Last updated on 13/02/2026
There’s a certain kind of quiet you only get late at night. The world thins out a little, and your brain starts telling stories to fill in the gaps. That’s always been part of the appeal of solo TTRPGs for me, not the mechanics, not the dice, not even the fiction they produce, but the way they let you inhabit that late‑night quiet on purpose. They give you permission to listen to yourself think. Actually, if you commit to the bit, they kind of force it.
Void 1680 AM tries to bottle that feeling, and sometimes, if you squint and angle the jar just right, you can almost taste it. Almost. It’s like a Lucky when what you really wanted was a clove.
The Part It Gets Right
I grew up around radio, not professionally, not in any glamorous way, but in the sense that it was always there, a companion humming in the background. Then, I got to college and I was lucky enough to work our station. 90.7 fm, WMHD, Terre Haute’s own The Monkey. Said like clockwork in a voice I can still hear, at the top and bottom of every hour I spent in that hole. A room that smelled a little too damp with a little too much ozone and the stale cigarette smoke that wasn’t supposed to be in there. The carefully curated dust burning in your nostrils, and the emergency copy of ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ laying out in the event that you suddenly had to take a dump.
If you’ve ever stayed up too late in an empty well lit room with nothing but your thoughts stuck with the creeping terror that someone is paying attention to you and the encroaching dread that no they aren’t, you know that odd, precarious sense of being alone and watched that broadcast radio engenders. It’s like mildly justified paranoia, and Void 1680 AM captures it. Beautifully, I have to say.
The game’s loop, picking tracks, juggling callers, filling dead air with whatever comes to mind, hits the emotional beats of DJing in a way that surprised me. It mimics that particular tension of thinking two moves ahead while still trying to sound like you’re effortlessly in the moment. You start building a playlist and suddenly realize you’re negotiating with yourself: What goes next? Why did I think this was a good idea? Who is calling now?
It’s good. It feels right. It feels true. Unfortunately, truth isn’t the same as depth.
The Hollow Spots
A solo game lives or dies on the richness of its prompts, and here… well, it’s almost dead air.
The callers, who should be the beating heart of the whole experience, aren’t much more than rough demographic sketches. “Teen with romantic problems.” “Middle‑aged person with money trouble.” These aren’t characters; they’re the outlines of outlines. They don’t narrow enough to spark creativity, and they don’t widen enough to give you room to interpret.
In the quarter-hour-ish-ness of a three track segment, I couldn’t breathe life into these people. Certainly I couldn’t manage enough life to sustain multiple sessions with a cast of weird callers. I get that we play to find out, but I would have preferred to find out what these people shared and how I reacted to it on the phone, not that and why they were calling in the first place.
The music prompts missed the mark for me too. “A song someone introduced you to.” “A beach song.” “Song of summer.” Look, I love the idea, but my brain just doesn’t work like that. I don’t have a personal playlist organized by seasonal affect. I don’t even like the sun that much. Maybe if I had a different relationship with music, I suppose. It’s hard to accept that a game that is so obviously for me might not be for me, if you see my point.
And because of how the card draws work, it’s absurdly easy to miss entire game mechanics. I didn’t get requests. I didn’t get callers responding to an earlier track. Statistically unlikely, but still possible in a play through. Certainly it wouldn’t happen again if I played twice, but why would I play twice when round one was so flat? A shame, because the real promise of the game is in concepts that require repetition.
The Version You Can See Through the Static
Here’s what hurts: the game hints at something genuinely special.
The promise of recurring callers, of parasocial relationships slowly developing over multiple broadcasts, of piecing together lives through fractured midnight conversations? That’s exactly the sort of intimate, personal narrative solo TTRPGs are uniquely good at. That’s the heart of the medium. That’s the magic trick.
But RAW, the game doesn’t give you enough to reach that space. You can feel the shape of it, like a half‑remembered dream, but it’s not quite there.
And yet… the other parts, the parts outside the printed rules, are fantastic. There’s an actual god damned AM‑station run by the creator where community contributed playthroughs air. They also maintain call ins for your show so you can be prompted by real voices from other human beings. This is the juice. The sense of participating in something communal and a little strange. Void 1680 AM is a better love letter to the promise and profoundly weird reality of public access radio than it is a game, and while I showed up for the latter, there is enough resonance between the communities that we are, if you’ll forgive me, on a wave length together. We’re all interested in building things that matter only because we decided they do. To fill the quiet with something of our own making.
If You Do Play It
A few gentle suggestions:
- Don’t get precious about equipment. Your phone recorder is fine.
- A real playlist builder helps, but if like me you are a person of a certain age, changing CDs and records manually will have a much realer feel.
- Read the whole manual before you start.
- Write down the suit sequence for play so you don’t have to flip back and forth for it.
Mostly, though, be patient with yourself. This is a game that rewards you only if you bring more to it than it gives back.
Verdict
I didn’t enjoy playing Void 1680 AM, not in the mechanical sense. But I’m still glad it exists, in the same way I’m glad certain weird roadside attractions exist. It’s evidence that someone cared enough to make a thing that defies neat categorization.
Ten dollars is a lot for the game you get, but not too much for the strange, communal art project around it. Supporting that feels worthwhile.
And maybe that’s the secret here: some games are about joy, some about story, and some, like Void 1680 AM, are about conveying a vibe. Here, that vibe is tending a small, flickering signal in the dark and seeing who else might be listening.