Ever seen that game, The Void, on Steam, waiting for your download? It's a nasty little first-person adventure game that's basically like Clive Barker took a shit on Okami. My main problem with it is the difficulty.

Yeah, a gaming masochist complaining about difficulty.

This game utilizes "color." You pick up colored plants and allocate the different colors to life vessels called hearts. When you step out of a level you go into a world map called The Void where your life depletes rapidly. This causes your color to convert to a different kind of color called nerva, which can be used to fight, cast spells and feed sparkling naked women with British accents. Feed them enough and they'll give you some goodies: access to new levels, more hearts, new spells which are cast by drawing runes.

Problem is that the game is ultra-reliant on color. Guess what you don't get a whole lot of?

Time in The Void is measured in cycles. When you step outside, a counter slips backwards from 99, and upon reaching 0 will begin a new cycle. Colors will respawn in certain areas, but sure as hell not enough to survive another full cycle, or to just barely enough to survive the cycle.

You can invest your color by using a spell to revive trees or using a couple other spells to tap some color mines. The returns at first are wonderful. After drawing color about two or three times, you'll start to get next to nothing back. The trees and mines only work well if you let them sit for a few cycles, which you cannot afford.

Don't even get me started on the spells and their inability to work half the time. At times you want to use a spell to drop a little color on the ground and attract a firefly to nibble on it. While it's nibbling away, you can then sneak up on it and grab it for beaucoup color. Trouble is you wind up drawing the damn rune about 55 times before it actually works, and then half the time the firefly will see you and run away, resulting in wasted nerva.

If any of this made any sense to you, you might want to see a shrink. I'm really not sure how I feel about this game. It's unique, but its ideas are far from original. They're older ideas dressed up in poetic prose and sexual undertones to look new. At times the game is fun, at other times you want to skin yourself alive and jump into a pool of salt.

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