Children of Silentown – Test / Review (PC).
Contents
Point and click adventures have delighted a large number of players for many years. Including us. This genre became known, among other things, through Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle or the well-known and popular Deponia game series. Those who are a little familiar with it will remember that Deponia was published by Daedalic Entertainment. It took a long time, but now another point click adventure has been published by this publisher. We checked out Children of Silentown to tell you all about it!
The silent village
A young girl named Lucy plays the leading role in this 2D point and click adventure, which combines puzzles, humor and a dark atmosphere. She lives with her mother and father in a small hut on the outskirts of the village, which can be found on the edge of a forest. Of course, Lucy is not the only child in the village and there are other residents. All in all, the residents could lead a normal life, but you quickly realize that something is wrong here and back. The children are constantly encouraged not to be too loud, to behave quietly and to listen to the adults. This is where the name comes from: “Children of Silentown”.
Lucy also mostly follows these instructions, with the exception of the singing interludes, which she performs at home with her mother. Her father is against it, but can do little about it. The player quickly realizes why silence is so important. Monsters seem to live in the adjacent forest, which kidnap the villagers at night, and according to the adults, these are mainly people who don’t follow the rules. It happened as it had to: A person close to Lucy, in this case her mother, disappears and she makes a decision: to solve the mystery of the missing people, the forest and the monsters around and to find her mother alive again!
What is the solution to the riddle?
As is usual with point and click adventures, we steer Lucy through the gloomy world with a click, can look at objects or even take some with us. The player can select these objects via the inventory or try to combine them with others. A duvet cover and blanket quickly becomes a rope and we can climb out of our room through the skylight without being seen, which can be quite handy.
At some points in the game we got stuck for quite a while and we don’t even mean the puzzles that exist in the game and represent a kind of mini-game, but rather what you have to do now, for example to get a doorknob for a resident back. However, this relatively high level of difficulty gave us a lot of joy and there should be something like this in several games.
Lots of different songs
However, one of the unique “contents” of Children of Silentown is the ability to create different effects with certain songs. For example, there is a song through which Lucy can recognize the current thoughts of the other person. It is also possible in the course of the game to see the past of certain things or the like. However, these songs are not readily available when you feel like it.
As the game progresses, you will automatically complete various tasks to unlock certain notes. As soon as you have unlocked all the notes of a song, it will be noted in your notebook and, depending on the chapter, you can access them indefinitely. This is also necessary, because without such songs you will not be able to finish the game.
Tricky puzzles
However, we also spent a lot of time with the mini-games, because some of them are really tough. Here we can give you two examples, which often appear in the game: the “sewing” and the “eye puzzle”. But let’s start with the sewing puzzle first. This can appear when you try to read a person’s mind and they literally “lose the thread”. Here a patch appears in the picture with several buttons, seam beginnings and a tear in the middle of the fabric. The task now is to get from the beginning of a seam through all the buttonholes and finally to reach the tear in the fabric. The difficulty here is that the seams must not cross. The first puzzles of this type are easy, but as the game progresses they increase in difficulty enormously.
The second riddle, the eye riddle, is easy to explain. Here you will find a kind of chessboard on which several eyes can be seen. Each eye has a maximum number of “charges”. Your goal here is to make all surfaces glow without opening those eyes completely. So it makes sense to think of a good “way” beforehand on how this is possible. But even apart from these puzzles, there are other small ones that are unique to the game and provide variety. Compared to other games, these are quite limited.
Beautiful dark atmosphere…
The atmosphere of Children of Silentown knows how to convince. Except for a few passages, the entire game is kept quite dark and brings out the dark atmosphere with the various sound effects and melancholic songs to such an extent that goosebumps can run down the spine of the player. The developer did a pretty good job of conveying the game’s setting well.
This also applies to the different animations and facial expressions of the characters. Despite the fact that the game was only designed in 2D, you can definitely recognize and partly understand these feelings and emotions of the characters. It was also particularly successful that the mouth was explicitly omitted in order to give the name “Silentown” even more emphasis.
.. with some playful shortcomings
All in all, the game should excite most people, but one has to have a few criticisms as well. Among other things, this affects the bridge puzzles, some of which are so tricky that you cannot necessarily solve them. Also, some of the puzzles are repeated a bit too often, so that they are no longer fun in the long run. Furthermore, some small puzzles are not necessarily thought through logically, but this is the smaller problem.
Also, getting into the game is pretty slow and you have to watch a lot of dialogues and sequences before you really get to play. After all, there are no technical problems or FPS crashes, of course also due to the 2D graphics!
