So, I did not plan to write this review. While Silver Pines is a game I have been looking forward to after it came on my radar a few months back, I didn’t think I would be writing about it so soon. For context, when this review drops, Silver Pines will have only been out for a week. Normally I take a bit longer with my reviews since I take my time with games, but after starting up the game I really just couldn’t put it down…

Silver Pines, as you probably guessed given what month it is, is a horror game. More specifically a survival horror game. And more specifically than that, a Metroidvania survival horror game! A good distinction to make as that is truly what sets this game apart from the rest. For those who don’t know, Metroidvania is a genre of game that gets its name from Metroid and Castlevania, more specifically Symphony of the Night. It’s a genre known for dropping players into a big map and letting them explore around but the big difference between it and an open world are the roadblocks it throws at players. The point of an open world is to let players run around and explore as much as they want but in a Metroidvania the player will often run into roadblocks that require them to come back later once they have the ability to get around said roadblock. For an example from Silver Pines itself, you will run into bordered up doorways. The first time you run into one you won’t be able to do anything about it. However, once you get a crowbar, then you are able to break them down! The appeal of this, and the genre itself really, is the satisfaction of discovery and getting something you normally wouldn’t if you hadn’t bothered coming back. Piecing this stuff together and filling out a map in a Metroidvania always feels good and lends itself way more to survival horror than I was originally expecting! So you can probably imagine why I was inspired to write about this very new release.

But lets back up a bit! Before I get into that and the game play, lets talk about the set up for the game itself.

You start the game off waking up in a diner, seemingly passing out after a long trip over to the town of Silver Pines. A small mountain and lake side town very similar to the small town in Alan Wake! A similarity I don’t think was a coincidence. You play as Private Investigator Red Walker who came to the sleepy little town looking for the musician Eddie Velvet. He has disappeared but was last seen in Silver Pines just before that and it’s your job to find him.

You’re introduced to the game play loop pretty quickly as the diner you wake up in is locked. Exploring around the place in order to find the key and while doing so running into one of those roadblocks I mentioned before already! Once you’ve got the key to leave you get a call from the guy that hired you to find Eddie in the first place. A man known simply as Mr. Jackman. This is also how you save! The game takes place during 1993 so pay phones are still pretty common. Giving Mr. Jackman a call on one is how you save your game too. A fun framing of it if you ask me! This being a pay phone though does mean you have to pay to save though, usually just with a dollar. Just like in the original Resident Evil games where you needed ink ribbons to save, you usually will have more than enough cash to save so don’t worry too much about running out of money. Still, this is the game showing its survival horror hand pretty early on!

This side of Silver Pines serves as a little tutorial. The main goal of this area is to explore the Crimson Bear Motel for any signs of Eddie. But even then, this area does a great job of showing how the game functions. Not only are there plenty of roadblocks but there are also plenty of secrets to discover even this early. The motel itself also provides a really good preview of how the game ties further into survival horror.

Most survival horror games have a very similar flow to them. You find a place like a school, hospital, or police station, spend a lot of time exploring, finding notes, and solving puzzles in said place until you’ve done the big story thing there, and then move on to another place and repeat. Silver Pines has this too! Just with an explore able map around it.

The motel is the first of these places you’ll be coming across and it follows the same survival horror rules. Exploring, finding notes, and solving puzzles, with the big story goal of the motel being getting into the Grizzly Suite where Eddie was staying. The main thing you learn from the motel is that Eddie seemingly went up to the mountains on a gondola ride which obviously becomes your goal. Before you can take the ferry over to Silver Pines proper where the gondola is, you have to fight through a boss in the nearby tunnel! This is another big part of Silver Pines actually. Every area you explore like this will just about always end with a boss fight. And I’ll use this time to talk about the game’s combat some.

Like a lot of survival horror games, Silver Pines‘s combat isn’t exactly deep. You have a dodge, melee attacks, and range weapons that are mainly guns. Dodging and melee attacks use your stamina as well which is very important to manage! The game is entirely 2D so your dodge is the only way you’re getting around enemies. It can actually serve as a very easy way to by pass enemies too! Something that is obviously very important in a survival horror game where you need to manage your resources like ammo and the durability of your weapons. And I’m sure there are plenty of people who just groaned hearing the melee weapons have durability, which I very much understand, but the later melee weapons you unlock have a surprising amount of durability to them that it wasn’t too much of a worry. Not only that when a weapon breaks it isn’t lost, you just need to repair it with some tape or repair kit. Actually, you can keep using the weapon even after it’s broken too! It will just do very weak damage.

With all that being said, overall the combat did feel kind of weak. But that is honestly pretty normal for survival horror games! It’s a genre no one really plays for the combat given that a lot of the tension of combat comes from not only making it out alive but also with as many resources left as possible. And Silver Pines does do this well. Well enough that I can look past the repetitive combat as the other aspects of the game shine regardless.

That being said, one positive side to the combat is the surprising number of weapons in the game! There are a lot of different guns to choose from and you even have the ability to upgrade them if you keep an eye out for said upgrades. It was always a good incentive to keep searching and looking around. Silver Pines very much knows how to reward the player for going out of their way and interacting with the Metroidvania aspects of the game. Speaking of, most of the roadblocks you run into are solved by the melee weapons you get throughout the game! Making getting a new melee weapon all the more fun as it provides not only a boost in a fight but also to your ability to explore. Despite the combat staying pretty much the same throughout the game, besides having a surprising amount of different enemies, the variety of weaponry really does help spice it up. So much so that while I wasn’t ever excited to get into combat I wasn’t dreading it either.

That being said, something that Silver Pines absolutely nails is easily its exploration! Something very important to a Metroidvania as you can probably imagine. It does this by keeping the exploration very grounded. Rather than getting a double jump or grappling hook, you get a sledgehammer and manhole opener. Rather than getting the ability to teleport between save points, you can instead repair a boot engine and travel between piers. Movement can be a very important thing in this genre and if you were expecting to get the kinds of abilities that let you dash around and move quickly you will be disappointed with what Silver Pines has to offer. But looking at this as a more grounded, survival horror game, it works very well! It also helps that the developers clearly knew to design around this and provide plenty of short cuts around that make backtracking much easier. Not to mention having a smaller map in general so getting around shouldn’t take you too long at all.

Speaking of the map, there is one mechanic I really do love that needs to be mentioned. Right at the start of the game you get a Polaroid camera. At first I thought this would just be used in a kind of photo mode but no! How the camera works is you can take a picture at any time and even of some objects you are inspecting like a lock or a close up of an item out of reach. When taking a picture, the polaroid is added to your map right where you snapped it! This lets you look back on a spot from the map itself if you think you need more detail. I used this a lot when trying to remember why I was being blocked off from somewhere. For example there are times where the icon on the map showing a way is blocked won’t tell me if I just needed the sledgehammer to break it down or if I needed a key. So rather than running back just to see what was there, I snapped a picture and could always tell if I had what I needed to get through there or not. As someone who always enjoys adding personal touches to big maps like this, I really enjoyed it!

I think I have shown why I feel Silver Pines is a great Metroidvania but how is it as a survival horror game? I was actually surprised how well the Metroidvania and survival horror elements worked together. Normally you go hunting for secrets in a Metroidvania in the hopes of finding an upgrade or something like that, and that is true for Silver Pines too but given how important resource management is in a survival horror game, it really works with that hunting around nature! After all, finding a few bullets and some healing would be a let down in some games, but not for a survival horror. This gives players all the more reason to try and fill out the map as best they can while running around. This is also probably why the “Survival Horror” difficulty option is the recommended one when you first start the game. There are easier difficulties, and one tougher difficulty, but I found the balance of “Survival Horror” worked just right. The game never felt like a cake walk and each time I went out of my way to find ammo, or a couple dollars, always felt worth it.

So that is the ‘survival’ part down, but what about the horror. Silver Pines isn’t really a traditional horror game. You won’t be getting much in the way of jump scares or anything like that. Instead, it’s closer to something like Silent Hill. The game is very haunting. Thanks to the incoming “storm of the century” the town of Silver Pines is nearly deserted. Which provides not only a great reason for there being very few people around but also for why everything is locked and boarded up. And much like Silent Hill, the people you do meet aren’t all too comforting. The game absolutely nails the atmosphere. And I think what sells it best is the art.

I’m honestly not really sure how to describe the art style of Silver Pines. The first thing that comes to mind to me is smudgy, especially the characters! They look blurry, almost like the rain in the town is making the art runny and wet. However you’d describe it though, it works so well. It does a great job of giving the game this haunted feeling, which is probably the best way I can describe the kind of horror Silver Pines goes for. It’s haunting.

Like I said before, the game doesn’t have much in the way of jump scares but it does have plenty of creepy visuals and the atmosphere of the town gives the perfect unsettling feeling. Like, you know something isn’t right with the town and not just because it is crawling with monsters! The few towns people you do meet also contribute to this. All but one of them aren’t hostile to Walker but at the same time they have this air about them, like they all know something Walker doesn’t and simply can’t tell him. Again, it reminds me a lot of Silent Hill in that regard but here it feels less like the town itself is alive and rather something inside of it is pulling the strings. That being said I won’t be going into the game’s story beyond that. The game literally came out last week so I want to avoid spoilers at all cost! I will say that I did enjoy the story overall even if I don’t feel it’s anything amazing. But it does set the tone very perfectly and was a good enough mystery to keep me going to the end of the game. I’m even thinking about doing another playthrough to see the true ending!

With all that said though I do have a few gripes about the game as well. Nothing I feel ruins the game or experience but are at least worth mentioning. First the game feels kind of small for a Metroidvania. While I do think this is a good thing for traveling around and I do feel horror games are best when they are on the shorter end of things I feel like someone getting Silver Pines for the Metroidvania aspect could be disappointed. Second, the boss fights. I enjoyed most of the boss fights in the game but they all boiled down to being pretty similar to each other, simply run around each bosses limited attacks with your dodging before laying on some bullets. Now while that is super standard for a survival horror game I feel like I need to call out Silver Pines in particular given that two of the boss fights are just you fighting lots of basic enemies you see around the map, which feels particularly lazy. Like I said before, these issues aren’t anything major but I still felt I should bring them up any ways as they did dampen the experience.

Overall though, Silver Pines was a great and fresh experience! It might be because I don’t play Metroidvanias all that often but the game truly felt like a breath of fresh air in the survival horror space. And impressively it was made by a studio of five people! So shout out to you Wych Elm Games, you guys managed to deliver an awesome game this Spooky Month and one I very highly recommend, especially to fans of Silent Hill and Alan Wake. But really, if you’re a fan of survival horror you won’t have a bad time with this new indie darling.

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Thinking about picking up Silver Pines now? Are you a fan of Metroidvanias? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

And thank you for taking the time to read the post! If you enjoyed it feel free to leave a Like or share the blog with a friend. You can also follow the blog on WordPress or on Twitter if you want to stay up to date on new posts. Also if there’s a topic you’d like me to discuss sometime, go ahead and tell me in the comments! Any interaction is appreciated, even just viewing this post, so thanks again for stopping by.