Video Game / Void Stranger

Place your faith and embrace the Void.

You do remember why you are here, right?
Or have you lost something?
Something very important to you.

Void Stranger is a dungeon crawler / Block Puzzle game developed by System Erasure (known for their previous game ZeroRanger). It was released for Windows PC via itch.io and Steam on September 1, 2023.

Presented in a monochrome pixel graphic style reminiscent of the Game Boy, the game sees the protagonist entering a deep dungeon seemingly in search of something important to her. The only piece of equipment she carries into the dungeon is a strange rod she finds at the start of the game. From here on out, movement is tile- and turn-based; time only moves when the player moves, and movement can be done only one tile at a time. The rod's main ability is to pick up one floor tile at a time and then replace it wherever a free space is available (including the same space that was vacated). Along the way, the player will encounter all manners of enemies with their own movement patterns, tile types that can help or hinder progress, and various treasure items. Some puzzles have multiple ways to solve them, while others have solutions that must be followed to the exact step to succeed. The game auto-saves after every floor completed, but floor progression is one-way and therefore the player will sometimes have to decide between solving an exceptionally difficult puzzle to get a desired item, or just give up and move on.

Due to the puzzle-driven and twist-heavy nature of this game, it is virtually impossible to talk about it in-depth without mentioning major gameplay and story spoilers; as such, ALL SPOILERS ARE UNMARKED. Beware entering any other subpages besides the Laconic page as they will also have unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned!

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You acquired some strange tropes. Simply reading them makes you feel uneasy. Something is wrong:

• Achievement System: Subverted if playing the Steam version. There is a single achievement, "Pendant", that is obtained simply by starting the game. In fact, it's presented less like an achievement and more like a key item.
• Alien Geometries: It becomes apparent early on that the Void's overall geometry defies Euclidian space. Entering stairs is the only way to move to the next floor; if you fall into a pit, you simply plummet to your death (and respawn if you have locust idols in stock or are voided). More strangely, you can pick out the stairs with your Void Rod, place it down somewhere else, and it still takes you down as usual. It later turns out to be justified in that the "B" in the floor counter doesn't stand for "basement", but rather "brane"...which only adds to the mystery of the Void's geometry as "brane" is a term in string theory.
• Another Side, Another Story:
  • After reaching the bottom of the Void, Gray decides which soul to take back with her, is warped to a modern-day setting with Lily's child in her hands, and then the credits roll. The game then closes, and booting it back up cuts to years later, where Gray's now-adoptive daughter searches their house for a birth certificate before seeing a demon and falling into the Void... unlocking the brand for Lilith mode, in which the daughter must now reach the bottom of an even harder version of the game.
  • After Lillie reaches the bottom of the Void at the end of Lilith mode, Bee encourages her to succumb to despair, but is punished before Lillie fully succumbs. Lillie is then granted her own boon, and as all she wants is for her parents to be safe wherever they are now, she's allowed to return home with Lily's freed soul alongside her. As the family returns home and discuss their fond memories of Gray, it cuts to the demons observing them, with Cif asking their leader some questions about what DIS actually is (a research facility) and why their leader took an interest in Lily's life (she reminded her of an old friend). When the leader departs, Cif then realizes that she forgot about her sister Bee...unlocking the brand for Cif mode as she goes back to retrieve her.
• Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: One floor contains a giant Snake Person who states that her appearance shifts to match the beloved of whoever gazes upon her. In Gray's mode, their upper body resembles the Queen (Princess Lily's mother), while in Lillie and Cif's modes, her true self of a three-eyed snake head is shown, due to respectively Lillie not having a beloved and Cif being a fellow denizen of the VOID.
• Arc Number: 23. The number 23 comes up a lot in this game, from the amount of floors between the void lord statues and birch trees, to the HP you are given by the succubus easter egg, Cif's brand room being B223, being able to hit the device in your own personal brand room 23 times before Add's shadow crashes the game...
• Bilingual Bonus: The game has two language options: English, and Finnish. However, in the True Ending, there will be snippets of text written in the opposite language chosen that give context to the sudden change in setting.
• Bittersweet Ending: Both successful runs (either completing all three character modes or the secret route requiring the Infinity +1 Sword) end with Princess Lily saved and Lev's plans foiled, but not without sacrifices.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In some floors, you can create a path down to the HUD at the bottom, which you can walk on. Beware picking out the HUD though, as you might perform a literal break of the fourth wall: Picking out text or icons may cause visual "glitches", crash the game, or dump you into an unending void!
  • In Cif mode, by jumping down the hole after defeating Mon, Cif ends up on a beach where she reunites with her sister Bee. After Cif gives Bee a Cooldown Hug when she gets riled up over being sent there by the supposedly-dead head demon, Bee congratulates her for a job well done and says it's time for the credits; Cif has a few frames to deliver a Flat "What" before it indeed cuts to a credits sequence with Bee and Cif dancing in the background.
• Brutal Bonus Level: v1.1.0 added in a special brand put together in an ARG that, when input at run start, will start you as Gray, pre-Voided and in an entirely new zone. This requires you to have seen the Developer's Room Ending and the new zones will push you to your limits on what you can do with each and every one of your items.
• Cheat Code: By progressing through the story and uncovering secrets, the player will find new password-like "brands" to enter before starting a fresh run, allowing them to start with the power-ups normally obtained later, play the Another Side, Another Story mode, and other benefits.
• Collision Damage: If any of the playable characters collide with another enemy, they dies instantly.
• Confused Question Mark: ? appears over main character's head when trying to examine something.
• Cooldown Hug:
  • In Lilith mode, upon reaching the bottommost floors, Lillie is almost turned into a void egg by Bee before being rescued. Lillie is then given a vision of flying through space and crashing onto the planet, where she ends up right next to what appears to be Gray laying flowers at a gravestone. After a moment of shock, Lillie starts laying into Gray about her insecurities and her fear that Gray only saw her as a replacement for Lily, only to be interrupted by Gray hugging her and stating how proud she is of Lillie.
  • In Cif mode, upon reuniting with Bee, Bee is riled up that the supposedly-dead top demon tried sealing her for messing with Lillie, before then deciding that it must have really been some kind of trick played on her by the mortal girl. Just as she swears to pick a fight in revenge, Cif gives her a hug and calms her back down.
• Dark Reprise: "Voided", the song that plays in the voided ending, is a reprise of "Void Symphony", the song from the first area. Though you might not notice it until you return to the beginning immediately after getting that ending.
• Dead-End Room: If you attempt to pick out the floor number, the game will throw a "fatal error" and you will end up in an infinite void, with nothing but an error screen in the central room. You can still access the pause menu, but the only meaningful action you can take is to exit the game and retry the room. You can avoid this by doing it on a rest floor (the ones with birch trees in them), but the only valid object you can replace it with is the Locust Idol counter to warp yourself to another floor.
  • If the player elects to not sleep at the final birch tree at B255 and goes down the stairs instead as Lillie, they will enter a completely unwinnable puzzle. No matter what the player does, there is no way to open up the stairs and proceed down, as there is a single judgement statue in the room that will punish you for lifting a tile, and the button is misaligned. Closing and opening the game instantly starts up the ending sequence with Lillie crossing the Despair Event Horizon and turning into a void egg.
• Deal with the Devil: In her final flashback before reaching the end of the Void, Gray remembers breaking out of the dungeons to confront Prince Johann. Johann then reveals that to survive, he made a deal with beings comparable to demons in order to gain phenomenal power, with the final sacrifice to complete it being Princess Lily on the day of their wedding. When Gray tries to stop him by offering her soul in place of Lily's, Lily interrupts by making her own deal with the demons: her soul in exchange for protecting Gray. The demons decide to honor Lily's deal, and with Johann's deal now unable to be completed in time, he loses all of his powers and is quickly killed by Gray.
  • This is how a Game Over works. Dying with no more locusts will have you visited by a little imp creature who offers you an orange saying "eating fruit from the mortal realm can recall the soul". Accepting the offer infects your character with the Void status which allows them to respawn immediately(up to 5 times a floor if Gray/Lillie die rapidly), but locks Gray into the Bad Ending, as the fruit is poisoned and saps her willpower. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it does teach the player to take notes and nudges them towards solving the secrets of brand rooms before resetting them back to B001.
• Deliberately Monochrome: This game is presented in a Game Boy-style monochrome look. By default, the game uses shades of gray, but you can change the base color to various other settings.
• Despair Event Horizon: "Strangers" who end up in the void and are unable to find their way out before succumbing to despair are turned into Void Eggs, i.e. the many "boulders" you see throughout the Mega Dungeon, all of which bear a distinct skull texture on them. And you as well, if you repeatedly "die" while Voided and then start trying to get back up only to give up. If you have the Void Memory equipped, you can speak to these Void Eggs; most of these can only speak words of despair and begging for help, although if there's only one Void Egg on the floor, they are generally sane enough to offer some lore or advice.
  • Gray and Lillie themselves can cross it and transform into Void Eggs should they repeatedly fail a room when in VOID status and fail to fully stand back up when the screen darkens. It's a Wonderful Failure goes over it more in detail.
• Doing In the Wizard: At the end of Lilith mode, upon booting the game back up, one of the demons of the VOID asks their leader who or what DIS actually is. It turns out to be a high-tech research facility, rather than the product of magic as the initial medieval setting would lead players to believe.
• Dungeon Bypass: If you fall into a Bottomless Pit under one of the triangular idols with some Locust Idols on you, you will warp ahead by however many Locust Idols you have. This is not necessarily a good thing, as it means you may miss out on items needed for endings or 100% Completion, and you cannot go back up to previous floors.
• Developer's Foresight: The game has multiple ZERO Court scenes to account for different means of save-scumming, such as quitting the game right after dying without any Locust Idols, repeatedly reloading your game to try and hoard infinite Locust Idols from the same chest, and repeatedly reloading when you get stuck.
• Edge Gravity: Stepping onto a pit will cause your character to panic and steadily slide towards the middle of the pit. If your reflexes are fast enough you can quickly pull back to return to the platform, but the moment you hit the center, you'll fall down the pit.
• Education Mama: In Lilith mode, some of Lillie's dreams show that Gray became one while raising Lillie, telling her to focus on education and acceptance into the military while forbidding her from taking a trip with friends even after Lillie saved the money for it and got the approval of others. It's what led to Lillie growing up into a rebel who's convinced that Gray wanted her to be someone that she's not and doesn't respect the real her, cutting her own hair to look less like Lily as well.
• Effortless Achievement: When starting the Steam version of the game up for the first time, you instantly get the "Pendant" achievement, the game's only Steam achievement. However, refusing the "help" after your first death will result in the game kicking you back to desktop and the achievement getting undone.
• Escort Mission: Deep in Lillie's adventure through the void, talking with a shy girl and showing her the path to the stairs with the Void Staff will begin a sidequest that spans the entire section of the void involving making paths for her to reach the stairs, complete with exciting music as she cheers you on. Unlike most Escort Missions, she's not really in any danger as enemies ignore her but she can't make it without a little help from the staff.
  • Stepping on a rune forces the floor to act like this as stepping off of it conjures a shadow of Add to, well, shadow your every move. Not only are they lethal to touch but if an enemy collides into them and destroys them, it kills you as well. Protecting them from harm while they actively impede your ability to double back adds quite a bit of intricacy to a room's solution.
• Evolving Title Screen: Upon startup, the intro shows a blank background with lights floating up, but it can change depending on which ending the player obtains.
• Fish out of Temporal Water:
  • Gray's story ends with her and Lily's unborn daughter being warped from the medieval era that Johann ruined to modern day.
  • At the end of Lilith mode, the demons allow Lily to leave with her daughter, but she's then shown struggling to adapt to life without her royal privileges.
• Gainax Ending:
  • The first time through, and following a dream sequence where Gray is arrested for her alleged murder attempt of Princess Lily, the player is locked into an ending where a vocal track plays with the lyrics shown in place of the HUD. At first they make their way through floors with abruptly easier solutions, but then start being periodically and inexplicably teleported to much deeper floors before they can finish the previous one. These floors feature unsolvable puzzles (e.g. the exit cannot be reached or simply doesn't exist) and eventually, the player comes across floors with incoherently-arranged tiles, until they start rapidly and uncontrollably teleporting around an ever-changing mess of tiles. Eventually, the floor counter turns into question marks and finally, they reach a rest floor with a tree, but when Gray falls asleep, she's unable to dream at all. The next floor forces her to step onto an exit with a Dark Idol placed above it, introducing the player to the Reset Button mechanic if they have not incidentally discovered it already.
  • If Gray or Lillie ends up in the void due to messing with the HUD, then it is possible for her to find a giant broken sphere that triggers an ending where a scientist named Dr. Lily is busted by some kind of police force, only for one of the onion people from ZeroRanger to suddenly bust in through a tear in reality, ending the game and rolling the credits.
• Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: Character portraits have more realistic body proportions than in-game sprites. For the latter, the head makes up more than half of the character height.
• Guide Dang It!: While the game has a lot of difficult puzzles, it also has a lot of obtuse and hidden mechanics that can only really be discovered by looking it up or extensive trial and error.
• Have a Nice Death:
  • If you die and refuse to continue, the sprite who offered you help mocks you for crossing the Despair Event Horizon so easily. A bright explosion then occurs and the game exits to desktop.
  • If you activate the Infinite brand before starting a game, then later pick out the infinity symbol on the HUD, the game will transport you to a still screen with "-∞" on it in large-point font. The game is soft-locked at this point and the only action you can take is to quit the game to retry the floor you did this on, but with no locusts.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • During one of the dream flashbacks, Gray and Princess Lily are accosted by a group of bandits. Gray is forced to unleash her "Gray the Destroyer" form, which results in a boss fight...from the bandits' point-of-view, as the bandits fail to even harm her at all. In other words, the protagonist is the Hopeless Boss Fight with this trope being Played for Laughs.
  • Played for Drama during a different dream flashback; Gray tries picking a fight with Bee, one of the demons Johann bargained with, to prevent them from taking Princess Lily's soul as part of Johann's deal with them. Trying to attack Bee just causes Gray to take counter damage (until the final hit, which hurts Bee but causes her to retaliate), and if she stalls by defending or checking the demon's status, Bee will quickly become bored and attack for over a thousand damage.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Unopened treasure chests can be found throughout the game.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: If you die too many times in the same room after being Voided, Gray or Lillie will fall to their knees and the screen will dim. They will then appear in an empty screen of darkness. If you mash buttons, they will regain resolve and stand back up. Should you start tapping and then give up, she too will give up and eventually transform into a Void Egg. The opening notes of the Bad Ending song 'Voided' begins to play, almost as if in mourning for the fallen adventurer. This is treated as an ending as if you hold the Esc key to close the game, [End it all.] takes significantly longer to fill like other endings, and the title screen will show their petrified form. This was added in a later patch to serve as an emergency abort for your run should you be unable to solve a room and with no other way to get out.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Thanks to they way the game is structured, the story is drip-fed to the player in an incredibly fractured manner meaning it is quite the undertaking to put things together.
• Jump Scare: A few are present. Some examples:
  • Should Gray end up in the void from messing with the HUD, then one of the possible ways for it to end is some kind of creature suddenly jumping out of nowhere, snagging her and crashing the game. It happens so suddenly that it is sure to scare those unprepared.
  • Entering your own Brand in a Brand Room will take you into a strange zone where constantly touching things will make one of the shadow enemies(who bear a perfect resemblance to Add) glare at you for a split second as the game crashes.
  • Deep beyond the numbered floors in the white void, the ground may start pixelating and a loud crackling noise can be heard as a strange entity(heavily implied to be Gor's separated body) will being to slowly chase you. Pausing the game will have the entity suddenly invade the pause screen and attack you, calling you bothersome and crash the game.
  • Bee loves to do this, suddenly leaning on the text box and glaring at the player with empty eye sockets and twisted smile.
• Kaizo Trap: Some of the floors in Lilith mode have the stairs placed below a Dark Idol, meaning you risk resetting back to floor 001 if you fail to notice, or aren't fast enough to force-quit the game in time.
• Living Shadow: Stepping on the sigils on the ground will conjure a shadow of Add to follow your every move. Touching it is lethal and if it dies via a monster attacking it or falls down a pit, you die as well.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The trees at the "rest" stops initially seem to be just a place to take a break and see a memory of a character's past, but one of Lillie's "dreams" is interrupted by Bee discouraging her from using them to escape from her current situation, and Cif's mode has her outright refer to them as this trope.
• Memento MacGuffin:
  • The pendant that Gray has with her at the start of the game is revealed near the end of her mode as a gift from Princess Lily before demons took her soul in exchange for saving Gray's life.
  • At the end of Lilith mode, the pendant is revealed to have been in the envelope Lillie discarded at the start, as a final memento before Gray passed away.
• Mercy Mode: If the heroine dies and has no locusts left to revive her, the game ends...but a small, round imp-like creature offers her a fruit that bestows the VOID status, giving her infinite retries, at the cost of being unable to obtain any Memory Crystals, or being forced to reset as Gray upon the final floor.
• Minus World: On a "rest" floor, it's possible to swap the tiles of the user interface without getting forced to a Dead-End Room. By swapping the amount of Locusts you have with the last two digits of the Floor, it teleports you to that floor. Do this to warp to Floor 00, and you're sent to a special room before the game's beginning where Gray or Lillie (but not Cif) can obtain a more powerful rod that can store multiple tiles at once, but only if they had slain the right Void Lords beforehand. This special rod is in fact required to access an alternate route (by removing tiles in a brand room until none are left).
  • Using the Bee Idol warp on a later floor with many locust idols, you can warp past the final floor, 255. Doing this sends you to a white void where taking too long or dying will crash the game, putting you back on the floor you warped in from. Making it through the handful of simple floors leads you to a strange entity that will offer to completely wipe your save file.
• Multiple Endings: There are numerous endings to the game, each with their own credits sequence and title screen change. There's giving up and becoming a Void Egg as Gray or Lillie, reach the bottom floor while in VOID state as Gray, reach the bottom floor as Lillie or regular Gray, rescuing Bee as Cif, confronting Lev on Floor 000 as Cif, witness the Dr. Lily scene in the abyss, and the "True Ending" of reaching the heart of DIS as Gray or Lillie (which itself has variations depending on NPCs assisted and Memories collected).
• No Fair Cheating:
  • Attempting to cheat by performing actions like exiting and reloading to get around losing Locust Idols or editing your save outright sees your character being brought to ZERO Court. Depending on the crime and how you respond, you may merely be let go...back at B001 to start over.
  • The Infinite cheat brand gives you unlimited Locust Idols, but as a result you cannot use the trick of swapping your remaining Locust Idol and floor number values since attemping to pick out the infinity symbol softlocks the game in a Nonstandard Game Over. That said, you can use a Bee Idol warp to set your Locust Idol counter back to 0 so you can perform the technique again...however, the lowest floor that this warp will send you to is B100, so you cannot warp to B000 unless you do a Dark Idol reset.
• No Final Boss for You: Done in a roundabout way. Getting to the very final area, the heart of DIS, requires warping to B000 to get the Endless Rod. You can't warp there if you're using the Infinite cheat brand, meaning no way of getting to DIS with infinite lives in tow.
• No-Gear Level: At some point, Gray will encounter a young treasure hunter who takes interest in her staff. Before she can answer, the woman rips the staff from her hands, forcing you to chase her down and solve several floors without your primary tool for interacting with the Void. The thief will actively sabotage your efforts to pursue her by stepping on glass tiles and covering her tracks, forcing you to take dangerous detours.
• Nonstandard Game Over:
  • In levels where you can step onto the HUD, picking out any of the item icons or the HP/VOID indicator will "crash" the game and exit to desktop.
  • If you pick out the "Bn" part of the HUD, you end up in an endless pitch black expanse. Here, one of two things can happen: You're grabbed by a strange creature which crashes the game, or you find a giant egg that leads to a strange alternate ending that has seemingly nothing to do with the game itself.
  • If the Infinite cheat brand is on, and you pick out the infinity symbol where your Locust Idol counter normally would be, the game cuts to a negative infinity symbol on a still screen, and softlocks right there. The only thing you can do is manually exit the game now.
  • If you form your own brand in the 6×6 brand rooms, and in the resulting room interact with the womb-like symbol on the wall 24 times, the silhouette of Lord Add glares at you and then the game crashes.
  • In the white void beyond B255, if Gor's body touches you, the game crashes. If you pause the game while it's on screen, it says "How bothersome..." in a quivering text format and then attacks you, again crashing the game.
  • As detailed in It's a Wonderful Failure, repeatedly dying in the same room when Voided will trigger a last-ditch effort to not give up before Gray/Lillie cross the Despair Event Horizon and transform into Void Eggs.
• Not So Stoic: The leader of the demons is always wearing a mask, and treats things like pact-making with utmost seriousness. Upon learning Lilith's utterly humble desire to let her parents know she's grateful to them, however, she breaks out laughing so hard that the mask shatters.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: Picking out the wrong parts of the HUD or being attacked by certain enemies will cause the game's graphics to garble up briefly before the game exits to desktop.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: If Gray or Lillie comes in contact with any enemy and does not have VOID status, she instantly dies. Nominally, she does have 10 hit points, but she loses 3 upon entering the dungeon due to the deep fall and never gets them back, and all enemy contact takes away 999 HP, making her effectively this trope. However, averted during the RPG sequences in the dream flashbacks, where Gray is capable of taking multiple hits.
• Out of Continues: Dying usually lets you try again: If you have Locust Idols left, you'll use one to retry the current brane. If you don't, you can continue the game in Voided state with infinite retries, or refuse to continue and be kicked out of your run and start over. However, if you die on the same brane five times in a row while Voided, your character will slump to the ground, and repeatedly pressing the action button will allow them to get back up. If you start trying to get back up, but then stop, your character then turns into a Void Egg and dies for real, ending the run.
• Painting the Medium: Occasionally, you'll encounter a "rest" floor with a tree you can rest under. If you choose to rest, the game will narrate you falling asleep and then close, as if telling the player to also take a rest.
• Reset Button: If you step onto the exit stairs when there is a Dark Idol over it, you will be rewound back to the beginning of the game. This can be useful if you miss a Locust Idol or a memory crystal. The first time you play through, you get a Downer Ending that forces you to reset via this method anyways. This gets used against you in Lillie mode, with some Dark Idols being pre-placed over stairs, sending you back to start if you don't move the stairs or idol out of the way first.
  Only a simple memory will remain.
• Rewatch Bonus: The Release Trailer contains a lot of imagery that does not appear in the game itself, and also won't make sense without fully playing the game, such as Eus' true form or silhouettes of the human forms of the Void Lords.
• Sadistic Choice: Upon reaching the depths of the Void, Gray has proven her devotion to the demons that took Princess Lily, and is allowed to bring a soul back with her to the surface. However, they disclose that Lily is pregnant, and Gray must choose which soul to bring back to the surface with her; the post-credits scene (and Another Side, Another Story mode) show that she chose the infant.
• Save Scumming: If you fail on a floor, you can force quit the game and reload to avoid losing a life. Just don't do it too much, or the game might take offense by having your character brought to court for their actions.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The game's save file has an obvious "level" variable you can see if you open it with a text editor. Trying to change this to skip ahead leads to you being sent to ZERO Court, from which you can plead not guilty and will be put back on the floor you were just on. The game doesn't actually use that variable at all, it's just there to screw with you if you try to cheat.
  • If you enter your file's Brand Room, touching the capsule at the top will cause the background to shimmer in Tron Lines and make a sound. Keep on pushing it and Add's shadow will be quite upset with you...
  • In several branes, you can actually walk onto the HUD, which seems awfully tempteding to pick out. You might be able to get a warp out of it or solve a puzzle depending on which tiles you pick and which brane you're on, but picking certain HUD elements like the HP counter / "VOID" indicator or the Void Rod icon itself will crash the game instead.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Gray's mode ends with Gray choosing to rescue Lily's unborn daughter instead of Lily herself, and parts of Lilith mode have Lillie upset over whether she's just a Replacement Goldfish taken out of pity or someone Gray genuinely cared for as herself.
• Taken for Granite: Some statues, meant to first be encountered in Cif mode by following Mon's footprints down a specific path, will instantly petrify a character in their sight and count as a lost life. Mon's boss fight form also has this power, petrifying Cif if she's in sight of the face on her tail.
• The Starscream: In Cif mode, after their boss has left and while traversing the VOID to find where her sister Bee was sealed away to, she learns that Mon, the demon that exchanges hints for Locust Idols, has also been traversing the floors. Once she catches up to Mon, she discovers that her and Lev have decided to take the place over for themselves, leading her to fight against Mon's centipede-like monstrous transformation.
• Trailers Always Spoil: Downplayed. The gameplay trailers and promotional screenshots show some of the game's dungeon floors, but the floor counter is obscured with question marks, so that a prospective player will know that the floor exists, but not where that floor is.
• Triumphant Reprise: "Sacred Defender" of all things gets one in "My guiding star", as Add and Lily prepare to fight Lev.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: During the dream sequences, there are minigames with formats other than the usual block puzzles:
  • Some sequences have turn-based RPG combat, such as the sense-slapping fight against Lily and the fight between Gray and the bandits attacking the caravan.
  • In one sequence, Gray and Lily engage in dance practice, which is played with arrows similar to DanceDanceRevolution, but the different arrows scroll left on one lane like in Taiko no Tatsujin.
  • There's an Unexpected Shmup Level called 0st//Ranger, a clear nod to System Erasure's previous game ZeroRanger.
• Video-Game Lives: If Gray or Lillie has not died and come back under VOID status yet, then the Locust Idols that can be collected throughout the game are used like this; instead of dying, a Locust Idol will be used to revive her. This is the only mistake insurance in the game short of going VOID, as although she seems to have 7 hit points, all enemy contact is lethal. Cif, as a demon, starts her mode with VOID status already enabled.
• Was Once a Man: The large round eggs seen throughout the Void turn out to be other people that ventured into the VOID and did not have the determination to reach the end, succumbing to despair. During Lilith mode, Lillie's Escort Mission with Ninnie ends with them trapped in a room and Ninnie turning into an egg, and Lillie almost turns into an egg herself at the final floor due to Bee's goading and desire to eat her before Bee is stopped and punished.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: At the end of Lilith Mode, Lillie is forced to confront the fact that, for all of Gray's restrictive parenting and Lillie's rebelling in turn, all she really wants is for her mothers to be safe wherever they are now and know that she's proud to have been their daughter.

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Only a simple memory will remain

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