Children of Silentown – Review
Elf Games and Luna2 Studio created Children of Silentown, which was then published by Daedalic Entertainment as a point-and-click adventure game focused on storytelling. Lucy, one of the wide-eyed children of Silentown, a village hidden beneath a forest populated by monsters, is the protagonist of this disturbing tale. With her inquisitive mind and her feeling of duty, Lucy sets out to discover the truth about the beasts in the forest and the mysterious disappearances from Silentown.
Missing people, both young and old, are a typical occurrence in Silentown. Adults insist that a curfew is necessary for your safety, and that if you observe it, you won’t get into trouble. The villagers must keep their voices down and not make any unnecessary noise. People who wander into the woods are rarely seen again, and most people are too terrified to go looking for them. So, Silentown has developed into a silent community ruled by fear and paranoia, where those who mysteriously vanish are held responsible for whatever happens to them.
Throughout the first few chapters, the protagonist and the other kids primarily spend their time playing games like hide and seek and doing chores for the townspeople. Being a point-and-click adventure, the bulk of your time in Silentown will be spent exploring the various hand-drawn areas in search of things and objects you can use. A grappling hook, for example, is nothing more than a fishing hook and some rope strung together to provide a new tool with which to deal with a variety of issues.
For the most part, exploring entails a lot of tiresome backtracking between spots and a lot of combing the screen to look for any overlooked details. Whenever I got stopped on a puzzle, it was because I was missing a crucial piece of information or because I hadn’t considered using the same object in multiple locations. However, it would have been wonderful to have the option to call up some form of suggestions or clues to help prod you in the right direction when you get stuck, especially on the more difficult tasks.
Lucy has a talent for singing, and after mastering the notes, she can perform various songs, even though noise is discouraged in Silentown. Lucy has the ability to utilise her songs to learn new information about the past by stimulating memories in her fellow villagers and by using artefacts in their homes. The music chosen determines the difficulty of a mechanical problem that must be solved in order to access a previously hidden memory.
Examples of memory puzzles include tracing a trail across a piece of fabric, lighting up a grid of tiles in a specific sequence, and assembling a gear train to form a pipeline. These puzzles provided a welcome diversion from the sometimes monotonous nature of exploring while also satisfyingly testing the player’s mettle. While the game’s environmental puzzles get progressively better, several late-game gameplay changes feel neglected in light of the game’s earlier puzzles.
There is no spoken dialogue in this story other than the narrator; instead, all discussion is shown through text and speech bubbles. When she uses songs, though, Lucy does actually sing a few notes. While you click around hand-drawn scenes and environments in subdued jewel tones and gentle shadows, a melancholy piano piece plays in the background.
Children of Silentown gives the player the illusion of agency by presenting them with a few dialogue choices here and there. If Lucy picks the right response in a given event, she can strengthen her relationship with specific villages and learn useful information from them.
The narrative in Children of Silentown is excellent. With each new chapter, the game’s story grows more compelling. I wanted to learn the truth about the disappearances and the woodland monsters as soon as possible.
The second half is much more action-packed than the first, but unfortunately the game peters out towards the conclusion, leaving me with more questions than answers. Unlocking the game’s many endings requires more than just going through the last chapter again. There is no chapter selection and the game autosaves as you play, so if you want a different ending once you’ve completed the game or want to grab any missed collectibles, you’ll have to start over from the beginning, which I wasn’t inspired to do after my original gameplay.
Children of Silentown is an engaging story that highlights how fear can cause individuals to lose sight of what is important, despite some stumbling at the end. The puzzles are a fair challenge and vary in style, and the game’s dark aesthetic serves to enhance this. I would suggest Children of Silentown to fans of the point-and-click genre and puzzle games in general, despite some slow spots in the story.
