Silent Hope from Marvelous and Xseed Games is a refreshing take on the roguelike dungeon crawling experience. Players will dive into the Abyss and face off against monsters and other creatures as they try to save a world devoid of words.
Is Silent Hope a title you should pick up and what exactly makes it worthwhile ?
Silent Hope
Players in Silent Hope will take on the role of 1 of 7 distinct heroes. The story of the game kicks off with an intro cinematic that explains what happened to the world. A calamity befell the kingdom in Silent Hope and a once powerful King took to the Abyss with all the world’s words. His daughter, distraught and overcome with grief, cried for a century, eventually encasing herself in her own crystal tears.
Now, fast forward to the present, 7 great heroes have been drawn to the Princess and she tasks them with rescuing the King from the Abyss. Silent Hope features a beautiful intro cinematic and players should definitely view this before diving into the game.
The game itself gets you up to speed with its mechanics quite quickly with a very straightforward tutorial. Silent Hope is extremely easy to grasp and this is great since both younger and older gamers alike can dive right in and start enjoying themselves. Gameplay in Silent Hope involves picking a Hero from the line-up of 7 and then venturing into the Abyss. In the Abyss, you’ll have to traverse the mysterious lands and face off against monsters. Defeating the monsters is required in order to progress further.
Gameplay Loop
The gameplay loop will be very familiar to those who have played games in the genre before. You’ll simply pick a hero, dive into a dungeon/Abyss, defeat enemies, and choose to either progress further or return back to the surface world where it’s safe. Rinse and repeat. Things get slightly more complicated the further you get into the game since you’ll start to unlock new things though. These being new crafting materials, new forging materials, new food items and of course, new weapons.
Since you’ll only be able to venture into the Abyss with 1 of the 7 Heroes at a time, the others will chill back at the base and make themselves useful by doing other things such as crafting and refining items. This also means that while you’re adventuring out in the Abyss, you can be creating new items back at the base at the same time. This works ridiculously well for Silent Hope since you can queue up some items to be crafted and then head into the Abyss to spend some time getting more materials for crafting. The gameplay loop works extremely well in this regard.
Where things do hit a bit of a snag lies with the fact that by playing as 1 Hero at a time, you’ll have to swap over to another one to level them up and unlock more of their abilities and skills. This can become extremely tedious and annoying, especially if you’ve latched onto 1 specific Hero and enjoy their play style the most. It would have been amazing if we could swap between heroes on the fly instead of only at specific points in the game.
Having access to all 7 characters at the touch of a button would have really elevated the game and created potential for numerous combos and more. Unfortunately this isn’t the case here and was a missed opportunity.
The difficulty curve also ramps itself up quite quickly and the earlier levels will seem like child’s play compared to the challenge that awaits you in the later stages. The story of Silent Hope also seems to take a backseat at some point. The Princess does do her best at getting things across to you but don’t expect an insane amount of in-depth lore here. It’s fairly basic storytelling throughout and you’ll be left with a lot of questions.
Silent Hope’s charm lies with its graphical style. The game features Chibi characters that look visually appealing and the environments look great. Enemy attacks, your own attacks and your skills look beautiful in action and there isn’t much to fault here. The game’s overall look fits it perfectly. Silent Hope’s boss battles can be a bit of a hit and miss affair with some being rather predictable or annoying to fight but they do look formidable at least. This gives you a sense of satisfaction when you finally beat them.
Silent Hope’s soundtrack is great with music that isn’t annoying but is rather catchy. The soundtrack is just as good as the gameplay itself and there is voice acting in the game which is done quite well.
Overall, Silent Hope is a very enjoyable roguelike title with a cute Chibi anime aesthetic that would honestly be perfectly suited for the Nintendo Switch. Playing the game on Steam made me wish I had a Steam Deck to play this title on. It’s great to pick up and play in short bursts as you do a quick run through a dungeon, return back to your base camp and put some stuff to craft before venturing out again.
The gameplay loop and the rewards tied to it keep you going and it’s very enjoyable despite the minor grievances mentioned above. Silent Hope doesn’t overstay its welcome either with a story that will take you roughly around 15 hours to get through depending on your playstyle and what you’re doing in the game. This is a title I can recommend if you’re looking for something fun, challenging and enjoyable to spend a few hours in.
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