Silver Pines PS5 Review. Wych Elm is a brand new studio made up of developers who worked on games like Helldivers 2 and The Darkness. That makes for quite the resume. This team came together to create a new survival horror 2D Metroidvania called Silver Pines. The team put together a very compelling game, but how does it fare in the end?
Silver Pines Review (PS5) – A Compelling, Paced Metroidvania More Focused on Exploration Than Survival or Horror
It All Started With A Phone Call
You wake up as Red Walker, a private investigator down on his luck, in a small, mostly abandoned town called Silver Pines. Soon after waking up, you receive a random phone call on a nearby pay phone from a mysterious man. He pushes you to pursue a musician named Eddie Velvet, but he doesn’t provide much reason why. Still, you feel a strange compulsion to go along with it. Before long, you gain an obsession to find Eddie, leading you through the growing dilapidation of Silver Pines and the looming flood that threatens to overtake it.
Silver Pines uses specific visuals to help heighten the atmosphere that it creates. Instead of going for realism, designs rely on solid colors with specific black shading to represent the noir style. The shading behaves dynamically as you play as well, with changes in lighting naturally affecting detail definitions.
It visually invokes the likes of Dick Tracy meets Sin City but taken to a monotone extreme. In motion, everything looks just absolutely gorgeous when it wants to and yet intentionally turns equally grotesque at will when needed. Dynamic lighting plays into this as well, making everything feel both vague and realistic in equal parts. I just cannot gush enough about the visuals and stylization in Silver Pines.
Out With the Scares….
The gameplay loop itself works so very well. Through and through, Silver Pines is a compelling marriage of survival horror and Metroidvania. The game is played entirely in 2D, with a map that reflects its Metroidvania nature. After the map starts to open up, you really see the Metroidvania elements show themselves. As you move along, you reach obstacles, like cracked walls or boarded areas, that you cannot get through without finding specific tools. This sees you running back and forth through the different areas in order to progress through different parts of the town. As is the nature of Metroidvanias, this leads to a lot of empty time looking for things to unlock or paths to take.
This works well enough with the formula in survival horror games, since those are generally 3D versions of Metroidvanias. At the same time, though, one aspect of the game always suffers when placed in a Metroidvania: the story. What makes the best survival horror games thrive is their ability to feed you just enough to keep you moving forward, teasing you with more tidbits or twists to keep you compelled.
Unfortunately, Silver Pines gets itself lost in the Metroidvania aspect, regularly chipping away at the narrative intrigue by separating the compelling tidbits between large chunks of game time. In particular, one section of the game requires you to find five specific items in order to reach the last chunk of the game. Up until this point, progress felt very organic and compelling, with a healthy balance between exploration and narrative drip. When you reach this point, though, all you end up getting is the occasional phone call from that aforementioned mysterious man or an occasional meet-up with the town’s sheriff, who really doesn’t want you in his town.
…In With The Exploration
The early hour or so of Silver Pines does a great job of bringing you into the game world. While vague, the narrative feeds you tidbits quite quickly, motivating you to explore and learn the mechanics. Soon, you get caught up in the exploration side of the game because the game shifts your focus. This is a great thing, since this is a video game. You find new weapons, unlocks, even knickknacks called Mementos that improve your gameplay in different ways. All of these contribute to a great sense of gameplay progression without taking you out of the world itself. The end result, however, dampens the horror elements quite a bit. You still have the palpable ambiance and the fantastic visual style on top of it all. You just lose the horror element of a horror game.
Another element that gets lost is one that often gets lost in most survival horror games: resource management. Enemy AI is not complicated by nature. It acts more like a means of resistance as you progress. Bosses appear along the way, and they feature quite simple mechanics. This works well in tandem with your character’s movement. Red’s controls are deliberately slower, and enemy attacks work in tandem with that. So, once you get a feel for combat, then most fights go by without much issue.
With that said, managing your resources isn’t all that challenging. Melee weapons may rely on durability, but avoiding basic enemies is just as easy as finding the necessary materials to craft repair kits for your weapons. You can cater this experience with difficulty settings, increasing the amount of enemies as well as reducing melee weapon durability. I say this not as a negative or a positive but rather as a transparent point. Regardless, once you get a feel for your surroundings and your equipment, managing your resources doesn’t add much challenge to the experience.
An Immersive, Paced, and Engaging Metroidvania Through and Through
Silver Pines tries to mesh two very different genres, combining survival horror with 2D Metroidvania. This makes for a refreshingly paced approach to the formula, asking you to step into the shoes of a down-on-his-luck detective as he tries to figure out what happened in Silver Pines. The horror elements may not weigh very heavily on the experience, but it helps to build intrigue for the Metroidvania side of the game, making it very compelling to explore the map. Silver Pines makes a name for itself in spades.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.