Silver Pines review – a stylish, neo-noir detective drama
PC, PS5, Switch 2; Wych Elm Games, Team 17
Abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks make up a dark landscape in which you play a private eye searching for a missing singer-songwriter
In a weird deserted town miles from anywhere, a troubled detective searches for a missing musician and the girl he may or may not have murdered. It could be a Silent Hill game or a lost David Lynch movie from the 1990s – in fact, it’s neither. And also both. If that whets your appetite, stick around, there’s plenty more to come.
Developed by Scandinavian studio Wych Elm Games, Silver Pines is a dark Metroidvania-style adventure, where you play as shambling private eye, Red Walker, exploring a 2D universe of abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks. Officially, everyone has left because of an incoming storm, but very quickly you learn that something much darker is afoot. Someone has hired you to find singer-songwriter Eddie Velvet, but you don’t know why; your only contact with your client is via the payphones dotted around town, where you can also save your progress – as long as you have a dollar to pay for the call. Each location is filled with clues and puzzles – a weird newspaper story pinned to the wall, a strange statue that needs a missing piece – and through these artefacts you unlock new rooms and descend further into the mystery.
This format will be incredibly familiar to anyone who has played a point-and-click adventure in the last 30 years; it’s not doing anything wildly original with the formula. And when the monsters inevitably emerge, you find yourself fighting them off with knives that break easily, and pistols that have to be painstakingly re-loaded with limited ammo, reminding you that you’re in survival horror territory, too.
But what makes this game much more than an amalgam of familiar adventure tropes is its brilliant sense of style, it’s considered pace and it’s wonderfully constructed mythology. Using rotoscoping to create the lead character’s animation, he looks like some film noir drunk sloping around in the darkness, fumbling with clues. Each location is loaded with detail, from strange paintings, to battered furniture and fizzing neon signs, while parallax scrolling is used to brilliant effect, allowing you to see forthcoming locations in the distance as you wander the streets. Each room is beautifully constructed, so that as you move, the light coming from filthy windows or an old reading lamp sends slivers of shadow creeping over the walls. This is a design team that really understands the aesthetics of film noir, a fact underscored by the soundtrack a sleazy jazz club combo of Angelo Badalamenti and Vangelis.
As you progress, new areas of the town open up, and you meet a few weird inhabitants that stuck around despite the incoming weather emergency, among them a cynical police chief and a brooding femme fatale. The puzzles can be obtuse, but thorough exploration often yields the answers you need: could you squeeze through that air duct? Could you climb that apparently impassable wall? Sometimes the answer is yes. Combat is always tense and panicked, especially the boss battles, where you’ll be floundering about with different weapons and ammunition as some Lovecraftian monstrosity pummels you. But then, this is very true to the earliest survival horror titles, where the inability to actually move, shoot and/or avoid incoming blows was part of the drama – you were always a victim and never a super cop. Besides, you can turn the difficulty right down if it’s the story you want to experience.
As I played, I discovered countless references to 80s and 90s neo-noir culture – from Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks (you drink coffee to increase your stamina), from the X-Files to Alan Parker’s hellish Angel Heart. It was a pleasure to explore every broken-down movie theatre, oily car garage and sweat-stinking interrogation room, collecting weird trinkets and working out how they’d all fit together – then exploring them again (and again) when the answers failed to show up. Silver Pines is a game to sit back and wallow in, like a private eye, kicking off his wingtip shoes and pulling that bottle of bourbon from the bottom drawer as rain trickles down the window and sodium street lights paint the walls a sickly shade of yellow.
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