Originally Published to https://oldgrizzledgamers.com/
Fade to Silence is an early access survival horror game that is fighting to stand out from the crowd. Its unique world entices you with a Lovecraftian hellscape frozen in a perpetual winter. I was initially pulled to the game by the focus on managing a village along with tower defense mechanics. All while exploring and maintaining the slate of usual needs: hunger, rest, and body temperature.
In retrospect, this is a boring and poorly designed game. It lacks originality and is unfortunately caught in the trap of trying to look like a blockbuster AAA game than actually being fun. It took me 2 revisions of this article to actually realize, I didn't like this game. Each time I went back to rewrite a paragraph, I found myself realizing how poorly designed each system is. Even learning to play is overly complex and abstract. It managed to hit every one of the points I love in survival games but disappoints in implementation. This game needs an overhaul before full release, everything needs to be redone. If all they do is build upon what they have, at best it'll be a generic, flashy third-person flop.
Should you buy it?
You probably want to wait till full release. It’s is very incomplete and is filled with poor design choices such as an abundance of QTE. Game performance is also bad at the moment. A patch did make the game run a bit smoother, but it still needs a lot more work. It’s annoying and interrupts the experience.
If you are predominantly drawn to the village management, this only is the barebones of everything they are promising. At this time, the system lacks any meaningful impact on the world. Furthermore, while the ability to construct defenses is fun, it feels needless since the enemy AI is still too stupid to put up much of a fight.
After a few months of patches, they may fix the graphics issues and the village management may be more extensive. Then I would feel more comfortable suggesting people buy the game. In any case, you should keep your eye on Fade to Silence. It’s fun, but still not ready for mass consumption.
The Game
This is one of the better depictions of a Lovecraftian nightmare. An evil voice whispers into your ear making fun of you while you struggle to survive. You’ll come across fascinating sights that defy logical thinking; tentacles writhing in the ground, blood veins crawling up trees, and the threat of falling debris from a floating mountain made of skyscrapers. It all creates a dream-like atmosphere.
In order to survive this strange world, you must build a safe and industrious village. A permadeath system gives you six lives to do so before starting over. You must collect wood, food, and scrap metal. As time progresses, monsters attack your home with increasing difficulty. Tower defense meets village management. You must balance building defenses with creating and upgrading shops. These shops are where your villagers will craft better weapons and equipment so you can explore the world. This, in turn, will allow you to discover more resources, fight more difficult monsters, and rescue new villagers.
Unfortunately, the learning curve for the game is poorly paced. It doesn’t do a great job of explaining how to do most of what I just described. I was left confused when trying to learn more complex mechanics and in the end, felt like I had wasted lots of time. It would have been a more enjoyable experience if the game had guided me to crucial information instead of hoping I stick around long enough to learn. If the developers don’t find a smart way to teach players how to play I can see this game becoming a confusing mess as it expands.
Exploration
Exploration is key to building your village and you act as a scout who must go out and find crafting materials. As you explore, you’ll come across “Eldritch” shrines that are consuming the few natural resources remaining. Destroying these shrines by initiating some lack-luster QTEs frees the supplies. Since you’ll be destroying a lot of these shrines, I hope they come up with a more interesting mechanic. Nonetheless, once destroyed you can either assign a villager to travel out and harvest that resource or you can stuff your pockets and carry back as much as you can.
As you deplete resources near your village, you need to explore further to find more. This leads you towards increasingly dangerous monsters. The more you explore, the more you need your villagers to craft better weapons and survival gear for yourself.
A very obvious loop emerges here. Explore, collect resources, create better gear, explore, collect more resources. There is the potential for a lot of nuance in this system. However, right now you can ignore the powerful upgrades villagers give and get by with the basic survival items that you craft on your own. It’ll take some fine-tuning for this loop to be worthwhile.
One last note about exploration; there are several travel options available. You can go by foot, by dog sled, or unlock fast travel points. The sled simply allows you to move faster. However, the physics system breaks often, making your sled disappear and leaving you stranded. Fast travel is unlocked by defeating mini-bosses who guard areas called strongholds. Upon successfully defeating the monsters there, you will have the ability to spend a rare crystal resource to move between your village and that stronghold.
Combat
Combat is straightforward and recycled from every game that includes a stamina meter. You have a strong attack, a fast attack, and a roll button. Most fights are one on one, which offers little excitement most of the time. The most common enemies are limited to ineffective range attacks and after a while I mostly ignored them. The game’s less common melee enemies do create a delightfully high anxiety situation. If you get cocky, you’ll deplete your stamina, be unable to roll away, and lose one of your precious lives.
Ranged combat is the best option for most fights. At the moment, the enemy AI has no real counter to your onslaught of arrows. The only situations where the bow didn’t work were when the framerate dropped or when the aiming system became confused and shoot the arrow in the wrong direction.
Limited AI
The AI is very simple. When your villagers see a monster, they rush towards it. They seem to ignore the rules you must follow and easily kill anything. Furthermore, you are better off not creating walls right now. They look cool and keep the bad guys out, but your villagers are stupid and get stuck on the inside. Meaning, they can’t help defend when under attack.
Monster AI isn’t great either, as I’ve mentioned. However, the only unfair enemy I encountered was some kind of demon dog. They are completely broken as they can teleport, hit you, and disappear before you even see them. In addition to this, most enemies would glitch from time to time. But, that usually meant you could cheat some of the bigger fights.
Final Thoughts
I enjoyed my time in Fade to Silence, but other than some cute sled-pulling-puppers the game fails to stand out still. I think there is a lot of potential for something great to emerge if they expand on the village management system. We haven’t seen an immersive survival game really branch into the management genre yet. If they don’t, we’ll just end up with a generic survival horror game.
They are looking to release this game in mid-2018 with four major patches before then. The patches are planned for the end of every month from January to May. I doubt how reasonable that is. With the number of problems currently in the game, four months doesn’t seem like enough time. Unless they're hiding some good stuff up their sleeve, I believe the game still needs some major design revisions.
