Void/Breaker hands you a hyper-moddable gun and tells you to massacre some architecture

I was all primed to ignore Void/Breaker forever based on it being pitched to me as a roguelite FPS in which you “escape an endless cycle” and “craft infinite weapon variants” in order to “forge deadly synergies”. I joke, I joke. There is, of course, no way of ignoring the roguelike and/or roguelite genre in this, the year 2025. We are all caught in the endless cycle of roguelike or roguelite releases, doomed to forge synergy after synergy until whatever software our universe is secretly running on finally blue-screens. Bet it’s Windows 7.

Fortunately for Void/Breaker, I overcame the above feelings of crushing hopelessness and watched the trailer. My feelings about the game are now more specific, and optimistic: this is a game about flaying entire skyscrapers in half with a piano-white shotgun while peering at vaguely fractal, megalithic horizons and other set-dressing that reminds me of Returnal. It’s absolutely not Returnal, but it haunts me in a similar way. Those backdrops bode. Here’s the trailer.

The developer is Stubby Games, aka Daniel Stubbington, creator of The Entropy Centre. We never managed to review that, but James liked the demo enough to feature it in a round-up. “As much as this first-person puzzler borrows from Valve’s masterpieces (especially the overgrown lab environments from Portal 2’s opening hour), its demo suggests that it can successfully transplant the thrill of solving a test chamber while using a brain-bending central mechanic of its very own,” he wrote.

Odds seem fair Void/Breaker will have something of the same cerebrality. For one thing, there’s some kind of hostile AI running the show behind the scenes. “The machines think you’ll never escape,” comments the Steam page. “The system is designed to keep you here.” I imagine the system wouldn’t have given me guns if it thought I could shoot my way out, so perhaps you’ll do something brainier between the firefights. Perhaps you’ll sweep up all the buildings you’ve just murdered and arrange the fragments into an SOS.

I’m not judging you if you just want to stick around and murder buildings, mind. I like murdering buildings too! Void/Breaker launches later this year, and there’s a playtest happening… right now. It runs till 24th April. You can find out more on Steam.