I waited months to reach a point where I reckoned I've seen enough to put down a review (I've put it down a couple times here and there, it's not gargantuan in length :p)

Some friends of mine one day last year were strongly recommending this game, saying it might be one of the best games of all time. Obviously an attention grabber, and high expectations to set coming into it. There's an impossible breadth of games people have made, and especially in terms of puzzle games I don't think I have a real experts scholarly amount of games played that I'd say that without pause. But...wow, yeah, I see why they were saying that.

This is an extremely inventive and intricately designed puzzle game with an astounding amount of layers and depth to sink your teeth into, asking a lot of the player to truly parse and engage with everything, but always being fair and well worth it. Things can feel punishing or obtuse or frustrating at times, and you may think you've seen it all, but if you're up to it, I implore you to explore as much as you can. Very very deep into this game is perhaps one of my favorite moments in any video game I've ever played.

(While maybe not FULLY necessary, and it's also a completely 2nd game in a different genre so I'm really asking a lot here to recommend both, but I would also mention it being worth playing the devs' first project, an excellent shmup called ZeroRanger, to get the absolute most you can out of Void Stranger.)

It is difficult to put fully into words how impressed I am by this game and how much it's quickly come to mean to me. Maybe it doesn't help that this is also one of those games where, since there's so many cool moments of discovery, people want to spoil as little as possible, and you get people talking with you about the game like most of it is classified. But also I want to talk to people about how cool it is so so badly, so please - place your faith and embrace the void.

If you like sokoban puzzles a lot, go for it. Don't listen to anyone telling you this is worth it just for the story or the "hidden x factor" that they refuse to elaborate on, or anything like that. It's not. I put in about 5 hours across roughly 150 puzzle rooms and I don't think I got even 10 minutes of narrative from the game or anything else that wasn't sokoban puzzles. The graphics are charming albeit simplistic, with some nice pixel art in the incredibly sparse cutscenes, and the music is great. The puzzle design is slightly repetitive but can be pretty clever. Again, as a sokoban puzzler it's at least solid. Just make sure that's what you're buying the game for and not anything else, or you'll be disappointed.

Surprised by comparisons with Outer wilds, it is nothing of the sort. Moreover, when it does something similar to whatever TOW did right it manages to screw it up. World and plot introduction are meh, puzzles are rather bland with difficulty jumping all over the place.
Also, remember how TOW has that basic feature any competent game has: being able to switch save game profiles or start the game completely from the start, for example, if you want to show it to a friend? Well, developers of this one probably never had a friend.
Also, puzzles themselves are rather not good enough to carry the game, visual style is completely uninspiring (same simplistic graphics can be done so much more tastefully), shtick with easier mode is a complete joke, and overall it is about as fun as randomly pressing your gamepad buttons with your PC turned off.
One of the very few refunds which I was not thinking over even for a moment. Play any random puzzle game on steam and you will have much more fun with it.