INTRODUCTION
SINISTRY SILINIUMis a first-person psychological thriller game that puts players into dealing with people that have gone psychotic due to a disease that has been spreading. You have to fight your way out but along the way solve silly puzzles.
This game was developed by Igrodelsky and published by Siberian Digital
You can purchase this title on Steam sometime this month but there is no known release date, but do keep in mind that this game is also in early access which means it’s not completely finished yet.
STORY
The story is about a research center that wanted to see how the influence of sound waves affects animals but then they wanted to see how it would work on humans. Telling everyone it would be completely safe and would pay them a good amount of money, everyone assumed it would be fine. This growing interest in sound waves was supposed to help cure a lot of diseases and much more but unfortunately it had the opposite effect. Everyone has started to go crazy and want to kill each other.
GAMEPLAY
SINISTRY SILINIUM is a first-person psychological thriller game so essentially you’re going to be doing a couple things such as fighting, ammo management, and solving puzzles. Let’s talk about the fighting mechanic in this game because in my opinion it’s really not that bad but it’s really not that great either. There is a mechanic in this game where if you had a firearm equipped you can essentially shoot a specific part of the body to either impair movement or disarm a foe that’s trying to kill you. While I do appreciate this mechanic for what it is, I don’t understand why we couldn’t see more of this because it was pretty cool and unique.
The melee mechanic of the game, for example, I had a fire ax and it was very strong, however, sometimes hitting someone wouldn’t work right away and even though I could clearly see that I hit him first but this didn’t happen often which is a good thing. I do like the melee system overall though, it works well for what it is and does the job but I’d definitely like to see more with this and that goes for the firearms as well. Like I said the game is still in early access so there is a ton that can still be improved.
This is where the game starts to get a little cheesy with solving puzzles, while I do respect and think that the first person aspect of this game works fine generally, I don’t think this is the type of game that should even have a “solve puzzles” type element in it. It just doesn’t seem necessary to even have them to start with because it’s storyline doesn’t really fit that theme overall, just seems out of place. Regardless of my small banter, these puzzles are ridiculously stupid and quite honestly abhorred. I detest them and I see no reason as to why they exist in this game. For example, the very endgame (well 35% portion) of this game has the player stranded on a desert like platform that is spread across from other platforms and you need to find this portrait photos to teleport to other platforms.
It was very random and frustrating because it just came out of nowhere and didn’t seem to fit anything at all. No, you can’t say that this a psychological thriller and that random things happening can make sense because you make your game as a psychological thriller, it just doesn’t work like that. Plus, there was another “puzzle” where you had to run through a maze and look for the exit, very standard maze just run until you find the exit. I didn’t think that these two “puzzles” were necessary to be included in this game and I wish it could have been a lot better or more improved.
GRAPHICS / sound
Look, we all know when we see that a game is using the Unity engine that we don’t think anything of it as being impressive at all. I’m here to tell you that you are completely right for this game, it looks very bare bones and there’s not much to it that you would think that would make it stand out as it’s own thing. What I’m trying to say is that the game doesn’t look bad but it also doesn’t look very good either. While we do get a decent variety of environments to play in, the graphics will be the last thing you remember about this game.
The acting is the most horrible thing that this game has to offer, it is the most painful thing to listen to. I would highly recommend that whoever did the lines for this game should consider redoing them all over again with someone else because there is a huge lack of emotion and seriousness when it comes to the scenes. The voice acting just doesn’t match the serious tone of the story and it was just cringe worthy, even though it wasn’t in my language that doesn’t mean you can’t make it still sound good and impactful.
Conclusion
SINISTRY SILINIUM is a game that tries to aim for so much but fails at the end of it all because of it’s horrible voice acting, basic gameplay, and stupid puzzles. Don’t get me wrong, this game generally felt creepy at times and it did make me feel timid but these were only subtle moments, at the end of my playthrough I just kept saying to myself, “when will this finally be over,” and when you have someone saying that to themselves, you know that this game isn’t going to turn out well. Like I said, this game is still in early access so there is tons of time to improve the game overall but in its current state, I can’t recommend this game at all.
