



About Fade to Silence

Developer: Black Forest Games

Publisher: THQ Nordic

Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, and PC

Release Date: April 30th, 2019

Price: $29.99

Reviewed On: PS4 Pro

Review Code Provided: Yes, by THQ Nordic

Fade to Silence isn’t your average run of the mill, happy go lucky game. It has you starting off essentially with your death, think like a respawn from a bonfire in the SoulsBorne series. Ash awakens stuck in a cave and you must grab a torch and break free. You walk out of this cave to your village burning to the ground, leaving just your stronghold left. You then find a monumentally large floating island in the sky. This island will essentially just annoy the living piss out of you as it drops cars, bombs, and various other means of trying to kill you. A red sphere on the ground will appear and that is what you’ll want to avoid as seconds later it will harm you. The rough and demoralizing treck around the world to discover secrets from the past and answers to what is going on definitely isn’t something of joy for the player, I can assure you that.

There are points around the world where you have to free the area from corruption by giving your…. life, per say, to these alter like areas. Each time your life bar gets even smaller until you die. It’ll essentially act like a freezing point. So each time you de-corrupt an altar, that 10% of life can’t be regained unless you rest enough at a campfire. The incredible blizzard system is how you really start losing health as you freeze yourself to death (make sure to craft a hut). One neat thing is you can save people from this corruption, you can then invite them to stay at your camp. They will eat your food and drain your supplies but in return, they will defend your area from being taken over by various threats. Wolves can also be added to your faction, hell, you can even go sledding with them. This little stronghold is where your daughter Alice lives. The world is full of areas where you can chop down wood, mine copper, and hunt deer. Doing so will allow people under your support to gain resources while you are away to make sure they have supplies.

Pressing Square will initiate an attack while Triangle will be your “heavy attack”. So the fighting scheme seems to be the same as most games with sword combat. The game resembles Dark Souls and BloodBorne, since you have a meter that relies on stamina. So a few heavy attacks later and you won’t be able to dodge attacks with moving the left analog stick and Circle. At any point, while you have a bow on your person alongside arrows, you can press L2 to quickly equip your bow. For whatever reason, the developers decided to make R1 the jump button which is… odd. You’d expect something like Cross or Triangle to be the jump button so I often forget how to get up somewhere. The one downside of the controls is they’re very heavy and chunky. You do not feel light at all and it makes for an uncomforable experience.







When you liberate strongholds, you can get a Light of Hope which is how you can revive after you die. Unfortunately, when you die you then lose a Light of Hope which means you have less of a chance to beat the game. This is because once all your Light of Hopes run out, the darkness consumes you and then you have to restart the game over again. You can collect abilities along the way that can help you around next time you revive. This is absolutely an unforgiving game to the point I had to restart the game from scratch in Exploration Mode since it was too challenging of an experience. I made it…. around 70% based on the map through the game on Survival Mode and got frustrated after having to go back to the beginning of the game 4-5 times after losing all my Light of Hopes.

The enemies are some of the most overpowered foes I’ve faced in a game, easily. There is this… corrupted wolf type enemy that I could NEVER beat so I had to run around the other way next time after I respawned to hide from it. Bringing a survivor alongside you is a perfect way to distract the enemy at hand so you can sneak around without having to deal with them is my best suggestion if you do not want to deal with them like I rather not. Armor hardly helps as well, if you get hit then you really get HIT.

Graphically this game is just an average looking title. When far away the game looks detailed but up close is when you can see textures seem questionable. The graphical quality is on part with something like The Technomancer, so not quite AAA but you can tell it wouldn’t be possible on last-generation platforms. When looking at fur, it is just straight up pixelated. So not so pretty to look at while the rest of the game is so much better looking.

At the end of the day, Fade to Silence is a unique concept of a game. The unforgiving nature of it all coupled with the survival aspects of the game are a welcomed feature. The frozen hellscape is a sight to behold and the creatures in it are just as hell-bent. The game is only held back by its very odd control system and lack of polish.

7/10



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