Bit.Trip Void (PC)

Gaijin Games’s Bit.Trip series has always been rather experimental, and with its third installment Bit.Trip Void having you take control of a small moving void dodging bullets, it certainly fits with Bit.Trip’s trend of trying to reimagine how a rhythm focused game can be executed. While you aren’t quite handling a black hole since it lacks any of the expected suction a gravity well would feature, the focus of pulling things into the void is what the game structures its action around.

 

In the heavy pixelated graphics of Bit.Trip Void, your void is represented by a rather roughly drawn black circle. Moving it around the screen is easy and there’s enough speed to it that you can react to incoming fire, but you don’t actually want to dodge everything coming towards you. The idea in Bit.Trip Void is that you want to get your void as big as possible before pressing a button to reset its shape and bank the points earned for reaching such a large size. Growing your void’s size involves catching black pixels known as beats as they appear on the screen, your size increasing with each new black dot integrated into your mass. It is actually possible to completely subsume the screen in some instances if you get big enough, but the challenge in Bit.Trip Void comes from the fact that abundant white beats also fly in from the sides of the screen. Any contact with a white pixel will make that dot disappear, but it will also completely eliminate all of your accumulated mass and throw you down to your default size. As such, success in Bit.Trip Void and high scores must be earned by identifying when you’ll need to cash in your size increases to avoid losing them, and the risk-taking of trying to keep your bigger and unwieldy void in play until it can reach its full potential is a decent way of motivating you to push your luck for bigger payoffs.

Bit.Trip Void begins with its difficulty set to easy automatically, but this actually doesn’t seem to impact the way levels play out. Instead, when you get hit by a white pixel, the damage you take impacts what might be called your flow. As you build up your void and cash in the points, the background begins flashing more vibrant and varied colors, the moving patterns always simple but still becoming more energetic or detailed based on your performance.

 

Unfortunately, these background colors and shapes can sometimes make it hard to even see the colored dots, and while the contrast is usually decent enough, there are definitely moments where you might wish you weren’t doing so well so you could actually seen where the pixels are as they move across the screen. If you miss too many black beats as they go off screen or enough white pixels make contact with you before you’ve had time to build back up this flow, soon the sound and colorful background will cut out, an eerily flat grey screen that almost acts like there’s been a malfunction in a television display backing the now lifeless collection of pixels. Things will eventually recover if you can grab enough black pixels, but if you fail while in a place you might almost call an empty void then you will die and be forced to restart from a checkpoint. The difficulty levels determine how much abuse your void can take before the grey screen appears and earning points can earn you more retry attempts from a level’s checkpoints, so the difficulty of the bullet patterns is always present, the game just becomes more forgiving based on your settings or performance.

 

The bullet patterns continue to evolve as you progress through Bit.Trip Void, the player always receiving a bit of help in anticipating what’s coming next and when they’re meant to be grabbing pixels or dodging based on the way such things would line up with the background music. Black pixels fit with the beat and the rhythm of the song while white ones are a poor match, but you will definitely be relying more on your eyes for determining how to move your void around the screen. White beats can box you in, form large moving barriers, stream across the length of the screen, or sequester black dots within groupings of white to force you to move right to grab them and get out. Most of the time you’ll likely find white pixels coming in from all sides of the screen in some form and black dots are often placed in ways to test your ability to bank your mass before you touch the border of some shape made by moving white dots. However, since they can appear from any direction at varying speeds and missing black dots damages you, sometimes you are given barely any time to anticipate the incoming set of patterns and mess up for it. Most ideas are repeated a few times or eased in to in order to teach you what you’ll be spending the next part of the level dealing with, but it does feel like Bit.Trip Void leans too much on learning the level by messing up on it and then coming back later with a memorized version to assist in actually beating it.

Checkpoints do help a little with the possible need to memorize stages if you can’t manage your void’s health well, but the fact there are only three major levels is key to making actually finishing Bit.Trip Void rather doable. The small set of three levels are named for the three parts of Freud’s idea of the human psyche: Id, Ego, and Superego. Whether this plays into their gameplay content is hard to say as Bit.Trip Void’s small scenes don’t so much tell a story as they show tall dark pixel men with visors interacting in strange wordless ways that seem to relate to the level title. However, each of the three levels do feature a series of unique bullet dodging challenges before they culminate in a boss challenge. Boss challenges aren’t always about enemies, you might find yourself navigating a dangerous moving maze for one while collecting black dots as a white dot spacecraft opens fire on you in another, but they are usually fittingly difficult finales to their levels.

 

The regular portions of the levels can also feature challenges though, a flashing beat sometimes bringing with it rule changes like reversed controls that allow you to earn more points if you can push through it successfully. Some flashing pixels instead give your void powers, such as allowing it to act more like a black hole by magnetizing black dots towards it or doing the opposite and repelling any white dots that get close to it. Some level sections are designed specifically for you to harness these powers properly to avoid the danger and grab black dots, so unless you know one is going to be a difficult challenge instead of an almost necessary state change, you will be grabbing these and dealing with the consequences be they interesting gameplay or an annoying shift to the action.

 

While Bit.Trip Void does throw a lot of little bullet patterns at you to avoid repetition, it still never really feels like its idea evolves much over the course of play. You touch on a few tailor made moments for the power-ups and the boss areas ramp up the difficulty while usually playing more fair than even the regular levels and their hard to predict bullet spawning, but Bit.Trip Void feels like it isn’t interested in exploring its concept much and instead just took the basics about as far as they’d go before something would need to change. It’s certainly closer to the arcade style of game design where you are meant to keep going with a simple design until you’ve honed your skill and learned the way the game will challenge you so you can earn a high score. Getting Bit.Trip Void as part of the collection released for Wii or 3DS make that simplicity easier to accept as you can hop over to a different title after seeing what little Bit.Trip Void offers, but on its own on PC it certainly feels a little light on content and ideas to motivate spending additional time with it beyond just seeing its three levels to completion.

THE VERDICT: Bit.Trip Void core idea is simple but effective. Your void grows with each little success but needs to be shrunk back to a normal size as your growing mass becomes a liability, the points reward system not only important for scoring but for avoiding a deadly fate if you start to make mistakes. However, the simplicity and general difficulty level involved in dodging the bullet patterns feels like it is lacking the shakeups such a concept needs to really shine, and with some issues holding it back like identifying dots on colorful backgrounds, it’s really hard to see Bit.Trip Void as the kind of game you’d keep returning to in order to try and outdo old performances. It has some fun to give because it does nail the basics of its ideas, but Bit.Trip Void uses its creativity on the shape of bullet patterns instead of finding interesting ways to iterate on its concept and keep the player coming back for more.

 

And so, I give Bit.Trip Void for PC…

An OKAY rating. Bit.Trip Void manages to make its rather simple idea fairly challenging just by coming up with new ways bullets can fly on screen and test your ability to properly manage your ever-shifting size, but its three levels, despite being difficult at times in a good way, still feel like they’re only scratching the surface of where this concept could go. A few little power-ups like repelling beats or drawing them in are on the right track and the bosses briefly brush against some interesting recontextualization of how your void deals with the pixels it needs to collect on screen, but it is still relatively basic and wraps things up before the gameplay type can be put through its paces. It’s still satisfying to get your void to ridiculously large sizes and seeing that mass blasted off by a white pixel usually feels fair unless its a weird new pattern or colored background allowing them to sneak in, so Bit.Trip Void does have some fun and frantic action to engage with during its three levels. It does enough with the few mechanics at play so Bit.Trip Void isn’t a game you’d want to avoid, but its inclusion in package deals certainly befits its simplicity better. The standalone release feels harder to justify grabbing because it doesn’t feel like a game that explored its unique space properly before concluding the adventure.

 

For a series that likes to be experimental, Bit.Trip Void unfortunately feels like a surface level exploration of its concept. The basic idea is fleshed out enough to work well but the few changes to the regular flow of the action don’t last long or have only a few short sections catered towards them. Gaijin Games seems to have mostly gone all in on Bit.Trip Runner for exploring the depths of a mechanic with sequels, but while Bit.Trip Void does feel simple it isn’t half-baked. If Bit.Trip Void ends up in your game collection one way or another, it will provide some moments of excitement despite not evolving its concepts much from how they function in the first few minutes of play.