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Silt

PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

AS I have written here before, the covid-19 pandemic and global chip shortage have caused havoc for the video game industry.

Whether due to the difficulty of collaborating from home, or an inability to produce consoles for eager players, major titles face repeated delays. Even the Russian invasion of Ukraine has contributed, forcing Ukrainian developer GSC Game World to indefinitely postpone its survival horror entry, Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl, which I named as one to watch at the start of the year.

So, with big releases in short supply, I have been checking out some smaller morsels. First up is Silt, an atmospheric, underwater puzzle game. You play as a diver and navigate a black-and-white world depicted with hand-drawn artwork. It is gorgeous, creepy and features far too many things with teeth for my liking.

The twist is that the diver can possess denizens of the deep: you use an ethereal light that reaches out from your body to take control of them. These beings help you to puzzle-solve. One little nipper can cut through wires that block your path, and another creature, which looks like a hammerhead shark, is able to bash through rocks. You even get to chain these skills together, “soul-hopping” between animals in an attempt to progress.

Soon, you find yourself going up against large boss enemies that take multiple stages to conquer. The first of these is an anglerfish, whose luminescent lure you must chase through a series of tunnels before you face the beast itself. Once you have defeated this boss, you absorb its soul and things get a bit weird, in a Lovecraftian way.

Sadly, I didn’t find that Silt had a lot of staying power overall, with the impressive atmosphere and visuals failing to compensate for the fairly linear puzzles and occasionally fiddly controls.

My second choice is Spacelines from the Far Out, a quirky game about running a space travel business. This sports a liberal dash of kitsch that doesn’t feel a million miles away from 1960s animated sitcom The Jetsons.

The game puts you in charge of a “spaceliner”, which you use to ferry passengers between planets, space stations and more. You, and up to three of your friends, then have to juggle between the roles of pilot, navigator, flight attendant, mechanic and even janitor, as you attend to your passengers’ needs while simultaneously attempting to avoid deadly asteroids.

The routes you travel are broken up into short hops. These last only a minute or two, and you often get to choose which one to attempt. Reaching your destination might give you access to a shop where you can improve your ship, or refuel and repair it. If you fail to complete a journey, however, it is game over – and unless your ship was insured, you must restart your burgeoning business from scratch.

This set-up makes for lots of slapstick comedy, like when you serve reheated space food while making sure the gravity generator works. Your first ship doesn’t even have the power to keep everything switched on, so I needed to switch off the navigation system in order to power up the communications array and contact new passengers.

One of my runs ended with the ship endlessly drifting through space after I ran out of fuel. I had failed to notice that we were off course, since, unable to afford a TV, I was too busy dancing to amuse the passengers. Let’s hope that real “spaceliners”, such as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, are prepared to splash out on in-flight entertainment.