Silence Will Break
Silence is a sequel to the 2009 PC game The Whispered World which follows the same point and click adventure style of its predecessor. The story starts with the main characters, teenaged orphan Noah and his younger sister Renie take shelter from an air raid on their rural town. To pass the time, Noah comforts his sister with stories of adventures in an imaginary world. When a nearby explosion rocks their hiding place. Noah wakes to find himself transported into the world of Silence, and must find his sister before working out how to get home.
Unless you’ve played the first game, the story tends to be confusing and mystifying, but you can always put that down to being in a dream world, which by nature will have a degree of disconnection with logic. The world of Silence is quite dark, certainly not a place of unicorns and rainbows, with the scariest inhabitants being the Seekers, who terrorise the population in the name of the oppressive False Queen. A vital weakness of the Seekers you can exploit is the fact that they are blind and rely on sound to locate you, but one false move near them and its instant death for you.
On the whole, this game is a standard point and click affair, but does have an interesting mechanism with the character of Spot. This creature that looks like an oversized glow worm is Renie’s pet brought to life via her imagination from a sock puppet, and he has the ability to inflate into a ball or make himself flat so that you can use him to interact with the puzzles and progress through the game. There are also a few other physical states he can morph into, by interacting with specific objects, so he is an essential tool for you to get past certain stages of the story. For example, if you can’t move a heavy rock, make Spot flat and squeeze underneath it, then inflate him to roll the rock away.
The look of the game is great, with beautiful graphics and well rendered characters. The voice acting and writing is adequate enough to give a bit of depth and charm to the characters, but without being good enough for you to empathise and care about what happens to them for the majority of the game. The puzzles are solved by interacting with objects or parts of the scenery mainly in a trial and error process, and can soon become repetitive and tedious, especially when you constantly have to move backwards and forwards between the same couple of areas. The mechanic of the point and click is a bit clumsy, and you will get frustrated at having to get your character in the right spot to trigger an interaction with something. This makes it obvious this is a converted PC game where using a mouse cursor would be much easier to hit the right trigger on the screen.
There are a couple of alternative endings to the game so it’s worth another play though to trigger those, but be warned, the conclusions can end up more like an original Grimm fairy tale than a Disneyesque ‘Happy Ever After’. You may have to make a decision as the whether you would rather stay in the dangerous dream world of Silence, or return to your war-torn reality. Silence: The Whispered World provides an aesthetically pleasing point and click adventure that’s a bit out of the ordinary but doesn’t thrill as much in terms of gameplay.
Huge Thanks to XCN for the review copy.
Game: Silence: The Whispered World 2
Developer: Daedelic Entertainment
Publisher: Daedelic Entertainment
Genre: Puzzle Adventure
Price: £24.99