Now I know I am very late to this review, like 2-3 years late, but I simply don't care. I have seen this game featured on the Appstore many times, but I've never decided to try it out even though the first episode was totally free. Maybe it was the app icon, maybe it was the screenshots, somehow it didn't appear enticing. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg1xkPLJFro
The Silent Age is a fantastic game, one that does pretty much everything right. First, the story it tells is really intriguing. It's a story set initially in the Cold War era filled with government secret projects, sabotage, conspiracies and most importantly, time travel. As Joe Average, a simple janitor working for a tech firm in the 1970's, you quickly become the center of what happened and what's going to happen in the non-so-distant future. As you go and uncover the secrets of the firm you are working for, you meet a time traveler who bears news of impending doom and you have to save the world. How are you gonna do that? Well, time travel!
The gameplay is very reminiscent of old-school point-and-click adventure games and well, the execution is pretty damn good. However, unlike those old adventure games, the puzzles in The Silent Age are pretty much logic based with a few exceptions here and there. The time travel device offers up a cool mechanic of going back and forth from present to the future uncovering the dark secrets of what, why and how it happened. And all of that is done surprisingly well, going back and forth to the different timelines trying to find items to use in solving the many puzzles.
Some solutions are straight forward, a key to unlock a door or a hammer to break a lock, but some other ones are multi-step meaning that you'll have to think a little before the solution comes to you. So you might have to find a syringe in the past, fill it with gasoline, travel to the future to find an empty lighter, but the next step isn't what you might expect. Nope, you don't have to fill the lighter, but instead use the syringe to spread gasoline on some wooden planks you found in the past and light them up using the spark from the lighter so the smoke can clear out a wasp hive in the future opening a new door for you to go in. I liked this back then and I love it right now and I am really glad someone from the game approached to ask me to review the game, even though that's not the whole story.
You see, The Silent Age is now available on the Apple TV and I was asked to review that version, but since my Apple TV is 3000km away from where I am currently staying, that wasn't really possible, so I opted for the next best thing, the iOS version. The presentation is on point and it embodies the perfect atmosphere. As the title suggests, it's a silent age, especially the future, and you feel that. The colors are muted, the visual style is simple yet very detailed and the music is hauntingly beautiful. Something bad has happened, you are alone in this world and you experience that. As per usual, with any game, I can spend hours talking about the small details such as the rust on the metal or the overgrown plants to give the idea that many years have passed after mankind has gone extinct, but you better see that for yourself when you play the game yourself.
That's about it, the game has been out for quite a while now. There are two episodes, the first one being totally free, so there is no reason to not try it. Both episodes are great, the puzzles are great, the story is very intriguing and the presentation is atmospheric AF. I played it on my iPhone, totally awesome, but if you have access to an Apple TV, I would highly advise you to play it on a big screen. Thanks for reading!
