation with a character.
The Void isn’t just a remaster of Tension, though. It significantly truncates the text of the original Polish.
Oh, did I mention that? Tension is in Polish, not Russian.
There is an original version of Tension available in Russian, but it goes by the name Turgor. But in 2010, The Void was released with a second Russian translation. So there are essentially two Russian versions of the game.
As per the Ice-Pick Lodge MO, it seems that there was a significant amount of logistical weirdness that resulted in the remaster leaving out a ton of the original game’s text. The Void is in some ways a completely different game than Tension just by virtue of what gets left out.
I haven’t played Tension, it’s still only available in Polish and I don’t even know how to get my hands on Turgor. It looks like someone developed an English patch of the original game, but I straight up cannot figure out how to get it. You gotta remember that I have about 5 brain cells, and they are stressed enough as it is processing the content of the game I was able to play.
This presents a difficulty in how we’re going to discuss the story of this game. I played a single game, I engaged with a complete piece of art, with a pretty contained story. As weird as that story was, it homed in on a particular weirdness, while the game that preceded it had a whole lot more going on. As a death of the author extremist, I am inclined to accept the piece of work I experienced as it is, assuming it is whole and finished in the most perfect and fully realized form it is able to take. But, I’m also a human, despite my best efforts, and I just don’t buy that The Void should stand alone. There is so much stuff in Tension that feels like it belongs in The Void. And that’s to say nothing of the game’s development notes that seem to be scattered in forgotten corners of the internet. I’m literally going to source a 13 year old Facebook post in this video; that seems wrong somehow.
This isn’t a well-known game and these developers aren’t famous or wealthy enough to have their work perfectly preserved and disseminated. In fact, Ice-Pick Lodge seems to have largely forgotten about this game.
So, here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m going to more or less stick to the content of The Void, being the game that I’ve played, but I simply can’t ignore the other stuff I’ve read. It enriches the text that I’ve experienced too much: there are some wildly cool aspects of this game’s conception that simply never made it to The Void. Fuck my artistic morals, I can’t not engage with that stuff.
If you’re a subscribed to my channel, you are going to heaven, but also, you may have seen in my community tab that I will be discussing Pathologic 2 in a later video.
And that’s kinda weird for me. It’s not my MO. I’m not a devourer: it’s honestly kind of weird that I’ve so thorough consumed more than one piece of art from the same artist.
But, Ice-Pick Lodge has sort of captured my attention in a way that makes it impossible for me to not consider their work as windows into understanding a great artistic vision. I feel like they know something that their trying to communicate. They have access to some secret that they just can’t get across in words.
So, today, we’re going to break my rule. We’re going to resurrect the author.
We’re going to recreate this game in our own image, using any bit of evidence we can get our hands on as well as our understanding of Ice-Pick Lodge’s other works to pluck out the heart of its mystery.
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