Look, it’s okay to admit it: monster-taming games often sail rather close to ‘spreadsheet with graphical UI’ territory. Yes, even that one. No judgement if that’s your jam, but Hatchery Games (a studio that includes former Skylanders and Borderlands devs) attempts to offer an alternative by presenting its particular brand of combat servitude in the form of directly controlled, real-time, and pleasingly robust action. In Voidling Bound, you see, you don’t simply capture, tame, and evolve creatures – you inhabit them.
This is the nature of your work as a Space Wrangler, employed by GenLife to pilot biological drones (in the form of innocent indigenous voidlings, with which you bond via a neural link) and clear planets of a scourge known as Lesion Spawn. This bubbly purple menace has taken over a whole host of habitats and made the fauna pretty aggressive, in the process providing plenty of targets for you to swat.
The voidlings themselves are an emotionally confusing combination of cute and grotesque. They exude an appealing, wide-eyed naivety while at the same time sporting innumerable bulbous protuberances – anatomical anomalies that are probably best to avoid during a petting session, just in case you send the wrong message. I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly up on alien anatomy and it’s simply not worth the risk. The creature designs give off Spore vibes, actually – charming in their own way, but unlikely to take the leading role in a Pixar movie.
You start the game with one of the little blighters – a Kwipeck, which looks like the ungodly union of a turkey and a stork – aboard your ship. This high-tech craft is outfitted with a spacious vivarium that can house up to nine voidlings (if you’re really committed, a further 500 can be accrued in your sanctuary), and once you assign one as your companion, select a mission, and sit in the Neural-Bind Station, you can send it down to the planet’s surface to do your dirty work.
Missions come in two basic types: corruption cleansing and survival. The first is all about exploration as you make your way through hand-crafted levels, clear away Lesion “tumours” and kill the enemies which spawn in when you do so. There’s the occasional small building to explore; plenty of collectibles, including eggs, and elemental mutagens (which you can use to evolve your voidlings); and a boss fight at the end. The second type is wave defence, taking place in simple arenas and also culminating in a big boss fight.
Enemies are broken down into three factions, each containing a wide variety of ground and air-based aggressors. In combination, their bullet-hell attacks can make combat feel frenetic and exciting as you dart about each area avoiding projectiles and prioritising targets to reduce the pressure on you. But you’ll need to hike the difficulty up to experience that – on the standard ‘Adventurer’ setting Voidling Bound doesn’t present much of a challenge until the last few missions. Things are much improved on the subsequent ‘Fighter’ or ‘Wrangler’ settings, but don’t expect a Returnal-style rush of adrenaline here, either.
The eggs you find can be incubated and hatched back on your ship, and later you can use your ship’s Pheremonal Nest (a romantically lit breeding station just next to the Vivarium) to create even more. Hatchlings add to your growing menagerie, each addition providing a new canvas on which to experiment in the evolution chamber. Here you can spend the mutagens you acquired from previous sorties on evolving your voidlings along branching paths.
Through this you can create various specialisms with different play styles. My Kwipeck, for example, has been unnaturally selected up to its massive eyeballs with fire mutagens which have given it a rapid-shot attack that inflicts burn damage and explosive deaths on enemies. It can dodge huge distances now, too. Meanwhile, my favourite Gilick (a stocky gecko-like creature) has been taken down another path, imbued with ice abilities that include bringing a damaging storm around with it, and a shotgun-like blast of projectiles that can freeze enemies in place. It’s a bit of a glass cannon, and nowhere near as manoeuvrable as the Kwipeck, but provides a great alternative for areas where enemies aren’t weak to fire.
You can take this genetic experimentation even further later on by splicing evolved voidlings with other traits. Through this technique you can cover more elemental bases, adding, say, radioactivity or plasma abilities to a voidling optimised for electrical attacks. Along with the cosmetic changes you can also make (those bulges and bumps can always be a little more horrifying), splicing allows you to create your ideal, and most devastating, voidlings.
But no amount of tweaking will help you when it comes to navigating Voidling Bound’s more precarious surfaces. While combat is brilliant fun, and the primary paths of each level feel well designed and packed with intriguing landscapes, the game’s controls can’t quite live up to its platforming aspirations. Some collectibles are hidden in ambitiously hard-to-reach locations, but getting to them is often more of a panicked scramble than a confident display of agility. This problem is compounded by inconsistent telegraphing of what is and isn’t climbable – a problem Hatchery Games seems to be patently aware of given that a full line in the pause menu has been dedicated to an ‘Unstuck’ button.
But none of that really erodes the one-more-raid pull of the main gameplay loop, nor the completionist-addict targeted evolutionary experimentation. It’ll take quite a while to unlock everything, and there’s a roguelite endgame mode that lets you enjoy your most powerful builds for a good while after you complete the relatively short core campaign, too.
Voidling Bound confidently achieves much of what it sets out to do, managing to look and feel distinct from the competition in the process. It’s a bold and colourful creature feature that, if nothing else, lays down the gauntlet to the genre’s incumbent behemoths when it comes to the accepted tradition of watching from the sidelines.
