This post was originally written a day or two after I completed Void Stranger EX back in April 2024, it stayed in my notepad++, unnamed and unsaved, until today, when I decided that I should just Post the things I write, instead of letting them Linger in the Aether forever. I didn't post it back then because I felt like it was a bit longwinded, even if each paragraph had a purpose, but maybe that's okay, yknow?
Remember this longing.
Even beginning to explain where I'm dropping you, the reader, in the vast ocean of Void Stranger, is incredibly tricky. It's a game that deserves to be played and experienced yourself, or watched from the eyes of someone who is experiencing everything themselves for the first time. Void Stranger is a sokoban puzzle game first and foremost, and everything else is just additional, albeit beautiful and insane. I have tried countless times to write about Void Stranger in various ways to describe what I believe to be a perfect game. I've tried to write about my experience first hand, but felt I should give a spoiler free version of my experience (how else would a reader get their own unique experience otherwise), which I quickly realized was impossible. I've tried to completely ignore the game itself and only speak on the story, but once again struggled to figure out what was and wasn't worth mentioning.
I so desperately want to write about the parallels of the main characters' stories, and how they applied to my life, and still do, but it feels like an impossible task to explain everything without spoiling too much while also providing the correct amount of context for any average reader to comprehend why it all feels so important. All of that said, I feel I can finally talk in depth about a specific piece of Void Stranger, because it's intended discovery and solution is far too cryptic for any one person to discover on their own, and my way of discovering it had nothing to do with intended way.
Despite not talking too in-depth about the Main game of Void Stranger, this is a blanket spoiler warning. I will outright tell you how you're supposed to find this secret area, albeit, you would never find it completely by yourself. I will also probably touch on secrets that exist in the Main Game, but most of it will be discussing EX specific spoilers that only exist using Out of Game methods of discovery.
This post won't even really be discussing EX's floors for the most part, only what you can find after finishing them. If you think you're the type of person to go hunting in the game files, consider this slightly smaller bit of text as your spoiler warning.
Void Stranger EX is a recent update that was meant to be discovered through a community ARG. The intended way of finding this new secret inside the game was by finding an NPC that only spawned if you had essentially completed every single thing possible. Oh, and this NPC was 1 of at least(!!!) 17 NPCs, and your save file could only ever find one of them, somewhere in the depths of the Void. Each NPC had a specific mark, and when you combine all of those marks together, you get a secret brand that places you directly inside of the most brutal series of puzzles the game has. Worth mentioning as well, this update was silently added in an otherwise normal "fixed a few bugs"-esque patch.
This is NOT how I discovered the EX floors of Void Stranger, however.
Personally, I had discovered the existence of the EX floors months before they ever officially existed in the game. The secrets this game holds ate into my brain so heavily that during my original playthrough, I started looking where I maybe wasn't expected to. I had found out about a Debug Mode near the end of my original 60 hour playthrough, with one of it's perks being the ability to essentially teleport past each floor with the click of a button. After completing everything, I started using this to look for smaller things I had missed, little things still left over that didn't have a huge impact on the game and I just hadn't found yet.
It's worth pointing out, this Debug Mode wasn't perfect. After all, it was never intended to be used by anyone other than the devs themselves. Often times, depending on when and where you used a real exit, versus a Debug Teleport, you could Fly through some rooms and end up in one of a number of Limbos, where instead of the core group of rooms that you would expect to fly through, you'd get shoved somewhere completely unexpected, where you would see maybe a handful of maps not in that core set, and then usually a dead end where you could loop back around to Floor 0.
There were a lot of little limbos lying around, and as someone who isn't a gamedev, and isn't really familiar at all with how you actually create a game, it was really cool and interesting to see how the floors were numbered internally. It was like there were certain subspaces you could access, and then when you Flew through those rooms, you'd end up going through every floor of that same type, and sometimes those subspaces would have one or two leftover rooms where you could enter their exit and end up in another subspace. A lot of Test rooms, occasionally you'd hit a dead end and end up in a scripted cutscene where your only reprieve was to kill the game and start from the beginning again.
My favorite room I found while flying around. A leftover test room with an untranslated sign: In Finnish it says something along the lines of "No fucking guy solved this puzzle, nerd xD", I think. Despite being one of the more convoluted test rooms to access, it's staircase just takes you back to Floor 1.
One of these little limbos was a set of rooms that actually all led to each other cohesively. The exits were real, but the floors were just definitely not in the game. At some point I realized that these were rooms you only see in the trailer for the game, most of them impossible to complete with vanilla means, and in the trailer you just see Gray, the protagonist, kinda just walking through parts of each floor before it cuts to the next one. I think they probably just didn't bother removing them, because again, there's no way to get there without using outside methods, so why bother? I thought it was cool though, and at the time, definitely tried as many ideas as I could to access some even more deep part of the game, hoping and pleading that there was still something left to discover, but ultimately nothing worked, and I put the game down.
That was in September 2023, and at some point in January of 24, after my original stint in the Void, I opened the game back up. I had recommended the game to several friends, one of whom ended up on a very similar path as me, someone else who had really locked in with the game and, as you do, we started talking about it. Easily one of the highlights for me with this game was months after I had already completed it, and finally being able to share those thoughts and emotions on certain parts of the game with someone else WITHOUT it being a spoiler. The excitement of getting to go "oh but that part is so crazy!! oh man you figured that out so fast that took me ages!", that's the stuff I live for with games like this, honestly. During these conversations while being caught up on what they had just discovered in the game, it had already been several months since I had played, and while I remembered key moments or specific floors that gave me the most trouble, I had forgotten what a lot of parts of the game actually looked like. So when we would talk about the game, I would just open it up and Debug Around, getting my bearings and all that. It was around this time that I accidentally teleported into the EX floors.
Accidentally flying into an unknown world, unsure if it was cut content or planned for the future.
This hadn't happened before. I had flown through these same sets of rooms dozens of times, this wasn't here before. I knew they had done some patches since I last played in September, but what the hell was this? Are these just more dead rooms they cut from the game that I had missed? There's no way, right? It had to be new, right?
Suddenly, I had information I shouldn't have, and, despite my searching, couldn't find a single person anywhere mentioning this area of the game. This felt like completely uncharted waters, and obviously I'm too far gone to just stop here. So I started Flying through every floor I could, and despite my latent curiosity, tried very hard not to parse anything I saw, because I knew that at some point in the upcoming year, I'd almost undoubtedly be playing through these rooms legitimately.
As each floor flashed past my eyes, all I could feel was some sort of dread taking me over, because these floors were fucked up, man. Nothing in the original game could even compare to the nonsense I was seeing. I wanted to see more, but there was a statue blocking the fourth and final area, and nothing I tried made this statue disappear. I specifically remember there being this goofy hardstyle track playing, and I tried timing the amount of Donks the song had to the amount of bonks I hit the statue with, hoping it would magically disappear, to no avail. There was an egg in the corner, which are sort of like other travelers in the Void who have Fallen and usually repeat a message at you when spoken to, but it's message hadn't been added into the game and just said "Undefined", leaving me stranded without seeing that final area. Probably for the best, I figured. Leave something unseen for Future Me. I closed the game at 5am on a cold January morning, went to bed (let's not talk about my sleep schedule surrounding Void Stranger, it was Bad), and didn't open it again.
The main hub of EX, with a Statue covering the 4th area, and an Egg in the bottom right corner.
Fast forward to April 5th. I was given a very brief heads up from a friend that "maybe that thing I mentioned back in January exists now", and so began the hunt again to find out how you're supposed to get there legitimately. Knowing how to access the EX floors through the Debug Mode wasn't fun. Every other secret in the game has an established hint and solution attached, so it was time to Hunt for Where The Hint Was. After trying several first guesses that did nothing, I realized I hadn't tried using the brand that EX shows you when you first enter, and boom. That answered how you get there. Now it was a matter of figuring out Where The Fuck The Game Gives You This Information.
I only knew the solution because the Entrance shows you, which I had only seen because I Debug Moded in there, so I was still hunting for the solution to the solution. And this is where things got a lot more difficult. The patch notes for this update mostly were just classic "minor fixes", but they also announced a release of the OST on bandcamp, and replaced some of the original tracks in the game with their higher quality bandcamp versions. One of the tipoffs for the ARG was a line in those notes that said "if you listen closely, you might spot the differences".
So, my line of reasoning was to go through every version of the bandcamp and youtube versions of the songs and see if there were differences. The Thinker's Solution, of course. I'm talking like, taking note of how many seconds were in each, and writing down each song that was timed differently, and then checking the locations in the game where those songs play. I tried playing those songs in the music room in specific orders, every single thing I could think of with these 5 or 6 songs, I was trying. This led absolutely nowhere, and it was 2-3 hours of wasted time. It was starting to feel like all hope was lost, and I'd have to wait until someone else figured out the missing pieces for me.
Well, after my friend had clued me in originally, I, thankfully, had sent a dm to another friend about what was going down. He instantly started checking the game files, and at some point I mentioned something along the lines of "if you see the number 17 anywhere let me know", because I already knew the key to access EX required 17 tiles to create. Within 5 minutes of saying that, he had found a funny little line in the unpacked game files that rolls a number 1-17 on your save file (That number dictates which NPC your save file spawns). That, and him finding his own personal NPC quite quickly (his NPC spawn was one of the earliest in the game), with a tile marker that matched what I already knew to be the Special Brand, we had essentially solved the entire thing backwards.
This is all very longwinded and maybe I'll edit it later or maybe I'll leave it all like this and a select few of you will read it in full and truly understand the hold this game, and it's secrets, had on me, on us, on basically every single person who had played enough Void Stranger to be able to even be able to parse the tipoff about EX.
The amount of insane nonsense I've tried that I've been very confident COULD have been a solution to one of a million different meta puzzles, this is the ultimate example of that, I think. Completely ignoring the intended puzzle, meant to be a Community Event, intended to be a giant Scavenger Hunt for those who had truly seen everything. We had, instead, just reverse-bruteforced the entire ARG because we had already scoured every single nook and cranny for any semblance of More Stuff. I'm not even writing this to talk about the actual EX floors, as great as they are. I'm writing this to talk about what we discovered after I had already gone and completed them all.
So you complete the EX Floors. It takes you about 30 hours, you get your ending, and that's it, right? There's another secret hiding on the final floor, where you would usually see the main ending EX. There's no tell, you just have to give it a try. By intentionally falling through a tile where, in any other similar looking location, there would be stairs, I landed somewhere I had become quite familiar with in my time Debug Flying through Void. These floors are never seen in the game, but have always been stashed away regardless. One of those subspaces I was very familiar with already.
The same set of floors that can only be seen in the trailer.
There was a certain sense of confusion and joy when I landed in there, realizing exactly where I was, and how it was real this time. I think everyone who has a similar experience exploring the depths of this game understands what I mean by that. It was baffling to finally be there and actually trying to solve each floor, despite them being impossible in the trailer, they were possible now. They had been possible the entire time. Completely under our nose. Except for one last floor.
The final floor hiding under the final floor of one of the most difficult puzzle gauntlets ever crafted. Forever searching for a solution.
See, the last floor is intentionally impossible, it's a series of eggs and buttons, every button needs to be pushed, but the eggs are positioned so that it's impossible to push them onto all the buttons. You're stuck here forever.
This, in my mind, was a perfect ending to this incredibly well hidden secret within a secret within a secret. It matches Void Stranger's core, on the surface story, and leaves the protagonist stuck in a loop, forever trying to solve the mysteries of the Void, just like every single player who managed to make it this far down. Intentional or not, much of the Void Stranger experience is mirrored through the player themselves.
I may lose some of you here, but stay with me. Void Stranger was and still remains a very Divisive game and experience. Plenty of people, like myself, absolutely adore everything about it. We love the challenge, the required out-of-the-box thinking, the story, the characters, everything. But there are a lot of negative reviews for this game, a shocking amount in my opinion, for what I genuinely believe to be a masterpiece. People who aren't used to a game not holding their hand, a game that wants you to go through it several times to learn it's every intricacy, a game that requires you to pay attention, beyond just solving each floor. Every negative review of the game calling it "too obtuse" or "too hard" is another Egg that stopped moving forward through the labyrinth, another Player who gave up at that spot on that tile. They lost hope, or maybe interest, or maybe just decided that continuing wasn't worth all the trouble. But you, the player still in control of Gray, are still moving forward. Maybe just to the first ending of the main game, maybe further. For some, like myself, it's less a concern of ever losing Hope, and more that we'll Never Stop Searching for More.
Void Stranger exists both as a reality and as a game, it does not exist to placate the player or the protagonist. It does not hold your hand, and in fact, is almost always just straight up begging you to quit. In that same vein, you have this final piece, leaving Gray, and consequently, the player, in an impossible room, stuck forever. All because they decided to delve far deeper into the mysteries of the Void than they ever should have. It's bittersweet, but it makes sense, neither the Player nor Gray were ever in control, you've both been allowed to explore, and now you've gone too far. There's plenty of Happier Endings in the game to look at if you'd rather. But if you made it here, you kinda deserve it. Pack it up buddy, you can't win this time.
That all sounds pretty cool, but it leaves out one more group of Little Freaks still left looking around. The impossible floor is theoretically NOT impossible through vanilla means. Whether through some glitch that people discovered on the new patch (who's to say it's really a glitch, and not just intentionally created), or through Debug Mode, if you go grab a specific item from the Main Void, and (this is where the glitch part lies) bring it back with you to the EX floors, you CAN solve that last floor, and what lies after is a familiar face with this to say:
- "I thought that last puzzle was impossible. Maybe I was mistaken. Of course I expected someone to eventually find this place. I wouldn't be here otherwise. This world has reached its limit. It's time for something new. It may take a while, but I hope to see you there. So until then..."
Left in an empty Void after the final text box closes, only after starting to close the game do you see the last part of the message.
I want to talk about what this message means to me, but I'd rather just get to the point first. This is only what shows up in game. Because, of course, after almost a year of dealing with batshit insane people like myself, I think the devs realized that they could, and should, be hiding secrets in places they didn't intend originally. Which is why when you use the Undertale Modding Tool and unpack the game, you can find this same NPC with this same set of dialogue. But several lines don't show up in the game. The full text reads:
Ah.
The hidden lines completely breaking the fourth wall and mentioning the reveal trailer, mentioning debug tools, it's a message left for that final group of people still hunting for secrets. Everything I've talked about so far is to get a brief glimpse into how far some people, like myself, are willing to go to uncover everything this game had to offer. Not just spending 100+ hours in the game solving the intended puzzles, but spending countless hours outside of the game theorizing about different characters, different inspirations, references, story breakdowns, really taking a deeper look at the metaphors and parallels. I think it's safe to say that for anyone who got far enough to find this message, they've gotten something incredibly important out of it, somehow, some way. It's no surprise that those who invested so much time into something as deep as Void Stranger would end up at this point. This message feels like a final goodbye from the devs, who are giving everyone who finds it some closure and a "This is it, we promise". There's nothing left to be said, there's nothing left to be found.
Remember this longing.
Longing... It's such a beautiful way to describe the emotion and feeling I'm left with. Void Stranger is a game I will never be able to play for the first time again. I will never get that first experience again, in my life. It left a genuine, lasting impact on me. The story of Gray, who's core message to me was that you can't fix your past mistakes, and can only learn from them, and be better in the future, gave me a better perspective on life and has genuinely helped with my anxiety. Lillie's story reminded me to cherish the time I have with those I love, and make sure they know I love them. In the aftermath of my original Void Stranger stint, I instantly started looking for something else to fill the, well, Void, that Void Stranger left in my brain. It's impossible, quite frankly. There is no game even close to Void Stranger, and at the same time, it's an experience that very few will truly get to have in full. I still want more, more secrets, more floors, more puzzles to solve, but I've gotten my closure, I've found all there is. All I have now is my memory of my time experiencing it, and how much it meant to me. How much it means to me still. I just hope I don't forget too quick.
Thanks for reading.
If you would like to see my playthrough of Void Stranger and EX, it can be found here.