Silt, the review of an underwater adventure that looks to Limbo

Games like Limbo or Ico they work because their authors have wisely chosen not to lock their scenarios in the prisons of logic. Their worlds give as few references as possible. They suggest, but they don’t say. They tell without following a precise narrative thread, at least in appearance. They work because they never deny their mythological dimension, their living in a space other than reality and traditional imagery. The characters that populate them are apparitions that make timeless spaces resonate, born from an unknowable story because it is lost in time. The developers of Spiral Circus Games not to be frightened by the unknown?

Let’s find out in the review by Silta very special title.

At the bottom of the sea

In Silt you wake up in the shoes of a strange diver chained by who knows who in an ocean dominated by colossal creatures that protect the secrets of an ancient civilization. The only words we will read throughout the game are six lines that serve as an introduction and basically explain what we need to do: find the giants and suck their eyes to reactivate an ancient machine. For the rest we will be left to ourselves and in search of our objectives, which will be addressed in a predetermined order. We don’t have a name, we don’t have a past and we don’t know where we are going. The world around us is a big mystery, as is our mission. Turning we will also meet the corpses of our fellow men. Why am I there?

The protagonist does not have many resources at his disposal. She can obviously swim, increasing or decreasing speed, and she can turn on a flashlight. The only one of him power, which is also the core of the gameplay, is the ability to own fish, then use their skills, projecting a tentacle of light from the helmet. The same power can also be used to interact with some objects, such as levers.

All the puzzle from which Silt is composed are based on this power. Just to give an example, it is possible to have electric eels to give energy to machinery, or you can dominate schools of small fish which, after being contaminated, can be used to poison decidedly voracious carnivorous plants. Or again, crustaceans can be used to break fans, or the sharp teeth of piranhas to cut ropes that block our way. In general, when multiple types of fish are seen in a level, they will inevitably all have to be owned in order to solve the puzzles.

The maps of them are not very large and there is not much to explore. The first chapters of the game are very linear, while the final ones offer more complex puzzles, sometimes distributed in several sections. At the end of each chapter you have to face one of the giants. Don’t expect to fight, because you’ll just have to solve puzzles to get the best of it.

Difficulty

Silt flows beautifully, enchanting the player scenario after scenario, so much so that it goes on almost on autopilot, in a state of ecstatic rapture caused by the rhythm of the game and its monochromatic graphic style that creates truly sublime moments from a visual point of view. Evidently, however, at some point the developers felt that the adventure lasted too short and therefore created steps of a difficulty huge, placed towards the end of the game, when the player is most anxious to pull the strings.

We are not talking about a gradual challenge growth reaching its ideal peak, but a sudden surge that transforms a meditative journey into an experience at times. frustrating. Where in the previous phases the gameplay required to discover the solution of the various puzzles and to apply it to move forward, you find yourself in more action phases in which you have to execute certain schemes to perfection if you want to survive. Having to understand what to do is marginalized by being able to do it.

Too bad they are really the game dynamics, which until then had been almost physiological to the gameplay, with the slow and fluid movements of the main character that endemically adapted to the scenarios, to rebel against the new artificial difficulty, which requires perfection in the execution of every truly irritating action. . A bit like Inside at some point introduces some platforming phases to Super Meat Boy. There is nothing impossible, but the contrast is very noticeable and can annoy, especially in terms of involvement, because it seems like you have changed the game without realizing it.