Game review: Silent Age
Silent Age is a great point-and-click adventure about time travel (not to be confused with Broken Age, which I didn't think much of).
It looks quite low-budget, and the dev team in the credits is small, with one person doing most of the design, writing and programming. It's partially voice-acted, which is unusual: conversations between the protagonist and other characters are voiced, but his reactions to player commands are just text. I suppose this is logical, because they're his thoughts rather than speech, but I haven't seen it before; I've only seen games which are fully voiced or not at all.
The plot is great, and, like many time-travel plots, fuelled late-night discussion.
The dialogue is OK, nothing special.
The puzzles are fun and entertaining. They are simpler than some, but surprisingly challenging given the nature of the game, which is very linear, with relatively small locations. The character discards most inventory items as soon as they've been used (even really useful-looking ones like knives and top-level security access cards), which means your inventory only ever has two or three things in it. Each new location is a new chapter in the game, and there's no going back to previous locations, so each chapter is almost like a locked-room puzzle: you know the solution has to be nearby. As a result, they haven't bothered to implement savegames: instead, once you've reached and unlocked a chapter, you may start from that chapter on a future occasion, and because the game is so linear, there's nothing you could have done in previous chapters to change the way later chapters play out.
The developers have thought about many of the incorrect things you might try, and given them custom responses, rather than a generic "That won't work", which is pleasing.
The puzzles really make use of time travel - like Day of the Tentacle, but in a different way. In DOTT you have three characters in three different time periods, who can send each other items, or strategically use items in one time period to affect a later time period. In Silent Age there's one character who can jump back and forth between the 1970s and the 2010s, so there's a bit of that as well, doing something in the past to have an effect in the future, but there's also a lot of actual time travelling, as opposed to remaining in one time for most of the game. He uses time travel as a way to escape danger, and he also uses the time dimension very much like an extra spatial dimension, allowing him to "go around" obstacles. If a door is locked in 1972, it might not be in 2012, so you jump forward, walk through the open door, and jump back.
It looks quite low-budget, and the dev team in the credits is small, with one person doing most of the design, writing and programming. It's partially voice-acted, which is unusual: conversations between the protagonist and other characters are voiced, but his reactions to player commands are just text. I suppose this is logical, because they're his thoughts rather than speech, but I haven't seen it before; I've only seen games which are fully voiced or not at all.
The plot is great, and, like many time-travel plots, fuelled late-night discussion.
The dialogue is OK, nothing special.
The puzzles are fun and entertaining. They are simpler than some, but surprisingly challenging given the nature of the game, which is very linear, with relatively small locations. The character discards most inventory items as soon as they've been used (even really useful-looking ones like knives and top-level security access cards), which means your inventory only ever has two or three things in it. Each new location is a new chapter in the game, and there's no going back to previous locations, so each chapter is almost like a locked-room puzzle: you know the solution has to be nearby. As a result, they haven't bothered to implement savegames: instead, once you've reached and unlocked a chapter, you may start from that chapter on a future occasion, and because the game is so linear, there's nothing you could have done in previous chapters to change the way later chapters play out.
The developers have thought about many of the incorrect things you might try, and given them custom responses, rather than a generic "That won't work", which is pleasing.
The puzzles really make use of time travel - like Day of the Tentacle, but in a different way. In DOTT you have three characters in three different time periods, who can send each other items, or strategically use items in one time period to affect a later time period. In Silent Age there's one character who can jump back and forth between the 1970s and the 2010s, so there's a bit of that as well, doing something in the past to have an effect in the future, but there's also a lot of actual time travelling, as opposed to remaining in one time for most of the game. He uses time travel as a way to escape danger, and he also uses the time dimension very much like an extra spatial dimension, allowing him to "go around" obstacles. If a door is locked in 1972, it might not be in 2012, so you jump forward, walk through the open door, and jump back.