http://forum.ice-pick.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9270&start=25
Scroll down half way down the page, there's direct links to Easy / Medium difficulty patches. These will make the game more western, and more forgiving of your actions.
The Void has many things going for it - and doesn't have the Westernised dedication to holding your hand & letting you win. In Soviet Russia, videogames beat you: this is also deliberate. The entire story revolves around the 2nd law of entropy, and the game mechanics are designed so that whatever you do, you'll end up polluting / destroying / harming your environment. You're in the land between life & death - there is no real "winning".
If you need to get your head around it, things to consider:
1) All your choices are going to be bad
2) Even as a Resource management game, hoarding resources / spending them wantonly to get hearts and so on will speed up your destruction of the environment
3) There is some scripting - and some events are unavoidable (or, incredibly hard to avoid)
4) The "good guys" aren't actually telling you the truth; this goes for all of the game mechanics
5) It will take you about 3-4 play throughs without the easy/medium modes to even get a handle on "winning"
6) Your choices have meaning: you can permanently screw your chances of progression up. Saving often, in different slots is essential.
Some hints:
1) Never make a tree less than full - having 2-3 fully filled trees is much better than lots of smaller ones. If necessary, make less than full trees in the secondary realms, not your gardens; these realms tend to have "twiglets" that take much less colour to totally fill precisely just to soak up any excess colour you have. If you miss-fire the donation glyph, especially early game - reload.
2) Every time you give a sister a donation you damage their realm - if you damage their realm enough, you'll create hostile mobs & generate interest from the brothers. Don't seek to do this too quickly, as you'll end up on the receiving end of an unavoidable splattering in some cases
3) You can abuse the cycles - a tree made 1 second before a cycle change will still bloom; try to structure your moves around this, so you can get to a garden with hardly any time left, make full trees from colour you've collected / converted so that you start a new cycle with the maximal amount of colour
4) Later on Brothers can destroy your gardens (or rather, take all your colour). Build redundancy, and accept that you'll lose at least some of your gardens during the game
5) The silver colour is badly translated - it isn't "luck" at all, it actually prevents negative consequences to spending colour. When interacting with sisters, you have two choices: use their favourite colour [it has an efficiency % boost] or later on fill up with silver to minimise the damage your colour spending is doing. Purple has the same use in making gardens - mid / late game, always be full with purple before making trees.
6) Don't obsess too much about hearts - there are many more hearts in the game than you can use; if getting a 3rd/4th heart from a sister is going to result in a brother becoming aggressive simply don't do it. Heart placement / type is also somewhat randomised - ignore walkthroughs that fail to recognise this: some realms always have hearts, others don't, and the type you get won't always be the same (thus making some play throughs easier than others).
7) It is entirely possible for your donations to lead to Sisters being permanently (well... let's just say until you get very good at the game, permanently) killed. Every donation you give to a sister increases the chances a brother will take umbrage. It is often better to hold off on fully donating to a sister until you can deal / neutralise a brother interested in those realms.
8) Despite what the tutorial instructs you to do, the parasites that appear in a realm are not there to be hunted into extinction. Every one you kill actually speeds up the destruction of a realm - they appear when you've given a sister a % of colour (or rather, when you've damaged a realm to a certain %). Ignore the hostile colour leeching creatures as much as you can - if you run around wiping them out, you'll drain your resources & actually speed up spawning lots more, and much harder ones.
Ice-Pick Lodge are an interesting dev. team, and have a very deliberate game aesthetic / design ethos - Pathologic is also entirely unforgiving, has a downbeat world and is deeply engaging (if flawed). In Pathologic, if you fail your daily tasks, you'll starve to death. Again, replayability is virtually guaranteed due to your choices resulting in failure.
Coming to games like these after being raised on Fable II/III will confuse you. The trick is to savour the experience and run with it.
