izigame.me

The game has told me on a few occasions to leave a review if I enjoyed the game, and in this case, I shall oblige. Having gotten all the achievements and having run through the game a few times now, I have seen most of what is in the game currently. Rather than just list all the things Void Sols does great within the souls-like category, I'll just list the parts I think Void Sols does exceptionally well just as an experience (and what my few issues are despite doing these elements well), and I can mostly sum this up with two ideas: experimentation and exploration.
Void Sols has the basics down in terms of how the combat feels (and I think enemy animations are really clean and give good indications of what they're going to do, you can learn their movesets very easily), but I think what it does really well is that it does promote experimentation, given that you can freely respec at very bonfire and upgrades work as a category rather than for specific weapons. When you upgrade your primary weapon, you basically unlock the next upgrade tier for all of them. However, when it comes to the weapons and gears themselves, Void Sols runs into an issue where half of the weapons just do not feel that great to use, or feel pretty lackluster. This extends to both the primary and secondary weapons. If you were to ask me what a good fix for these are, I honestly could not tell you, but my experience comes down to their numbers - using the katana as an example, it is the only weapon with a sharpness mechanic, with a meter that degrades after every hit and sharpness needs to be restored through a backstep. Cool and unique idea for a katana (and most weapons have a cool concept behind them), but why is the damage so lackluster on this thing? No other weapon has to deal with that sharpness mechanic, and as the katana is right now, the sharpness degrades so quickly and I'm not squeezing very high numbers at max sharpness. There are also combinations of primary and secondary weapons that absolutely delete boss hp bars - I am personally okay with these existing, but it is one of several major issues that causes weapon diversity to feel a lot more slim than it needs to be.
Exploration is what I feel Void Sols does best - the level design feels like a great translation of what the best in the genre has into a top-down format, and treasure is usually incredibly rewarding. The game's actual dialogue is incredibly sparse - off the top of my head, I can only think of at most one time where you can see dialogue appear on screen. The game opts to use more visual language to indicate what is or is not possible - item descriptions do not offer much in the ways of hints. This goes hand-in-hand with the level design and how it comes together really well for me. But I also think the game leans into this element so deeply that sometimes it required me to make certain leaps in my thinking to realize something was possible, especially when it came to items such as the mysterious mushrooms and how collecting those may work. Part of me feels it is unfair to treat this as a negative because from where I stand, it is such a subjective thing and speaks more about me as a player rather than the game itself, but I do think it's worth listing here in case somebody else struggles with these sort of things.
The last three things I want to mention are commendations - first, I really liked how Void Sols approached the side quest element of the genre. While it can be incredibly obtuse and not super clear (I pretty much got none of them on my first run), I think the few side quests in the game have incredibly cool rewards (or in the case of one side quest, a cool addition to a boss fight) and just feel rewarding to do in a "perfect" run. Second, I like the angle they took with NG+ where upgrades got reset but we keep all of the gear we have found between all save files, as well as the NG+ challenges to make each run more challenging without just buffing enemy stats. Third, the game is billed as being approachable, and I think this is baked into the game design itself, but going beyond that, they added difficulty sliders to help people who are really struggling. I personally would not use these sliders on a more vanilla run but I appreciate the option is there to make the game as approachable as possible.
All-in-all, I can recommend this game - I think it's worth the asking price but if you do want to get it on sale, $15 is very much in the realm of being absolutely worth it. 2024 saw the release of quite a few souls-likes and even amongst them, I think Void Sols stands exceptionally well amongst the titans.