Fade to silence is a particular survival set in a completely snowy and perpetually cold world. A catastrophe has struck our beloved land, reducing it to a harsh and desolate land. Will one of the few survivors with the help of his daughter succeed in making life grow again on the planet?
Survival in the ice
In this arid and inhospitable world, a survivor by name Ash he wakes up fresh from the apocalypse and with the incredible ability to hear and see a ghost known as the "Internal Voice". This demon who will accompany us all the way, will only instigate and mock us for all the attempts to recover what has now been lost. The world we knew is dead and the creatures of Eldritch they wander around the map, eating what is left of it.
The initial narrative does not explain how the world got to this point. Step by step, outpost after outpost, we will be able to glimpse something more in a broken way thanks to the backstories of the protagonist and the stories of the few survivors we will meet. The choice of the developers to make everything as "foggy" as possible is not wrong at all: only by surviving until the end will we be able to get a complete picture of this icy story.
From the beginning Fade to silence will offer us the possibility to choose between two very different modes: Survival and Exploration. The first offers a really difficult adventure to face: players will in fact have only a handful of lives available, very limited resources, the strongest and most difficult monsters to eliminate and, at the beginning of the game, they will have only three lives, known as Flames of hope. Once the three possibilities are finished, users will lose all progress accumulated up to that point and any conquests will be canceled, thus forcing them to start over.
This is a difficult mode because once you run out of Flames of Hope, players will have to find new companions, will lose the building progress they have obtained and will have fewer and fewer resources. Fortunately, the developers have seen fit to offer solutions to make the "death" something less tragic. In fact, by playing it will be possible to collect micro-crystals that will permanently strengthen the basic statistics of the character and moreover, every time we conquer a new outpost, we will earn some Shards of Hope, which will unlock the ability to activate small aids from a perk tree. The benefits range from more substantial initial stocks, to the opportunity to keep certain weapons and constructions intact, to an increase in the number of attempts granted.
As for the primary resources to be found in order to survive, the players will have to concentrate on collecting food and wood: the cold will play tricks, your character both to survive and to fight in fact needs "energy", as well as refreshment. warm where you can retire after long hikes. Our character's life will always keep going down if we're not good at managing our resources. Precisely for this reason we are sure that a significant part of the game, especially at the beginning, will be of managerial base, where we will be forced to manage different situations, such as the collection of minerals and the updating of buildings to produce ever stronger and more effective weapons.
Tackling the game in mode Exploration instead, everything we have told you disappears: there will no longer be indicators of cold and hunger, there will no longer be permadeath and the whole game will flow in a linear and calmer way, giving you time to comfortably spin around the entire game map (it's not small).
gameplay
Immediately after unlocking your initial shelter, you can start collecting the first resources to fill the deposit. The first part of the gameplay will be, as we had already anticipated, very slow: in fact, you will lose hours to collect resources and to understand which buildings to start building to increase the defenses of your shelter. Doing all this alone will not be easy, for this very reason Ash will start gathering followers.
Each character that we manage to conquer and bring with us will have special characteristics and unique abilities, and can also be taken with us as a hunting companion for very demanding expeditions. The thing we found most fun is the presence of a co-op mode, in which you can invite a friend to take control of the game. PNG and go exploring together. In any case, players will have to extricate themselves in this managerial environment, deciding whether to send their allies to collect wood, meat and minerals or whether to have them build, based on their characteristics, additional weapons, objects or equipment.
Black forest games wanted to introduce this crafting system within a purely survival title such as Fade to silence. Throwing yourself into this production must not have been easy and for this reason in playing we find that some dynamics are quite clumsy and little studied. Without a real internal clock, the timing to build buildings and objects are not consistent and this could make those who love this genre of games turn up their noses.
Fade to silence it offers an ambiguous and alternating degree of challenge. During the first hour of the game it is very important to understand the various mechanisms and dynamics. The more the player comes into contact with the environment and with the game, the more various tricks are understood to simplify the collection of resources. In mode Survival, the management of the followers will allow you to dictate the law and manage the dynamics in a fairly homogeneous way: in fact, even after a storm, or after a fight, you just have to reset the commands and everything will return to normal.
Even conquering an outpost will make your adventure much easier: in fact, after having freed it from the disease that gripped it, you just need to press a button to see the nests for the crystals appear on the map and also any other point of interest present in that area, removing that nice wandering that could please a lot of players.
Unfortunately in the long run the fights will become repetitive due to the lack of differentiation of the monsters (there are only a handful of enemies that sometimes change color and have some peculiarities, but which perform the same function). The lack of variety of opponents makes us use repetitive strategies that after a while tend to get boring. To increase the sense of frustration there are also several bugs and glitches (PC version) that unfortunately do not help: it happened a few times to get stuck while we were fighting (dying and consuming a life for a bug does not offer good feelings) or while we used the sled, and there are also blows that penetrate the shelters and so on.
Unexploded potential
We must admit that, graphically, Fade to silence it's awesome. When played at peak performance, the title delivers sensational visuals, giving us a sense of unparalleled despair and misery as we strive to survive. The boys of Black forest games they've done a huge job and the title perfectly conveys the essence of a post-apocalyptic world where survival is certainly not child's play.
Even the choice of such a segmented narrative helps players to move forward trying to survive and at the same time discover the story behind the past events. Too bad that the difficulty level, sometimes a little high, is taken to extremes by the various bugs and glitches present and this could drive away the newbies of the genre. For all the rest Fade to Silence has completely unlimited potential, thanks to a setting and a never banal theme that seem very contextualized to the fashion of the moment. However, this title has several technical flaws, which we hope will be fixed by the arrival of updates and patches, so that it can express its true potential, giving a sense of great adventure to all lovers of the survival genre.
