After enjoying Detention, I decided to try another frightening 2D puzzle/exploration game that has been on my to-do list for a long time. 'Silence of the Sleep' was released in 2014 and was developed by Jesse Makkonen. I've played a good chunk of the game, but not finished it quite yet, so consider these my "first impressions." I have some major high points and major frustrations to talk about.
Scary Flair
Silence of the Sleep is very atmospheric. It's dark, desaturated and depressing in sight and sound. Its backgrounds and environments consist of detailed drawings, while the characters - including the main character - are all silhouettes. This strong contrast means characters stick out nicely in lit areas, but are very hard to see in darker areas - you may lose sight of yourself if you're not paying attention. The first thing I noticed about the characters in Silence of the Sleep is how richly detailed the character animation is. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the smooth animation in the very first scene, and it stayed just as detailed after that.
The game has a few good and bad choices in terms of visual communication. Sometimes the objects to be interacted with are barely visible in the foreground or background - something that's made even worse by how dark the game is - and you need to turn in the proper direction to examine them (more on that when we discuss the gameplay). An example of good visual communication occurs in an area with a lot more characters; not all of them can be interacted with, so characters that are important are given something to break up their silhouette like a white shirt or red haircut.
The game's monsters - of which I have encountered 2 so far - are frightening and very uncanny-looking. They have humanoid parts, but clearly aren't just ghosts. You can only see their silhouettes, as with all characters, which is a benefit as well. You can tell that they are very deformed, frightening looking humanoids but a lot is ultimately left up to the imagination. The first time the player is in true danger of being attacked by a monster, you get an impressively scary scripted sequence as well. In this segment you're stuck in a bathroom and desperately trying to get into one of the stalls to hide, while the monster slowly approaches the door. You even get a view outside the room so you can see the monster approach in real time, making the tension even worse.
Speaking of the monsters, the game's soundtrack is as good as its visuals. Quiet hallways with atmospheric noise are broken up by the occasional somber piano or jazzy accompaniment. There isn't really much in the way of voice acting, but the monsters make some very disquieting sounds. The first monster sounds somewhere between a bird of prey and a human, while the second one sounds like an ambiguous animal with awful distortions and glitching.
The game is usually pleasant to the eye, but when you're hiding from enemies or looking through a special lens you get a ways into the game, the visuals with intense red colors and distortions can become quite unpleasant to look at. It's probably intentional, but that doesn't stop it from hurting your eyes if you stare at it for too long.
All in all, the game's presentation is quite excellent. Beautifully animated characters and unsettling monsters over richly detailed backgrounds, and a soundtrack encompassing beautiful melancholy tracks as well as terrifying background noise. Sometimes things can be a little unclear or just a bit too intense, but these moments are mercifully rare.
From Terrifying to Tedious (Gameplay)
Silence of the Sleep starts out strong. It's slow-paced, but many of these 2D puzzle exploration games are. To give you a brief overview of how it plays:
You can move left and right with the A and D keys, run with shift, look forward with W and backward with D. You press E to interact and F to toggle your flashlight. You can also aim the flashlight with the mouse, although the function is underused. You can access your inventory by holding space, and the currently held item is automatically used on things you interact with.
The game mostly consists from walking from left to right, entering rooms and examining things. Nothing too unusual yet, but there are a few small problems from the start that eventually develop into major roadblocks. One of these is the fact that you need to turn forward or backward to examine things that are in background or foreground. While turning from left to right and vice versa is instaneous, turning forward and backward takes a little while. You need to wait for the animation to play, and you can't turn from forward to backward instantly either. This makes exploration a little bit slower than it needs to be, but gets downright frustrating in dangerous situations where you need to quickly run from room to room. It feels a little unfair to get caught by a monster because the character turned around to face the door too slowly.
It's not just limited to turning and interacting with doors; most of the trouble begins once the monsters show up properly. Before then, it's just an atmospheric puzzle game, but the monsters bring new mechanics with them that quickly wear out their welcome. For starters, after the first scripted appearance of a monster, it begins to patrol the hallways but won't enter any of the rooms. The initial rules are simple: If the monster sees you, it charges at you. If the monster touches you, you're dead. There is no health or anything; if a monster gets you, that's a game over. You run the risk of walking straight into a monster when coming out the door, so the game offers a new mechanic as a solution; peeking through the door, an option you get by right clicking while in front of a door. These moments feel very tense, offering you a narrow view through the door as you see the monster shamble past, but there's no risk of getting caught. The charm wears off quickly if you get unlucky with the monster's positioning and end up having to wait several times before you can finally get from A to B. The only really frustrating section with the initial monster was a variation of the mechanic they introduced earlier; listening through the door. The sound is a lot less precise than just seeing the monster pass by and knowing where it is, which means it was possible to enter the hallway and realize the monster is still too close for you to reach the door in between. You would then be forced to run back and wait again.
But the frustrations with the first monster were relatively minor compared to the second one, which introduced a whole lot of new ideas... and problems. The monster in the second area is a natural evolution of the first. It works in much the same way, but doesn't just patrol hallways; it can enter rooms and follow you inside them as well when it's chasing you. In theory, this is a great idea. It means you can't just escape the monster by entering any room. Of course, this would mean that you can never escape it, so another new mechanic is added to the pile - hiding. If you stand behind a stack of cardboard boxes and turn off your flashlight, you'll go into hiding mode. You'll know hiding mode is active because the screen will turn into an eye destroying red. If the monster enters the room with you and tries to find you while you're hiding, you'll have to play a weird kind of minigame where you need to keep the mouse cursor on a specific area in a moving slider, probably to simulate the idea of keeping your balance or holding your breath. I failed this the first time due to how quickly you're expected to respond to the bar appearing at the top right. This could be my own fault, but I still feel it could've been a little clearer.
Strangely enough, the game is very inconsistent with which doors can be peeked through or listened at, and neither mechanic is used much in this section. As a matter of fact, the second monster is very loud and you'll usually be able to tell when it's in the next room or hallway, which makes you wonder why a mechanic involving listening at the door was even introduced in the first place - it seems unnecessary. I know it was intended to let the player determine the distance by sound, but it's used for that purpose exactly once. Regardless, the monster patrols around the significantly larger area randomly as you try to solve the puzzles within.
The best horror games know that one of the biggest mistakes is overplaying your hand. If the player gets exposed to a particular threat or scare too much, they'll become numb to it. That's exactly what happened with the second monster. The area is large and its puzzles span across multiple hallways and rooms, which means you had no choice but to sneak past or hide from the monster several times. The first time I saw and heard it, my heart almost skipped a beat, but after a while, hearing its distinctive sound as it emerged from a door just made me sigh and roll my eyes. Sneaking and waiting for extended periods to prevent instant death doesn't gel that well with puzzle gameplay. There is a reason why beloved horror classics like Silent Hill 2 allow you to defend yourself and don't have many enemies that can kill you instantly; if it was any different, the puzzles spanning huge multi-room areas would just get annoying. Unfortunately, Silence of the Sleep does make that mistake.
The puzzles themselves vary, but I found myself enjoying them. They aren't overly complicated, but some of them are quite inventive - there are puzzles involving you using a special lens that can reveal hidden things if you zoom in on them just right, for example. For the rest, a lot of puzzles simply involve finding and using the right items in the right place, just like a point and click adventure. I did find some of the puzzles to be a little bit unclear, however; sometimes they drop you in a completely separate screen (some of which you can't back out of) and don't explain the rules very well. Some people might enjoy being forced to experiment with the controls on the fly, but I prefer that the rules be made clear from the start.
The pacing of the horror segments is a bit strange. There were no monsters in the prologue, there was a monster in the ending segment of chapter 1, the entirety of chapter 2 was spent being chased by a monster and I've seen no monster in chapter 3 yet, even though I'm a ways into it. If I had to guess, the game is building towards a climax in chapter 4; I'll probably update this article when I'm done with the game proper to let you know.
All in all, the gameplay is fine on the surface, but problems emerge when the slow movement and multi-room puzzle solving are combined with annoying instant death monsters that are impossible to completely avoid. The puzzles are fun, but could be better explained at times. The game's insistence on mapping movement to the keyboard and leaving only minor interactions to the mouse feels counterproductive for a game with point and click type gameplay.
Grieving Reeves (Story)
Like so many horror stories, Silence of the Sleep ultimately revolves around human suffering. You play as a man called Jacob Reeves. At the very start of the story, he attempts to take his own life. This causes him to end up in a strange place with no clear memory of why he even tried to commit suicide in the first place. The game does give it its own spin, but it's hard to deny that the concept of a person facing symbolic horrors to come to terms with their past is a bit cliché in horror at this point.
This strange world Jacob has entered has very little consistency, with doors and elevators leading from a bar to a motel to a family house. It feels like it's built up from fragments of Jacob's memory. One of the only stable factors is a strange man who refuses to tell you his name, but does regularly advice you on what and who to trust. It's unclear if you can trust him, however, and while he regularly calls himself Jacob's friend, he can be very cruel and mean-spirited. There is one particularly shocking scene I won't spoil, but needless to say, it moved my opinion of this character from "trustworthy" to "not sure."
The mysterious man tells Jacob that his goal is to find out why he tried to take his own life. All the locations, monsters and puzzles seem to represent something about his past, though at the time of writing this, it still needs to come together for me. I won't spoil it either way, since I do want people interested in trying the game to find out for themselves.
The game's characters are compelling, particularly the mystery man and Jacob's psychiatrist, and the writing is snappy and simple in a good way. The game isn't afraid to have a sense of humor, despite the grim circumstances, and there are a surprising amount of distinctive characters once you get a ways into chapter 3.
I don't know if the game has multiple endings as of yet, but it does have a great deal of choices, some of which do impact your immediate environment. I'll enjoy watching other people experience this game after I finish it, as I'd love to hear their thoughts and see how their choices pan out.
All in all, symbolism and snappy dialogue tell a compelling story in Silence of the Sleep. The initial setup is on the cliché side, but the story has its own spin and unique flavor that make it worth looking into.
Conclusion
Silence of the Sleep scores highly when it comes to its presentation and narrative. It's beautiful, atmospheric, has detailed animation and a variety of musical tracks ranging from threatening to somber to even uplifting. Its story shares similarities with other horror games tackling grief or guilt in a symbolic manner, but it has enough of its own flavor and compelling characters that this isn't a problem.
The game really only falls short in terms of gameplay, and unfortunately, that is a major part. Tedious and overly complicated controls, an underutilized mouse and frustrating monster encounters damage the otherwise tense stealth segments and entertaining puzzles. The game is pretty cheap, though, so I still highly recommend it to fans of horror games. To everyone else, the frustration just might not be worth it. If you're interested, you can buy it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/321870/Silence_of_the_Sleep/
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And that's that! I'm glad I got another Spooktober article out. I'll try to do at least one more, but we'll see. After all, surprises are a big part of the October cheer. Please let me know what you thought of 'Silence of the Sleep' if you played it yourself.