I’ve just completed Silence. Took me 2 playthroughs and one more extra ending re-do to 100% it :) It had many mutually exclusive achievements, so I wasn’t able to get them all by just playing once anyway. It was nice though that some of the achivs with counters (like licking things, or kicking stuff, etc) were global not per savefile. So, many of those started popping up in the second playthrough the moment I did the one thing I missed from the first.
Visually Silence is incredibly beautiful - each panel is gorgeous to look at. But it’s short, 5-6h (half of what The Whispered World was), the puzzles are really easy, and the story while imo better than TWW, follows the same pattern and lacks substance in several moments. I also liked the new protagonist more ^^. To top it all, the caterpillar Spot is even cuter, and I’m glad they prepared Spot-only stages here as well :D
They did a complete 180 with puzzles. TWW had annoying 3 interactions (with a delay) system, old school “logic” where many of the solutions seemed nonsensical and more often than not, one ended up using each object and each interaction on everything, while picking tons of stuff and running back and forth in between several panels. Instead of just simplifying the frustrating mechanics a bit, and making puzzles more coherent, they threw all the difficulty and complexity out of the window. Silence features one click context actions, no inventory, no backtracking, you usually pick up one item at most, use it in the vicinity or at once, and it’s really hard not to figure out what you’re supposed to do - everything is in plain sight.
As for side plots and support characters having no resolution, I suspect something went wrong in the development process. I remember playing The Whispered World Special Edition, and seeing Silence trailer after beating it. It said “Available in 2014”. The game managed to release late 2016, so not only they had severe delays, but probably other issues that made several things to be cut short regardless. There are panels in the artwork gallery that look like they were meant to be playable but ended up as a few seconds cutscene instead, or others that never made it into the game, as if they did plan for more but still didn’t manage to implement it despite all the extra time. Some ingame locations have entire sections that look like they were supposed to be utilized, but ended up as decoration. Shame, I would be interested in what happened to other characters after and what’s their backstory (cause some things were hinted at but never revealed in detail).
Overall I enjoyed Silence, but I wish things were more fleshed out, and there was more of it. :)
Liked the way you set up the game image (the rotation), congrats on the 100%
I agree that Silence is substantially more interesting to play than TWW. If only they borrowed the best parts of the first game and put it in the sequel…
If only they did a Spot spinoff ;) In both games I liked the solo Spot stages the best. This type of puzzles reminded me of the old Gobliiins games :)
I love that banner! I still need to play Silence.
I enjoyed Silence too, however it seemed to me the Fine Listener achievement was bugged because I know on both of my playthroughs I didn’t skip anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It seemed to me that they made a mistake at some point and overdid it to a punishing level (most likely not intended). I had an impression that pressing anything just nullifies it - alt tab? you’re done, screenshot via steam overlay? you’re done, etc. In my second playthrough I was very careful basically not to breathe on the keyboard too much, and was nervously checking my status against the savefile variable all the time to make sure I’m not wasting my time with this, and guess what - the savefile said I should get it, but I didn’t. :/ This is what the extra (3rd) ending playthrough was for - I had to turn off the game, restart he computer, turn it on again, cross my fingers, load the save (my character landed in the throne room, even though I finished the game on this save) and re-play it once more. Thankfully the achievement landed this time. Otherwise I would be pissed :P
Thanks for the review, LadyNarayan. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played of this genre, but still have a lot of them left to play. I’ve moved TWW to my (ever-growing) itching to play list so that I can play Silence at some point. It looks great, and “short” usually doesn’t bother me as a game descriptor.
Not being long is ok for me as well, but in this case it seems it’s short because it’s missing bits and pieces here and there, not because it was designed as a self contained short story. Lacking might have been a better word. Still nice to play through, and you don’t really need to have played TWW, which was mechanically annoying and featured similar story twist/pattern as its sequel. Not to mention you get a very brief reminder at the beginning of Silence of what was TWW all about, and you basically don’t need more info than that. Overall Silence was more enjoyable to play than TWW, also super casual because of the puzzles, but imo it should have had more substance.