Voidling Bound

It's cute but it's extremely short around 13 hours before it gets boring.

i played the demo for my first game ever played on my computer. it was nice playing the full version.

I absolutely loved Voidling Bound! I played the demo and bought it in Early Access without hesitation — and it’s worth every penny. The experience is engaging, intriguing, and extremely satisfying, and it already feels like there’s still a lot ahead to explore. The gameplay loop is seriously addictive. Capturing creatures, experimenting with different builds, and exploring the various evolution trees is incredibly fun. Being able to replay maps makes me want to 100% everything. The breeding system was also a fantastic surprise — especially for anyone who enjoys creating stronger creatures. I’m completely hooked on it! I also loved being able to name each creature — it turned into a really fun little activity between me and my husband picking names together. The technical and artistic side also stands out: The visuals, art direction, and sound design are all high quality. Performance has been great both in the demo and Early Access, with virtually no bugs — though there is some occasional lag during certain boss fights due to the number of visual effects on screen. Being compatible with the Xbox controller made my experience even better! Suggestions for improvement: • It would be great to see more variety in objectives and missions within the maps. • Creature storage could use some improvements, especially the ability to select and move multiple creatures at once. • A visible on-screen timer for speedrun maps would be very helpful when trying to earn stars. I’m already looking forward to the full release and future DLCs! Highly recommended — it’s a beautiful project, and if I’m not mistaken, this is the studio’s first game, so congratulations to everyone involved!

This is... such a great monster taming game. Just leaving my review here to help the ratings, pick it up for yourself and give it a shot!

This is a really great game that's a little rough around the edges. Rough bits: - Some abilities don't feel like they smoothly flow into each other - Walking around the ship to interact with each menu can make things feel a bit stop-start when trying to farm - The hitboxes of some enemy projectiles and attacks are suggestions at best and aren't accurate Good bits: - The creature collector bit is so addictive (I'd love it if you could get like a shiny of each voidling to farm for) - Splicing! 'build-making' is fun when getting the right stats, mutations, elements and cosmetics spliced together - Third person shooty game with abilities? Scratches the RoR2 itch - I like the collectible & speedrun challenges per level - I also like that there are level types, means I can choose to do a 10min run or an endless Abyss run

This game is a blast with a few issues. For an indie game, I had my fair share of fun and was rather impressed. I think the voidlings are fun, their evolutions are interesting and later with splicing provide deep levels of customisation which create fun interesting builds to play around with. I enjoyed my first 20h of this game and was left satisfied having beaten level 50 of the endgame which is the final difficulty achievement, you can go deeper, but I was alright. Let me reiterate, I had fun. That being said, this game lacks polish and enjoyable end game content, which I find acceptable given this is an indie game but I will be listing my criticisms for the devs to use as constructive feedback to work with. As context, I played this game with controller on the 2nd highest difficulty. [h2]Critisicms[/h2] [h3]The Menus:[/h3] I felt like I was fighting the UI often. The voidlings menus were unpolished, you can sort them your voidlings, but not permanently, it's not cached and you can only cycle through the various sort options one way, so if you skip your sort option by accident, you must cycle through all of them to get back to the one you want. Your selection on controller is also and not cached, a very subtle detail that's often overlooked by players and also the devs in this case. These details are frustrating, especially when interacting with multiple menus involving voidlings (most of them) in quick succession, and having it constantly resets between say selecting voidlings for evolution. It makes a big difference to the user experience when they have to select their filter and find where they were in the menu every time it's reset. [h3]The Extras:[/h3] Training, Hatching, Breeding and the Evolution Station (Not evolving itself) The user experience for the 'extras' such as training, breeding and evolving your voidlings wasn't amazingly thought out or well refined. With the exception of Hatching, these all use the voidling management menu thus suffer from the above issues. they're all spread out around the hub and often you will find yourself running around a fair amount. I also found it strange that breeding and training act on different timescales (missions complete vs real time) which left them out of sync despite being quite closely tied. Training is also split into 8 different training slots of 4 pairs of slots that each have different level limits, with only 2 being able to go to the max level, which quickly becomes a big bottle neck for the endgame. Due to the nature that training takes real time relative the levels left to train, you're still encouraged to use the other training slots to save time, but it's awkward at best and frustrating at worst. Menu animations: So as it turns out, a lot of these extras have menu animations, so every time you interact or use said station, you have to sit through a 5s animation, the evolution and hatching stations are especially guilty. The animations are cute the first time, but very quickly wear down on you and is a big part of why I wasn't willing to do more endgame. These are all aspects of the game that could easily be streamlined -> Give me one menu for all the training equipment, I don't want 8 seperate interactions for the 8 different training gears. Do the same for breeding which can have 3 stations you have to interact with separately. Give me the option to skip menu animations, such as skipping the lengthy hatching animation. And please move the training area closer to the breeding area. [h3]End game content.[/h3] So the endgame heavily involves trying to create your perfect voidlings through breeding and customisation, my issue here, is that there isn't really enough content relative to the amount of customisation, I was just shy of maxing out 1 of the 9 voidling species when I got the hardest difficulty achievement (lvl 50 of the void) and I had barely gotten started on most of the other species. Could I keep slogging away to get better and better voidlings? ... Yes? But I just felt exhausted at the idea of running the void over and over again, which is time intensive and doesn't really have a large variation in gameplay. Fundamentally, I just don't think the game paces itself well enough for the amount of customization and unlockable it has to the amount of playable content. This could change with future content/DLC. [h3]Optimization:[/h3] I had really bad issues with dropped frames. Now, I'm aware my pc is cpu bottlenecked, but, when I checked my cpu usage, this game never pushed it up to its max. I would have rather extreme fps lows when enemies spawned and died and it did impact my experience. I never found the game too difficult to be that bothered, but it was an issue. (Though knowing this game was made in unreal, I can't be completely surprised there, probably a bunch of unnecessary features that were left on by accident) [h2]Conclusion[/h2] All that said, again, [b]I HAD FUN[/b]. The moment it really started to get on my nerves was towards the endgame when you are expected to do the breeding to get higher stat voidlings to challenge the harder content, before that point, I had a really fun time as I wasn't being pushed to engage constantly with the systems that made me face the issues I've listed. I'm going out on a limb here, but all these issues strike me as the rather boring parts of game dev, and I suspect the devs were more interested in implementing the exciting and fun elements of the game like the combat, new voidlings and interesting customization than they were in refining the menu UX, refining the game play loop and optimising the performance of the game. With that said, I think Hatchery Game has something special here, and it just needs that bit more polish and refinement to really bring it up and stand out for what it is amongst indie games! I wish the devs the best of luck.