Silver Pines

Silver Pines knows exactly how to make an empty town feel wrong

The first impression is probably the easiest thing to agree on. Silver Pines looks unusual, almost like an animated illustration, with characters and environments layered across a 2D space that still manages to create a surprising amount of depth. Then the small details start doing the rest: rain hitting the screen, leaves moving through the wind, neon signs flickering, bad lighting and tiny movements in the background that keep making you wonder whether something was actually there.

Xboxygen spends a lot of time on exactly this. Even though a progression-breaking bug eventually stopped the reviewer's playthrough, the presentation had already made a strong impression: the town feels fascinating and unpleasant at the same time, the creatures are disturbing and the melancholy soundtrack pushes the whole thing even closer to Twin Peaks. 4Players, despite eventually giving the game just 6.5, starts from an unexpectedly similar place. Its opening hours are described as genuinely creepy, with the art, sound and staging all doing their job extremely well.

So the real question isn't whether Silver Pines can create atmosphere. It absolutely can. The question is whether that atmosphere stays as powerful once you've learned how the trick works. 4Players argues that abandoned apartments, strange notes and a red, rusty Otherworld eventually start looking too much like things we've already seen elsewhere. Most of the other reviews are much more forgiving and believe the game has enough character to keep those influences from turning into simple imitation.

Either way, the art direction is the safest part of the whole package. Even critics who have serious problems with everything around it still want to see the next room, the next street and whatever strange place the town has hidden away. For a game built so heavily around exploration, that's a very important thing to get right.

The best part is often figuring out where you can go, not actually getting there

Silver Pines isn't an enormous town, but the game keeps finding reasons to make you look at familiar places differently. A door you couldn't open before, a wall you can finally climb over, an object you didn't know how to use the first time around: the structure borrows heavily from metroidvanias and drops that logic into a survival horror game where exploration is largely about remembering what you had to leave behind.

DualShockers is especially enthusiastic about this because almost every room and detour seems to have a reason to exist. Pure Dead Gaming and Gamer Social Club describe much the same feeling, with the town constantly tempting you to see what's around the next corner. The map helps, but it doesn't solve everything for you, and that's important. Silver Pines still expects you to remember why a certain place caught your attention.

Red's camera fits into this beautifully. You can photograph a clue, a blocked path or an item you can't reach yet and have that picture saved directly on the map. It's a very simple feature, but it solves one of the classic problems of this kind of game without turning the map into a checklist. It doesn't tell you what to do. It simply lets you leave a reminder for yourself.

The problem is that eventually you still have to walk back to all those places. That's where the reviews start moving apart. Gamesurf, HobbyConsolas, PPE and Xboxygen all point out that getting around can become tiring, especially when you're no longer sure what the next step is. 4Players is harsher still: once the basic cycle becomes obvious — enter a building, solve several smaller puzzles, finish the main one, fight a boss — the game supposedly keeps repeating it without finding enough new variations.

Backtracking, then, isn't automatically the problem. During the better stretches it's exactly what gives the town meaning. It becomes a problem when you're going back because you've discovered something interesting less often than because you're still trying to work out which step you missed. Silver Pines spends a lot of time close to that line, and not every critic thinks it always stays on the right side of it.

Coins, bullets and inventory space keep forcing you to choose

Silver Pines takes a lot of rules from old survival horror games and doesn't even pretend otherwise. Inventory space is limited, melee weapons wear down, healing items need to be managed and resources aren't just there to be collected automatically. Even saving costs a coin: you have to find a public phone, dial the number and decide whether using the same currency you could spend somewhere else is really worth it right now.

That's where the system becomes interesting. Coins are used for saving, but they can also buy supplies from vending machines. Ammunition obviously keeps you alive, but in some situations it can also help you open up new possibilities while exploring. A resource doesn't stop being a decision the moment you pick it up.

Gamesurf is particularly positive about this because combat, exploration and inventory management all feed into each other. Xboxygen reaches a similar conclusion: every individual mechanic is familiar, but they work well together. KonsoliFIN and Pure Dead Gaming also like the way the game keeps making you think about what to carry and what to leave behind.

Not all of the friction feels elegant. Spending a limited resource just to save can be punishing, especially when there isn't always a safety net ready to recover a bad run. Some interactions also take more steps than you'd probably expect from a modern game. But at least that rigidity has a clear purpose: it wants you to think before you use something.

This is one of the areas where Silver Pines seems to understand why those old systems worked in the first place. It doesn't bring them back only because they look like Resident Evil. It makes them compete with one another, so a simple choice like saving or buying ammunition can matter again ten minutes later.

The puzzles are much more divisive than they first appear

On paper, Silver Pines has everything it needs for great puzzles. You read documents, inspect the environment, find objects, remember old routes and use the map almost like a notebook. And quite often, that's exactly how it works.

Xboxygen praises the variety, ranging from small mechanisms to larger problems that ask you to cross-reference several documents and environmental clues. Pure Dead Gaming is similarly positive and likes how the solutions usually make sense once you've understood the setup. KonsoliFIN reaches much the same conclusion.

Move a few reviews further along, though, and the picture changes quickly. UAGNA finds many of the puzzles too easy. 4Players goes further and argues that, beneath the presentation, too much of the structure boils down to finding keys and number combinations. Gamesurf and DualShockers identify a slightly different problem: the puzzle itself isn't always difficult, but working out which step you've missed can be.

That's an important difference. Being stuck because a solution requires some thought can be satisfying. Being stuck because you missed one interaction or forgot which building needed a certain item is something else entirely. The camera helps a lot because it lets you build a visual memory of places worth revisiting, but that only works if you remember to use it.

So the puzzles don't seem consistent enough to become one of Silver Pines' unquestionable strengths, but they're nowhere near weak enough to become a general problem either. There are good ideas here, and an excellent system for keeping track of clues. What the more critical reviews want is simply more variety in the kind of thinking the game asks from you.

The 2D perspective is beautiful to explore and much less comfortable when you have to shoot

As soon as a fight starts, several of the things that make Silver Pines look so distinctive become harder to work with. Red can use melee weapons and firearms, has to reload manually and often ends up fighting in narrow spaces where the exact direction of a shot matters quite a lot.

DualShockers is one of the more positive reviews here. Combat takes some practice, but eventually becomes satisfying, and Red's arsenal grows much more than you might expect. Gamer Social Club reaches a similar conclusion, although it does mention some questionable hitboxes. From that point on, however, the overall tone becomes much less enthusiastic.

Gamesurf describes parts of the interaction as cumbersome. Vandal sees the combat as intentionally stiff, but that doesn't always make it enjoyable. Pure Dead Gaming calls it the weakest part of the game. PPE points to simplicity and repetition, while KonsoliFIN becomes particularly critical once the bosses enter the picture.

4Players pushes the criticism furthest. Aiming along a 2D plane can turn into guesswork, especially from a distance, while narrow spaces make avoiding several attacks at once awkward. And when ammunition runs out, having to keep hitting a boss with what's left of a broken weapon isn't exactly the kind of tension the game was probably aiming for.

Boss fights are where combat seems to lose the benefit of the doubt most often. They're usually well presented and backed by excellent sound, but several otherwise very positive reviews suddenly become much more critical when talking about them. The contrast is pretty clear: exploring this town in 2D gives Silver Pines a huge amount of personality. Fighting in it is much harder to defend.

The real mystery is how much of Silver Pines actually belongs to Silver Pines

A private investigator arrives in a small Pacific Northwest town looking for a missing musician. There's fog everywhere, people speak in strange ways, unsettling television programmes keep showing up and something deeply wrong is hiding under the surface. You don't need to know Twin Peaks to understand where a lot of this comes from, but if you do know it, it's almost impossible not to think about it.

Most critics don't see that as a major problem. DualShockers considers the way Silver Pines absorbs Lynch, Silent Hill and Resident Evil without completely losing its own voice one of its biggest successes. Gamesurf and UAGNA reach similar conclusions: the references are obvious, but the final mix still develops a recognizable identity.

Finger Guns is more cautious about how the story distributes its information, while HobbyConsolas sees a strong game that remains fairly unoriginal in several areas. And then there's 4Players, which flips the argument completely. Michael Sonntag's review says Silver Pines starts brilliantly and then stops surprising: decaying apartments, unsettling notes, strange characters, a red Otherworld and familiar boss structures eventually start feeling more like a collection of references than a world with enough new ideas of its own.

That's probably the most interesting disagreement in the entire group because nobody is really arguing about what the influences are. Everyone can see them. The disagreement is over whether Wych Elm does enough to turn those influences into something new.

Overall, the reviews say yes. Not unanimously, and probably not in every individual part of the game, but enough to keep Silver Pines from feeling like a simple clone. There's still a question worth revisiting once player reviews become available: after ten or fifteen hours, does Silver Pines still feel like Silver Pines, or do you mostly start seeing the games and films it's borrowing from?