The Silent Age (PC) - Review
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 10 June 2015 / 4,303 Views
Stylish, easy, and intriguing are but a few of the words you could use to describe House of Fire's The Silent Age, an episodic Android game which has made its way to the PC via Steam. Having never played the original on iOS or Android, I decided to give the game a go after viewing an intriguing trailer for the game which showed off a stylistic atmosphere and potentially interesting storyline.
The Silent Age kicks off in an ordinary office environment. Our protagonist, Joe, has received a note asking him to speak with the management straight away. It’s at this point that you learn how to move Joe through the environment, and the game's transition from touch screen controls becomes blindingly obvious, as you click the cursor wherever you’d like Joe to investigate or move towards. Just like any other traditional adventure game, some items can be picked up, combined, and used at opportune moments to ensure your progress through the story.
Joe is informed that he's been promoted (albeit a promotion without a pay rise or a new title), and promptly ordered downstairs into the heart of the building to complete some engineering work, but only after using your puzzle solving skills to open locked doors. Oh, and you have to find an injured man who gives you some sort of time travelling device. Now things start to get interesting.
The time travelling device allows Joe to travel between the future and present with ease, adding a whole new layer to the puzzles on offer. One of the best uses for the device surfaces once you start trying to navigate the environment. The future may contain, for example, destroyed walls, and this allows you to bypass certain obstacles to progress.
Whilst this time travelling mechanic is brilliant in theory, in practice the puzzles are far too simplistic. Players can (and will) click on items at random to solve even the most complex puzzles on offer in The Silent Age with absolute ease. The Silent Age's puzzles are intelligently designed, but it's difficult to shake the feeling that The Silent Age is more an interactive novel than an actual adventure game.
Thankfully, all is not lost - the time travelling ability adds a great narrative layer to the story, which is initially mundane but soon becomes a mish-mash of confusion and delight. The apocalyptic trips to the future also do a great job of providing a fantastic contrast to Joe’s mundane daily life, with semi-familiar environments transforming into hellish scenes.
And it's a great story overall, one filled with clever subplots that explore aspects of political philosophy and time travel paradoxes. Given how sparse the dialogue between characters is it's also a testament to House of Fire's writing talent that Joe manages to become a very well fleshed-out character, and his internal thoughts being spoken out loud builds cleverly on this sense of character.
What stands out most of all in The Silent Age is its sense of style. The environments are beautiful; they're filled with colour and interesting and unusual scenes. There’s not much in the way of music or sound effects, which makes the game's atmosphere feel a bit hollow at times (the silent age indeed!), but the art style is so rich that I really didn’t mind.
Was The Silent Age for PC worth the wait considering the original, episodic mobile version launched two years ago? Well, playing it all the way through without waiting between episodes certainly has its advantages, but the short play time (it's ~two hours long) and simplistic puzzles really do hold the game back. The narrative is well written and it's a very stylish title, and that will be enough for it to be of interest to many adventure genre fans, but for most gamers The Simple Age will be a very short and only somewhat sweet title.
This review is based on a digital copy of The Silent Age for the PC, provided by the publisher.
