Greetings from an RPS refugee

You are now reading this in the voice of the narrator from the Stanley Parable.

Stanley has just finished playing Void Bastards. His opinion of the game was very positive, and there were a few things about the game that he found quite clever. For example, the arsenal the game provides for Stanley is very unorthodox, including things like decoy robots, poison darts, and a gun that absorbs an enemy, then shoots it back out later. Ammunition is also very limited, and Stanley quickly discovered that he could not simply shoot all the enemies with his pistol.

As a result, Stanley was forced to think strategically. Because the game informed Stanley of the types of enemies found on each vessel, as well as their numerousness, Stanley was able to choose the most suitable weapons to deal with each, and so use his limited resources to their full potential. Stanley found this particular bit of design very impressive.

Stanley was also quite taken by the game’s charm. He found that the expressive voices of the enemies contributed both to the atmosphere, and informed Stanley of the danger that he could not immediately see. However, Stanley was of the opinion that not all the voices contributed positively to the game. Specifically, the voice of the ship’s AI immediately stood out to Stanley, because it was exactly identical to the voice of this narrator, so much that it made Stanley feel distinctly uncomfortable.

Stanley suspected that the developers of Void Bastards had hired this narrator with the express purpose of “doing the Stanley voice”. A strange decision, Stanley thought, because regardless of whether this voice was appropriate for a callous and bureaucratic ship’s AI, it would constantly associate Void Bastards in Stanley’s mind with a much funnier game. On top of that, Stanley thought it did a great disservice to the voice actor’s range, as the role of the ship’s AI never allowed him to deliver his lines differently. When Stanley recalled the Stanley Parable, he remembered all the different emotions that the narrator went through in response to Stanley’s constant, and might I say, infuriating disobedience. Stanley felt constantly reminded of the lack of this dynamic delivery whenever the ship’s AI would speak up.

Regardless, Stanley’s opinion of Void Bastards as a whole remains firmly positive, and he would encourage fans of these so-called ‘rogue-likes’ to play it.