Previews
Aquatic Horror Game ‘Silt’ Captures the Enchanting Terror of the Deep [Preview]
Spiral Circus’ monochrome aquatic horror game shows great promise in our ‘Silt’ preview impressions.
I can’t remember the last game that enchanted me with its visual beauty whilst unnerving me with what it represented. Well, congratulations to developer Spiral Circus, because it has already achieved just that in a short demo for its upcoming aquatic horror game Silt.
I’m sure others can relate to this, but there’s something utterly terrifying about the deep dark gloom of the ocean. The very thought of being stuck, swimming in the middle of it is bad enough but worse if it was without the light of the sun, when the only illumination is perhaps a torch. The relative lack of control and speed of movement combined with the dark unknown of another world beneath the sea? No thank you. Yet at the same time, like all good horror, it’s a terrifying idea that fascinates me immensely.
Silt translates this to a two-dimensional format quite well. It immediately put me deep in that briny abyss as a diver, chained to the floor of an underwater cave. It’s a classic cold open setup. Held captive with no idea as to how or why you got here, and unsure how to get out of it. It pulls back the corner of its underlying mystery ever so slightly by making its first reveal.
I could possess a nearby fish. It’s a toothy-looking fella, sort of like a piranha, and it enforces that by being able to chomp through the chain on my foot and set me free. Signposted by the game or not, my first instinct is to swim upwards in hope of finding a way out.
Outside the chamber, Silt’s hand-drawn art style conjured up a haunting monochrome labyrinth of caves that have the unsettling appearance of undersea foliage, and humongous internal organs. Hammerhead sharks roamed the area, curious of my avatar if I drew near, but only attacking if I dared to get up close and personal. Possessing them allowed me to break sturdy barriers that prevented my progression, and off I swam through the gloom once more.
It then became clear that there was a reason for the scenery looking a little too…organic. The exit of this cave system was in fact, the large maw of some monstrous sea creature. Freedom of sorts had been achieved, but it really drives home how gargantuan the ocean depths are.
The best, most nerve-wracking section of the demo was still to come, however. Gaining access to a claustrophobic, dark tunnel, a glowing thing like an anemone drifted lazily at its entrance, and as I got closer, it began to move away, luring me into the pitch-black pocket. Obviously, I knew it wasn’t likely to lead to anything but another undersea abomination, but it was the only viable route out. The journey to that discovery ensured I wouldn’t be stalling.
As I chased down the glowing lure, it agitated striped eel-like creatures hiding in the rocky walls of the tunnel, as I passed them, they began to pursue. Before I knew it, I was rushing towards one fate whilst escaping another as several of these eels could just about be seen snapping at the diver’s flippers in the inky darkness behind. It’s the standout moment of the whole demo, and I’m eager to see if Spiral Circus can continue to tap into that special kind of dread throughout the full game.
Gaming’s Spookiest Ghost Ships
Through the other side of that nightmare tunnel, I came into a wider chamber, where the glowing beacon of doom drew closer to its source, and ultimately, revealed itself as the threat I’d assumed it to be. What followed was a strategic use of evasion to destroy the barriers preventing my escape from this new, hungry leviathan. The demo ends shortly after the conclusion of that encounter.
Silt certainly has a lot of promise at this stage. The art style evokes the mood of Playdead’s Limbo and Inside, but manages to put its own, more visually detailed spin on that. It’s pulling off undersea dread on a 2D plane, which is no mean feat, and it’s already offering up an enticing amount of ambiguity that leads to driving questions about where the journey will take our diver.
Silt preview demo played on PC.
Silt is available on all platforms later in 2022. Demo is available now on PC.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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