By Olivia Davies It’s always exciting to see the blend of two genres, especially when that pairing seems like a match made in heaven. Silver Pines is one of those innovations that marries survival horror with the metroidvania genre which for me, sounds like a perfect storm. The blend of having to micro-manage finite resources with the endless corridors and dead ends of a metroidvania, elevates both genre’s stress to an exhilarating thrill. Well Silver Pines has this in spades and is a 2.5D horror indie that captures you with its odd and supernatural mystery that sees a detective fight his way through the desolate town of Silver Pines to find the elusive Eddie Velvet. It’s definitely one to kick off the spooky season with.
Detective Doozy
The town of Silver Pines is shrouded in mystery, as detective Red Walker finds himself tasked with finding the missing musician Eddie Velvet. As you progress through the game, the narrative traps you in lull of what is going to transpire, with an impending storm that is set to create havoc. The streets and homes of Silver Pines have been evacuated, which is mirrored by the sheets of paper blowing in the wind, backpacks and purses left in the rubble, and the radio that keeps flickering on and off. The story feels like it’s unfolding alongside the storm as you venture from the stormy skies in the demo to the rain that slides down the lens in mid-game. The only information you can gather are from the remnants of empty buildings where you piece together where Eddie Velvet went and how the people of the town seem to orbit around him, including the recently deceased Alice Baker.
The few people that are left are scant with knowledge and seem to be deliberately steering you away from what is going on in the town, calling you an intruder and constantly questioning you why Eddie Velvet is worth risking your life for. Just as mysterious is Mr Jackman, the man who speaks to Walker on the phone whose only purpose is to push him closer to his goal. The narrative of Silver Pines is delightfully eerie and you can feel yourself being swallowed up by its mystery as you search the town. You slowly find out what this supernatural force is that is luring horrifying creatures to the town and keeping you away from Eddie Velvet and the people he has tangled into his life.
Despite that strong hook and a simmering atmosphere that is set up in the early game, the story stagnates when you enter the midgame, where you have to collect bells in different parts of town. Instead of the drip feeding of story and information that the metroidvania genre is known for, I found myself losing interest in the mystery surrounding Eddie Velvet and gradually thought that each area was quite repetitive in the information it gave me. All you really get in these sections is Walker being told ‘he shouldn’t be here’ and that something is coming for the townsfolk. The mystery is rather tame which is fine, but I never really found myself being reeled in as I made my way through the game.
The absence of that consistent pull also wasn’t helped by main character Red Walker himself, who I found rather bland and honestly what I call a wet flannel. He’s kind of flaccid in how he comes across, very neutral and like ‘Whattt? What’s going on??’ Which is not endearing. There’s just not much character going on which kind of harms the overall experience in my opinion. There are plenty of detective and survival horror games where you get invested in the protagonist, but unfortunately Silver Pines is not one of them.
Walk, Don’t Run
Silver Pines is addicting to explore with its many rooms and secret spaces to uncover with the game bringing in its metroidvania element of getting ‘abilities’ and ‘upgrades’ to guide you through exploration. When you stalk the streets of Riverside you’ll find tarpaulin you need to slash through, boarded up doorways that need a good whack, and rivers you need more stamina to swim across. It’s all tantalisingly good metroidvania stuff. Bypassing those obstacles comes in the form of new weapons and mementos. Mementos are this game’s charms where if you equip them, they’ll provide you with enhanced stamina, a higher damage percentage for head shots and the like. Upgrades are dotted around the map with the potential to increase how many mementos you can equip and permanent boosts to your stamina and health in the form of coffee pots, which is a nice touch.
Moving through this world is also quite rewarding with a jump feature that allows you to cling to ledges and lift yourself up on roofs. At first, where you can jump and what surfaces you can jump on to can be very easily missed. You need to adapt your eye to find parts of the environment that can be interacted with, like a breakable mirror or a bunch of scaffolding you can climb up onto. This could be quite annoying for some players, as these interactive objects don’t stand out very much. But once you do start noticing them, you’ll find a lot of fun in finding nooks and crannies that will provide you with a useful item or two. Due to the game being 2D, movement can feel quite stunted and clumsy. I often found myself bumping into walls and objects before being able to grab onto them and it feels even clunkier when running and jumping, or jumping up on the spot.
The other element of exploration is finding key items and solving puzzles to obtain those key items. This is where exploration feels a bit repetitive and not all that innovative. The puzzles in the game are fine, albeit rather simple and there aren’t many of them. It was only when I got to the mid-game where actual puzzles showed up and even then they were incredibly scarce and rarely that interesting. You have your typical safe code cracking and the rest are just ones related to getting a lock combination. I wish there were more and ones that felt more interactive.
The game does have a really neat feature where you can take a picture of points of interest using your polaroid camera so you can refer to them when inputting a code, which bypasses my usual phone notes app method. The map is also incredibly helpful as it marks everything you will need to come back to, with a key word that would make me go ‘ah!’ That’s where I should use my torch. Overall though, I never felt too smart when playing Silver Pines which detracted from the overall detective, solve the case kind of vibe.
Get Back, I Have A Knife
In good ol’ survival horror fashion, there will be a slew of creatures that constantly torment you as you explore your surroundings, so Walker needs a set of moves to combat them. There are two options, one is to fight using a knife whose durability depletes on use, or a gun whose bullets are scarce, or you can body slam your way past enemies to avoid the confrontation entirely. In the earlier game there weren’t as many enemies to slip past, so slip past I did, as I wanted to conserve my ammunition. However this won’t be possible as you venture further into the game, as mid-game environments like the Union apartments or the Sheriff’s office consist of tight corridors with a jumble of rooms you’ll dart in and out of. Each one of these spaces will then probably end up having at least one enemy, often two. This can quickly become a problem as dodging uses stamina so if you end up spamming it you’ll find Walker sluggishly stumbling and becoming ripe for the hitting. Dodging also needs to be timed just right so you’re not just stumbling right into an enemy, rather than dodge past them. If there’s two enemies, no dice because you’ll end up getting swung at by the other so dodging isn’t a mechanic that can be entirely abused. It’s all quite intense and despite thinking the game would be a breeze in the demo, I found the increase in enemies made me think twice before risking a bit more exploration before saving.
These tense and stressful experiences are only heightened by the game’s metroidvania quality. Like I said earlier, the game’s buildings often comprise of a lot of small rooms and most of the time they yield one reward, whether that be a story relevant item or just another piece of duct tape. There were many times where I looked at two enemies blocking my way to get further into the rooms and thinking whether my conquest would be worth it. Sometimes it wouldn’t, but that’s just the frustrating joy of the blend of these two genres.
The act of using your weapon is where a nagging annoyance pops up when playing Silver Pines though. Combat feels a bit too clunky in how you aim your gun and dodge past enemies. Everything feels incredibly weighty, which is fine but it made it so I struggled to know when to time a dodge or how to slightly tilt my gun up to get that headshot. Your knife is mapped to the right trigger whilst your gun is mapped to the left trigger with the right joystick to train your aim. With how close quarters you and the enemy are, it can be annoying to get yourself into position to shoot. This extends to when you swing your knife as you need to prepare to dodge when you have landed an attack, otherwise you’ll get swatted at. But because the dodge feels so heavy and the enemies can swing at a moment’s notice, it can feel rather frustrating. I do kind of love the QTE minigame attached to reloading and repairing your melee weapon despite it adding more to my list to do in confrontations. You can turn it off if it bothers you, but it does add that extra flurry of button mashing to ensure you can tackle the oncoming enemy. If it all sounds a bit too stressful though, Silver Pines has 4 difficulty options that can make the experience easier or harder.
Monster Mash
There is some enemy variety to keep you on your toes when exploring Silver Pines, with standard enemies, ones that speed towards you that you can’t outrun and the very annoying smaller enemies like bugs and dogs that you’ll either need to crouch to shank or quickly aim at the floor to kill. Personally, these enemies made me feel frustrated more than anything, because like I said about the combat, it’s not built for quick action so jumping enemies felt like a finicky hindrance rather than a challenge. You also have the bosses which ehh, were fine. Sometimes I think, do games just put bosses in for the sake of it? I feel like Silver Pines didn’t need them and I felt like I was ticking a box rather than feeling like I was encountering an in-world boss. They were lackluster and rather repetitive.
Where’s My Herb?
Key to both genres is resource management and disappointingly I never found this game to be too hard when it came to that element. In a delightful classic Resident Evil fashion, you have the same inventory style management and a currency for saving your game which at first made me shit bricks. I’ve played the original Resi and having to use your saves sparingly really elevates a sense of dread and makes you really think about whether swinging past that next enemy is worth it. Silver Pines tries to do this but gives you one too many items so I never felt that building pressure to manage my resources. It costs $1 to save and whenever you find the phone box to carry out those saves, it always has a spare coin lurking in the coin deposit. Money is also found in abundance if you do your exploring and even if you do run out of a certain ammo or heals, convenient vending machines allow you to purchase them. I think there’s just a bit too many options to get useful items. Dialling it back would have made the game feel a bit more survival horror-esque. Instead I was mostly clearing out all enemies in the vicinity which doesn’t strike me as rather scary.
Dripping With Atmosphere
Silver Pines’ art direction is its best quality with an atmosphere that compliments its rather grungy narrative. The town of Silver Pines is barely lit by fires that crackle in the streets and lights that flicker in dingy apartments, but despite the darkness the environments are full of detail that point to the unnerving mystery that is unfolding. I loved how the game layered its settings as you move through them, with the visual of a car burning in the background as you stalk the street below which can later be walked past.
However, what really gives the game that unique uncanny feel is the clever use of roto-scoping for its character models. For those who don’t know, roto-scoping is the technique of capturing footage of someone’s body movement and then drawing on top of that animation. This makes each person’s movement fluid in how they teeter in place and roll their limbs and twist their head to look in different directions, making them feel alive yet slightly odd in such a static setting. Roto-scoping also extends to the enemies which really makes them feel like these grotesque creatures whose body’s twist as they run towards you. This all gives Silver Pines this dream-like (or should I say nightmarelike) quality to the game that really suits the way the narrative blends the real world and this Silent Hill-like hell dimension.
Characters also have these Disco Elysium style water colour portraits which I also adored. Instead of a simple close up of a face, each person’s face contorts from one image to the next and it makes them all look slightly off, with smudges on the paint that make them look transient.
Silver Pines Review Verdict
Silver Pines truly is the perfect storm, pun definitely intended, with the marriage of two of my favourite genres. Wych Elm Games have really proven that they know how to create a tense and moody noir style atmosphere that is dripping with neon lights and populated with mysterious residents hanging on every street corner. You can feel the storm brewing in the background of the deserted town, with rain sliding down your screen and the remnants of people who have left in a hurry. The threat that stalks Walker’s every move is a challenging one, but never makes you hold your breath in fright or makes you weigh up if you should find out what’s at the other side of the room due to resources being so readily available. Combat feels fine but movement in this 2D setting can feel rather clunky and unpolished. However, this is made up for in some addictive exploration symptomatic of the metroidvania genre where I wanted to find every secret possible even though its puzzles were a lot left to be desired. Silver Pines is a thrilling time and definitely a pick-up for fans of both genres.
Silver Pines comes out on Xbox Series X|S on October 8th and you can watch our video version of this review over on the Xbox Nation YouTube channel!
Craving something just as spooky? Well, check out our previous review on metroidvania classic Well Dweller!
Silver Pines Review – Nightmare On Pine Street
+ What works
- Perfect blend of metroidvania and survival horror
- Rewarding exploration
- A mystery that hooks you
- Gorgeously grotesque art style with innovative stylistic choices
− What holds it back
- Combat and movement can feel too clunky
- A midgame that stagnates a bit
- Resource management never felt too pressuring or interesting
- Available on
- Xbox Series X|S · Xbox PC · Windows PC
- Developer
- Wych Elm Games
- Publisher
- Team17
- Release date
- 8 October 0026
- Age rating
- PEGI 16
- Price
- £21.99
Jordan Campbell
Matt Cabral