《Silver Pines》评测：融合恐怖、2D Metroidvania 与点击解谜，但探索与解谜部分体验欠佳

Where the sun never shines

I want, and not even especially deep down, to like Silver Pines more than I do. Wych Elm’s debut game – a Twin Peaks-inspired, neo-noir detective mystery that quickly repaints itself in survival horror red – is endearingly unusual, an angular mishmash of different genre staples that, nonetheless, stays coherently glued together by its expressively moody visual style and an intriguing missing-person tale.

It’s just... well, put it this way. I’m only about three hours in, and if I have to backtrack my slouching private dick through one more thicket of locked doors and collection puzzles, the next crime he’ll be investigating will be the aggravated assault of a desktop monitor.

Which is a rubbish feeling, because Silver Pines’ experiment in blending horror, 2D Metroidvania exploration, and point 'n' click puzzling initially shows great promise. For one, its dilapidated rural town, through which you’re tracking down a missing musician just as a generationally bad storm is about to hit, is impressively horrible even before the monsters show up. Half-broken neon signs dimly advertise the dusty, ruined establishments beneath, while the silent roads between them are lined with broken fences and piles of abandoned scrap. The game’s map appears to suggest a relatively flat, simple network of 'vania-standard interlinked paths, but these are complicated significantly by the explorable interiors of those abandoned shops and diners, some of which have a tendency not to spit you out where you came in. Also, the local motel has an excellent exhibition of porcelain bears.

Poking around it all is you, a wholly unimpressive detective whose rotoscoped movements further impart an uncanny, (one suspects) intentionally uncomfortable flavour to Silver Pines’ world. This heaviness extends to the combat, where slow boxcutter swings and ammo-deprived shooting are less frustrating, more desperate and tense – which, in turn, makes sure that the town’s newfound population of sobbing shamblers still carries a sense of threat. If you do end up playing this, I’d also recommend sticking to the default 'Survival Horror' difficulty, which is thus far doing a smart job of rarefying resources. This is not an especially scary game, but the opening hours do stretch your supply of health and bullets to nervy effect, while slipping you juuuust enough herbs or duct tape to make exploring another creepy businessplace feel worth the risk.

It’s good horror, then, and it’s often a good piece of mystery storytelling, especially when toning the paranormal down to a more subtly unsettling strangeness; I’ve particularly enjoyed catching glimpses of Terminal Drive, a pulpy science fiction show-within-a-game akin to Alan Wake’s Night Springs, on the town’s few remaining powered TVs. Between this narrative, and the hope of finding more healing drinks in the next building’s cupboards, there does always seem to be some impetus compelling you onwards through the danger and darkness.

For me, though, it wasn’t fear that halted my investigation. Some level of key-finding and puzzle-solving was inevitable in something so inspired by 90s survival horror, and for an hour or so this went fine. Puzzle solutions followed diegetic logic, and some measured pacing made it impossible to amass an overly long to-do list of pathways to open and safes to crack. However, once the town opened up, the subsequent sections became vast, backtrack-heavy mazes of frustrating dead ends and tedious item hunts. Exploration gave way to a miserable stretch of looped wandering, locked doors upon unsolvable puzzles upon locked doors obscuring and misdirecting me away from the single, solitary path forwards.

I later learned that some of this obtuseness was unintentional. Having admitted defeat in one area and gone begging to the developers for directions, it turned out that I needed to swim across a river – a river where the opposite bank wasn’t even fully visible from the starting one, and was in a location visited after previous watery sections where attempting to swim only had me fading to black and coughing my lungs up back on solid ground. To their credit, Wych Elm said they were looking at reworking the scene, with a politeness that now makes me feel bad for writing mean words about Silver Pines on the Internet.

Still, the best Metroidvanias don’t hide their open paths under a heap of blocked ones. They leave inaccessible routes as mouthwatering teasers of some future adventure, repeatedly but sparingly left hanging so that I’ll want to come back later with new abilities (or, in this case, new baseball bats and firearms). This game, or rather this extended part of it, feels instead like visiting a theme park where all the rides are closed. It also didn’t help that some of the puzzles in this area were tripping over each other, with two separate side-conundrums being based around looking for colourful bird models but otherwise sharing no interactable parts. And making that determination involves the kind of vexing trial-and-error that even P&C adventures largely got over years ago.

I’m not ruling out returning to Silver Pines later, once there are enough guides and confused reddit threads to more readily help me through any further moments of acute stuckness. It is a cleverly crafted hybrid of a game, in many ways, and I’m still curious as to a) where this AWOL guitarist went and b) why the town is trying to murder me. But also, this whole autumn is proving to be one of the most bounteous for quality games in ages. Maybe I could play something where those moments don’t happen at all?