WWGW - Fade To Silence Gameplay
2Sisyphus goes up the hill, the tentacles smack him down. Some sample gameplay from "Fade To Silence" and review (read on...)
Winter is coming… oh, scratch that; she here. The stylish survival struggle against the blight is rough around the edges with bugs, but it’s building your bungalow with friends in co-op that will keep you coming back
“Fade To Silence” presents a rustic survival struggle in our failed frozen wasteland apocalyptic future; where mankind’s past accomplishments have been torn asunder by the relentless forces of nature and an endless white covering all you can see. While there’s certainly no shortage of monstrosities out there to rip your face off, the weather itself that makes for your greatest foe. It’s no coincidence that your default weapon against those monstrous hordes doubles as your key to withstanding the ravages of a nature – a simple torch.
There's a certain flair to the animation dynamic that’s rather reminiscent of Darksiders. Though, as with that series, there’s just something about the design’s use of soft curves that, well, blunts the hard-edge appearance of nightmarish creatures and unfathomable imaginations to the extent it renders them more “nifty & shiny” than “vicious & lethal”. There’s like a sense of 90’s comic art stylings though taken down from 11 (thankfully) to around 6 or 7 where it starts feeling more appropriate. While it makes for a unique design aesthetic—particularly for showing the human characters and real-world remnants of this frozen wasteland---it ends up feeling antithetical to any survival struggle, sense of desperation, or brutality. In all honestly that might say more of myself than the game as matter of style preference that just ain’t my jam.
The game’s central experience is of course the battle of survival against the elements of nature and agents of chaos at work. There is perma-death, though it’s—gratefully--tempered by a safety net as you struggle acclimating to the game. You’ve got 3 lights that allow you to resurrect, with more to find as a rare resource.
Like most other survival simulators, you’ve got to scavenge for the definite necessities of life and craf raw materials into more useful variety of gear. The means of growth aren’t just your sustained survivability, but also a sustained society (or the closest thing to it that can exist in the end times). Your homestead will evolve with a number of facilities that aid in production/accumulation of resources, and a community forms in its place allowing even further exploration of the chaos.
Perhaps the defining feature of Fade to Silence that will have you sticking around: once you start being able to accumulate followers and get your homestead a rockin’, the game incorporates co-op elements as your friends can take control of your AI followers to play with you. While the initial gameplay is mostly a real grind for resources (hence the thankfulness there’s at least some safety net between death and starting over), the experience changes once you’ve started worrying about the bigger picture of society (however small) expanding. Each additional person taken in represents that increased demand of daily resource needs yet their potential for growth as well
Though the game is recently out of early access, it’s still rather rough around the edges with at least a few bugs noticeable right away. That said, I encountered a frozen deer model jutting forward instead of running, slowly enough that I could thwack at it and laugh, which was actually pretty awesome.
The circumstances and backstory are largely doled out piecemeal based on your time spent resting at fires---it’s a really interesting way of delegating story progress for a wide experience game, though it’s also rather disorienting. It serves to split up the narrative across your game time, though also means those more interested get gated by the means to waste firewood to find out more. Alternatively, the variation in success may also means longer gaps between those story-beats and room to lose any place or momentum. It’s a curious mechanic I’m split between considering a disruptive or clever solution. It’s actually a lot like the rest of the game in that respect, while there are certainly a load of bugs and issues there’s simultaneously a strange appeal that has you coming back. It’s far from amazing and I find myself unable to play for long stretches, though there’s some weird compulsion to keeping checking back.
Check it out now on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/706020/Fade_to_Silence/?curator_clanid=32660416
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