cre: Silver Chains review – Chain of ghouls
There are certain rules when it comes to creating horror games. When in doubt, set up your game in a dilapidated, haunted mansion. Put ghosts in it. Maybe a possessed puppet. Don’t forget the jumpscares! silver chains does all this in its short runtime. But is it a scary experience? Or is it a well the developers shouldn’t have tried to draw water from?
haunt me
silver chains tells the story of a man named Pierre. It begins with him waking up outside a mansion he doesn’t recognize and can’t remember how he got there. Peter doesn’t remember most things, because he’s an idiot. Don’t be like Peter. Before he can figure out what he’s doing there, he passes out and wakes up inside the mansion. Once inside, it’s up to him to piece together what happened and figure out what all this mess has to do with him while dodging spirits and collecting journal pages.
The game is very narrative but isn’t a walking simulator, and that story is pretty decent when it doesn’t rely too heavily on cliches. There are many twists, some too obvious and some less so. The game is littered with journal pages that fill in the details, and it has some solid cutscenes that shake things up. Regardless of its familiarity, the story was enough to hold my interest for the game’s five-hour runtime. silver chains in general.
See the signs
silver chains is more of a narrative adventure game than anything else. You explore the mansion and find items and keys to use to progress. It’s usually pretty clear where to go too. That being said, there were some questionable places.
At first the signage is quite poor. At one point I walked into a room and searched it, only to find a note on the floor. Then I picked it up and read it, which unlocked something in another room. I interacted with the new thing in this room, only for no obvious way to show up. After browsing the available area for a while, I returned to where I found the note. There was a new note in its place that contained a key. Things got clearer after that, but that opening part left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
Then you unlock some more of the mansion before you get access to the whole thing. The mansion itself is beautiful and believable designed. However, the game can get boring at times. That’s not a big deal, but it’s a bit surprising to see in such a short game.
Besides exploring, reading journal entries, collecting items and occasional puzzles, silver chains also has a handful of enemy encounters. When one spawns, you’re supposed to run away and hide in a well-placed cabinet. If you don’t hide or escape, the enemy will grab you and kill you instantly. It’s fairly standard and helps make the mansion feel somewhat dangerous, but these sequences can be tedious. I must say, however, that the game can be quite scary at times and I enjoyed the atmosphere. Even a lot of the jumps scared me, apart from the first one which was so typical I literally burst out laughing. But the sequences with enemies lead to the two scariest things about the game: loading times and general performance.
Stop, let it go
Most of the time I ran into enemies, it sent my framerate into the single digits. This, of course, rendered me unable to move, which got me killed. And when you die silver chains loads the whole mansion from scratch. I timed it once, and it took just over a minute and a half on my machine. But more on that soon. The performance issues also extend beyond enemy encounters. Even though the game doesn’t seem to require high specs, it does. I could be in a room with nothing in it and the framerate would randomly drop from 60 FPS to 45 or less.
And these declines are constant. Just exploring the mansion met me with a massive amount of snags and stutters. silver chains runs on the Unreal 4 engine, which is often a cause for concern when optimization is poor. But even compared to much larger and more complex UE 4 games, this game’s optimization is in a terrible class of its own. Even lowering my settings to the minimum, the game was no less painful. I’m hoping some fixes will even it out, because that’s not acceptable.
start the end
But the thing that put the last sharpest nail in the coffin for silver chains is the culminating event of the game. I don’t want to spoil the whole game or anything, but it takes place in an enclosed area of the mansion and has you running away from an enemy through a maze. You need to collect items to complete the sequence, except one is behind two steam pipes, so you need to turn them off before collecting it. This means you need to figure out where the two pipes are and turn them off while the enemy is chasing you. But it takes a few seconds to turn the valve handle, and it’s unclear how long you’re supposed to turn it, so the enemy can easily overtake you while you’re doing this.
And yes, if he catches you, you die and have to start the whole sequence over from the beginning.
This part of the game is simply torturous. It’s so horrible that I’m surprised the people who made the rest of the game thought it was a good idea to put it. I was a peculiar combination of miserable and bored during this streak and I wouldn’t wish that on another person. One of the main things that makes it so horrible is that I had to memorize the whole maze and do practice tricks just to complete it without getting caught.
silver chains shows you where everything is, though. You get a monocle early on that allows you to see points of interest, giving the necessary guidance. You can use the monocle during this final sequence to see where the elements and valves are. But it darkens the screen, so you can’t make good use of it when running away, so it’s just another bad choice. The rest of the game took me four hours, but that ending sequence took me a full hour of practice. But that’s not even the worst.
Get a load of this
Each time you are caught, the game should reload. But it doesn’t just charge the small area you’re in. It loads the whole house. Each failure met me with a one and a half minute load time while I waited for another attempt. I don’t know how much of my hour in the finale was spent waiting on loading screens. And to defeat the enemy after collecting the last item, you have to perform an act you’ve never done before, which is easy to miss. So I had to go through another loading screen and start all over again just to try to figure out exactly what he wanted me to do. Easily one of the worst sequences I’ve seen in any game.
And after all that, once you win, you’re treated to an ending cutscene that lasts less than a minute. Not only does it fail to wrap up the story, but it introduces more questions than it answers. It made me feel like the entire previous game had just been wasted for nothing. Before that, the story wasn’t great by any means, but it made me curious to see if the reveals and details were worth it. But no.
silver chains can be a scary time with an intriguing story. However, the game’s performance is broken, it makes some truly awful choices, and the story goes nowhere. As such, I can’t recommend anyone to play it unless they’re the forgiving type and really enjoy exploring mansions. If the developers drastically improve performance and do something about that terrible final sequence, it could improve the experience significantly. But the story is central to the game, and it leads nowhere, so even then you should temper your expectations.
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