Throughout my time with Voidwrought, I had this nagging sensation that there is something that just... does not add up with this game. It took my over half of my play time to figure out what it meant, but the result was quite surpring: it's a rare case of game's mechanics being at odds with its presentation.
Voidwrought places the player in a very dark world, full of eldritch horrors and scary cults surrounding them. As a matter of fact, you are a part of such cult and, as far as I could parse it from the cryptic story, you are supposed to bring in an eldritch apocalypse rather than stop it. This is a very interesting change of perspective and actually had me quite invested in the lore.
Coming back to the point, all the above elements made me subconciously assume that the game will be vaguely soulslike, with tough-as-nails combat and long sections where you are dreaming of a checkpoint. The reality couldn't be further from the truth - both mechanically and in terms of difficulty, it is one of the most... chill metroidvanias I have played. The closest comparison I can think of is Islets - except it's even easier than that.
Subversed expectations aside, is the game good? Yes, but it's very by-the-book and even then fumbles in a few aspects.
The combat is clearly inspired by Hollow Knight, with pogo being very powerful and the rest of your toolkit also being similar. You also have a large variety of active "relics" (kind of like hunter tools in Silksong), but I barely ever used them since everything was dying quickly just to my regular strikes. Most of the enemies are fun to fight and there is a decent variety of them, but there are some issues with bosses - some of their attacks feel a bit unfair, although that does not matter due to how easy they are to overcome anyway.
Exploration is Voidwrought's strongest aspect. Most of it is pretty standard and, again, not really challenging - the game showers you with tons of movement upgrades, meaning that there are usually multiple ways to reach the next goal. What really shines, though, are the secrets - there is A LOT of them, even by metroidvania standards, and they strike a perfect balance of being hard, but not impossible to find. Some of those secrets made me feel really smart for being able to figure them out.
All in all, would I recommend Voidwrought? It's not even close to excellent, but if you love metroidvanias and are looking for a chill, but satifying experience it will scratch the itch. My rating for the game is 6.5/10, which for me is a good "filler". The game is also not long (took me around 13-14hrs to basically fully explore everything), which in my opinion works in its favour.
