Voidigo is a Roguelite developed and published by Swedish indie studio semiwork.
The game's story begins with the forces of darkness overrunning the keepers of ancient Beacons dotting the landscape of the world, corrupting both the beacons and the world's inhabitants.
Enter Drash, the game's protagonist, clad in a keeper's magenta armor and feathered cloak. Drash knows very little about herself, but she does know the Antivoid has chosen her to purge the Void from the world. To that end, the player will travel through realms corrupted by the Void, killing enemies, collecting items, and purging corrupted Beacons to allow that realm's boss to be defeated in a game of cat-and-mouse not dissimilar to fights in Monster Hunter. Each boss killed opens a portal to the next world, where the cycle repeats until the player can challenge the Void on its home turf.
Void Fragments earned by killing bosses will persist across runs and can be used to unlock things in the Camp, including different starting equipment and entirely new playable characters, of which there are currently four: Clozo, Karkamas, Botanika, and Doctor Fusion.
In addition, the game offers extensive replayability through the Essences system, encouraging the player to experiment with new powerups, weapons, and builds to reach 100% Completion.
Unrelated to the mobile 2½D Action-Adventure-Platform Game hybrid Swordigo.
Voidigo contains examples of:
- Abnormal Ammo: Many guns start out shooting weird things like water or ice cubes, but many upgrades also give you the ability to increase this massively- ranging from the fairly straightforward elemental bullets to lotion containing jellied tungsten powder that increases knockback to snake oil that turns your bullets into homing snakes, and much more.
- Amnesiac Hero: Drash doesn't have much recollection of who she is, where she came from or why, but she is wearing the armor of the Beacon keepers seen in the game intro and her unlockable starting ability, Kindred Contact, heavily implies she used to be one of them.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Trying to get Weapon Essences becomes quite a bit easier given the game's very generous idea of what counts as a "kill". It's possible to get almost all of your required kills by pistol-whipping the passive creatures dotted around the map. Porko land even features tiny, almost invisible bugs (typically around the skeletal corpses in the level) that can also be "killed" to contribute to the 20 kill requirement.
- Badass Bandolier: The Human Bandolier powerup rather straightforwardly increases your maximum ammo capacity. Because ammo pickups are based on percentage, it also increases the amount of ammo you collect as well.
- Batter Up!: An uncommon melee weapon, the Homerun, is a standard wooden baseball bat that comes with a catcher's mitt for a shield.
- Beneficial Disease: Getting infected with Heavy Weight Bacteria makes all your melee weapons deal knockback, and increases the knockback you deal through any means.
- BFS: Most of the game's melee weapons are longer than normal humanoid characters are tall due to the art style, but particular credit should go to the Becleaver, one of Drash's unlockable starter weapons which has extremely slow and powerful swings. It's also the weapon she's seen carrying over her shoulder on the box art, where the blade really is almost as large as her entire body even when she has more normal proportions.
- Bird People: Drash and the other keepers seem to have been this given their plague-doctor-like beaked helmets and feathered cloaks, though we don't actually know what any of them looked like under their armor. Drash, at least, moves a lot like a bird with her body tilted forward and her arms held by her sides, and her unlockable ability gives her a set of skeletal wings made of Antivoid material when it's active.
- The Ugglur found in the North are Owl-people, some of whom are cultists who seem to worship some kind of weird baby bird-plant-god-thing called The Prophecy, which is one of the North's potential bosses.
- Breakable Weapons: Melee weapons have durability, depleted by landing attacks or blocks and using melee swings to delete projectiles. Depleting a weapon's durability doesn't destroy it, but does change it to a broken-down version with weak attacks and no special properties. Ammo pickups also double as durability restorers, giving you 35% of your bar back on use.
- The Cameo: Semiwork used to make animated shorts under the name Thunder Humor, and characters from said shorts appear in this game:
- The soft-spoken narrator who introduces each world is Rupert Grimsby, a storyteller who had a prominent appearance in many of their animations.
- One of the bosses in the North is the Pony from Pony & Boy
- The Chosen One: Drash, chosen by the Antivoid to purge the Beacons of Void corruption. It's even her subtitle on the character select screen!
- Cowardly Boss: All of them. Bosses spawn once the second beacon in a map is purified and will flee during combat if they're damaged enough, forcing you to hunt them down or allowing you time to breathe and resupply.
- Deal with the Devil: The Void itself will frequently offer item bundles, powerful weapons, and other benefits to you, but the price is always very steep, usually in the form of sacrificing your maximum health.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: The abandoned tractors found in The North are highly explosive if you damage them enough, telegraphing their detonation by the alarm going off as the engine tries to turn over before the whole thing blasts a chunk out of the level and launches all four of its tires into the air. These tires are deadly hazards in their own right, bouncing off the ground three times each and crushing anything unlucky enough to be underneath each time.
- Expressive Mask: Drash's magenta-colored birdlike appearance is armor she's wearing, not her actual body. Despite this, she can still make expressions perfectly well using the eyepieces of her helmet. This isn't even an affect of the pixel art style, either, since her official art has her eyepieces narrowing and even closing.
- Green Thumb: Botanika has plant magic that she uses primarily to teleport around in a burst of pollen as her starting ability. Her alternate ability instead grants her a living root bulb companion that attacks enemies with seeds. She also used her abilities to create some of the items in the game, including her starter gear and the entire line of Pepper powerups, which give elemental effects to melee strikes.
- Grim Up North: The third world, The North, has this theme, featuring the Ugglur cultists, the viking-like Nordunn, strange Jersey Devil-like creatures called Pinecrows, and magical gnomes.
- Goomba Stomp: One of the game's main methods of attack. The dodge ability takes the form of a jump, and landing on an enemy has various effects, from knocking it down, briefly stunning it, or killing it outright in the case of very small enemies. Chaining stomps also grants the player increased invincibility frames, extremely useful for surviving high difficulties, and many items also enhance the player's stomps, from flying boots that add an additional attack to a stomp to slippers and insoles that add elemental effects. Drash also starts out with the Antivoid Combo Strike powerup that gives her the ability to unleash an explosion by chaining stomps off multiple enemies. At high combo levels the explosion can level an entire section of a room.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The game's setting can best be described as like Adventure Time, featuring elements from modern, futuristic, historical, and fantasy settings all mashed together into one.
- Hard Light: A general motif of the Antivoid. The barriers protecting the camp, the Antivoid weapons, and the inner workings of the beacons themselves all seem to be made of vividly magenta-colored light.
- Heal It with Water: Exposing the Blossom Bud to water heals him, allowing him to be one of the more durable companions if the player has access to a weapon or powerup like the Splash Soles that create water puddles.
- Heli-Critter: The Pinecrows found in the North are birdlike creatures that fly by spinning their tail feathers, since they don't actually have wings. The Jersey Devil-like Greater Pinecrows also use this as part of their primary attack, boosting themselves backwards while spitting out a massive stream of projectiles.
- Helping Hands: An upgrade actually called the Helping Hand is available, increasing your reload speed. According to the hand's Flavor Text the hands are actually Karkamas', reaching through time and space to help you reload with the help of some unnamed invention. There's also the entire line of "Rehand" powerups that take the form of robotic or supernatural floating hands that perform attacks for you whenever you reload.
- Horny Vikings: The Nordunn are troll-like enemies with a Nordic theme found in The North. They have melee users with the standard viking attire and horned helmets, crossbowmen, and old mystics who can conjure floating runestones to attack you and bodyblock for themselves.
- Intrepid Merchant: Jhase's Shop can be found once in every world except The Void, where he sells items to the player and can also provide access to machines that give currency rewards for trading in some of the player's equipment. The shop itself appears to be some kind of steampunk Spider Tank.
- Improbable Infant Survival: The juvenile Pinecrows found in the North, being passive creatures, will simply get up and fly away with ruffled features when "killed", unlike the adults which are hostile enemies that can be killed normally.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Most melee weapons come with a shield, which enemies and the player can both utilize to stop melee strikes and reflect projectiles. Shields won't, however, block stomp attacks, something the player will have to take advantage of to fight crowds of melee enemies.
- Parrying Bullets: Like in fellow roguelike Nuclear Throne, melee weapon swings will delete projectiles, though it will deplete the weapon's durability.
- Pig Man: The Porkos in Porko Land are this, organized as some kind of militia or band of raiders and utilizing firearms almost exclusively.
- Pirate: Has a Kegler Captain who is a pirate hermit crab, with a barrel for a shell.
- Pistol-Whipping: Most ranged weapons have a secondary attack function where you can use them to hit enemies. Unlike dedicated melee weapons, guns don't have durability, though their melee attacks are much weaker and don't benefit from most of the powerups that affect melee, meaning you'll mostly use this to conserve ammo against stomped enemies or as your only means of attack when completely out of ammo.
- Plant Person: Botanika is described as belonging to a small community of "peaceful plant sorcerers" before it was destroyed by Void-aligned forces. She also has intelligent plant creations of her own like the Pot Pal and Blossom Bud.
- The Professor: Professor Karkamas is your standard elderly Omnidisciplinary Scientist riding a mono-wheel motorized chair who invented all of his starter gear as well as a few of the weapons and powerups you can find out on runs.
- Solid Clouds: Clozo is a cloud person, and all of his starter weapons are likewise made out of clouds.
- Super Spit: The Greater Pinecrow and Juvenile Imperiants attack by spitting tons of projectiles at you. The player can also leverage this with the 55 Vocaliber and Restrained Imperiant Baby weapons. The Normal Snake and Bass Hunter weapons also attack by spitting out snakes and fish, respectively.
- Totally Radical: Doctor Fusion is a former extreme surfer and doctorate-holding physics researcher who was transformed into a living miniature sun (with sunglasses) inside a fishbowl mounted on an android body after his brother spilled energy drink into the fusion reactor he was working on. His description explicitly describes him as "a new totally radical superhero". He's so rad, in fact, that even some of his weapons wear sunglasses.
- Turns Red: Every boss has two stages: a normal stage, and a void-corrupted stage where the void supercharges them as a last-ditch effort to kill you. The corrupted bosses are very aggressive, mobile, and have new attack properties, but also have less health and seem to be less accurate.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Clozo was kidnapped from his kingdom by agents of a rival nation. After escaping, he somehow wound up in the service of the Antivoid and hasn't been able to find a way to return home.
