Silver Pines Review: Getting Lost is Part of the Journey

There are genres that, more than others, seem to carry a vocabulary that is difficult to shake off. In survival horror, just mentioning an American town, some abandoned streets, and a protagonist who doesn't seem to be in the best moment of their life quickly brings Silent Hill to mind. If, among the declared influences, Resident Evil, Twin Peaks, Jacob’s Ladder, and a good chunk of 90s thriller imagery also appear, the risk of encountering a collage of already-seen suggestions becomes quite concrete.

Silver Pines fortunately manages to avoid this trap for most of the approximately fourteen hours it took us to reach the story's conclusion, played on Tense difficulty. Not because it hides its influences, quite the opposite, but because Wych Elm tries to use them to build a survival horror that thinks curiously about the concept of exploration. The small Scandinavian studio, made up of five developers with experience from productions like Yoku’s Island Express and Helldivers 2, has taken the resource management of classics and inserted it into a structure that openly looks to metroidvanias, without, however, granting the protagonist double jumps, supernatural powers, or that sense of growth that normally leads the player to progressively dominate the map.

Red Walker remains Red Walker from beginning to end. What changes is mostly us, as we learn to recognize a street, remember a shutter we couldn't open three hours earlier, or finally understand the meaning of a document left in our inventory for too long. And consider that we reached the credits even leaving behind a few unsolved puzzles, a detail that in another game we would probably have experienced as a shortcoming, but here, instead, it ended up further fueling the feeling that Silver Pines still hid something.

Eddie Velvet is Just the Beginning of the Problem

The task assigned to Red Walker is seemingly very simple: find Eddie Velvet, a missing musician about whom someone wants answers. The initial stages function almost as a long prologue, useful for getting acquainted with movement, combat, and inventory, but it quickly becomes clear that the investigation is destined to go in a decidedly less ordinary direction. There's no need to wait for some grand revelation, because the town itself communicates from the beginning that something is amiss.

Red arrives in a place that seems to live by its own rules. The streets are almost deserted, the buildings retain traces of those who lived there, and the few people encountered during the investigation often speak as if they know a part of the story that the protagonist is not yet able to comprehend. The search thus proceeds on two tracks that soon overlap: on one hand, one must follow the traces left by Eddie, and on the other, gradually reconstruct what happened in Silver Pines and why some of its inhabitants seem trapped, physically or mentally, within something that continues to elude understanding.

The reference to Twin Peaks, declared by the developers themselves, seems interesting to us especially for this reason. It's not simply a matter of bizarre characters or a small American town, but rather the feeling of having entered a community that had its own relationships, secrets, and rules long before our arrival. The local sheriff, for example, treats Red with a suspicion that often borders on hostility, while in the Rabbit Hole Bar we meet figures who seem perfectly at ease in a situation that, for the protagonist, is anything but normal. Some people provide information, others do things difficult to understand, and still others seem to have been swallowed by a nightmare from which they can no longer escape.

Silver Pines builds much of its narrative precisely through these encounters, alongside documents and notes scattered throughout the environments. It's an approach that requires a minimum of attention, because often an apparently secondary phrase only gains value much later, when a new element finally allows it to be recontextualized. The mystery grows in this way, by accumulation and association, and we rarely had the feeling that the game was hiding the absence of answers behind deliberately incomprehensible images.

Some passages remain complex to interpret, and others seem specifically designed to leave the player with more questions than they had entering the room. This is where the reference to Lost Highway becomes useful as a key to understanding, especially when identity, perception of events, and the logic of places begin to become less reliable. It doesn't mean that Wych Elm has simply borrowed Lynch's grammar, but the way reality gradually stops behaving as it should gives a similar feeling, that of something that remains recognizable even as it changes before our eyes.

Within this journey, Alice takes on particular importance, a character directly connected to Eddie and apparently central to many of the town's inhabitants. She doesn't establish a true relationship with Red, and it's important to emphasize this because it would be easy to turn her into the classic figure who guides the investigator towards the solution. Alice is rather a victim of the same story we are trying to reconstruct, and her weight grows precisely when we begin to understand how much what happened to Eddie has left consequences on other people.

The investigation naturally leads to a decisive encounter with the musician, and the game allows the player to influence what happens next. We'll stop here, because Silver Pines is one of those titles where even explaining the precise nature of the possibilities offered would end up detracting from the journey. What matters is that the choice comes at the end of a journey that has continuously questioned what we thought we knew, and it works precisely because the mystery has been fueled throughout the exploration, not just in the final moments.

Backtracking is Beautiful, Until You Want to Throw the Controller

The element with which we had the most complicated relationship is undoubtedly backtracking. We loved it because it forced us to remember spaces and hated it when, after a long time spent wandering, we could no longer figure out if we were missing an item, a piece of information, or simply the right intuition. This is an important distinction, because Silver Pines doesn't use the map as a simple collection of locked doors, but continuously tries to make the player think about how the tools they possess can modify an already familiar space.

Some examples are quite classic. A valve allows certain shutters to be opened, a dedicated tool allows manholes to be lifted, and a sledgehammer can break down walls that seemed normal elements of the scenery during the first visit. You encounter the obstacle, keep it in mind, and when the equipment finally allows it, you return to the spot. So far, nothing particularly revolutionary, also because metroidvanias have always thrived on this relationship between memory and progression.

Things become more interesting when Wych Elm decides that weapons can also become keys, and here survival horror immediately comes back to haunt you. A rusty padlock can be shot open with a pistol, some old planks give way using a shotgun, and suddenly the question is no longer just "how do I open this passage?" but also "is it really worth spending a cartridge to see what's behind that obstacle?". Those bullets, of course, are the same ones that might be needed shortly after against a creature, and there's no separate inventory that makes exploration gratuitous.

It's probably one of the ideas we appreciated the most, because it connects two systems that would otherwise have remained separate. In Silver Pines, exploration has a cost, and the player must learn to live with this possibility, especially when the number of resources begins to dwindle. On Tense difficulty, the game still allows a certain margin, so we never found ourselves completely paralyzed by the choice, but moving up to Survival Horror or Nightmare, it's easy to imagine how a cartridge spent in the wrong place could suddenly become important.

The flip side is that Wych Elm tends to rely heavily on the player's gaming culture. We understood some possibilities through trial and error, others because other survival horrors had already taught us to look at a certain type of obstacle in the correct way. For a player accustomed to the genre, this search can be enjoyable. For those who arrive without that baggage, however, the difference between "I can't do it yet" and "I haven't figured out how to do it" is not always clear, and frustration risks arriving quite quickly.

The puzzles follow exactly the same philosophy. Some are immediate, almost impossible to get wrong, and others require careful reading of documents, connecting information found at different times, and correctly interpreting details that are not highlighted in any way. In one hotel, we were stuck for almost an hour trying to understand what the game was asking of us, and, as anticipated, we finished the story without having managed to solve everything we had encountered.

And you know what? In part, we even liked it. The fact that not every door necessarily has to be opened before the credits makes Silver Pines less like a checklist disguised as a town. However, the problem of very irregular difficulty remains, because in the less successful passages, the obstacle doesn't necessarily arise from the quality of the puzzle, but from the way the textual clue is formulated. The absence of the Italian language also weighs here: dialogues, interface, and especially documents are in English, and when a solution depends on the correct interpretation of a few lines, knowledge of the language stops being a simple narrative requirement and becomes part of the gameplay.

Fighting Means Primarily Knowing Your Limits

Silver Pines doesn't try to reinvent survival horror combat, and it probably does well. On Tense difficulty, the one we completed the adventure with, encounters allow for a certain margin of error but still require attention to stamina, distance, and enemy behavior, especially when relying on melee weapons. Insisting on attacks until the bar is completely empty means exposing yourself to the enemy's retaliation, while learning when to engage, strike, and create space again quickly becomes more important than the power of the weapon wielded.

The bestiary isn't particularly extensive, and by the advanced stages, many of the threats inevitably become familiar. However, the existing differences are significant enough to prevent every encounter from being approached in the same way: some creatures attack from a distance, others make greater use of the terrain, and still others can inflict status ailments that make prolonging the fight more dangerous. There isn't a great variety of enemies, but there's enough variety in how they need to be read, and in a relatively simple system, this distinction manages to maintain a certain level of engagement even after several hours.

We particularly liked the freedom granted by the arsenal because Silver Pines doesn't impose a single philosophy of survival. Firearms are numerous and can be used with a certain continuity, while those who prefer to conserve ammunition can rely much more often on melee. However, the second solution does not equate to choosing a free path, because melee weapons degrade and must be repaired, a variable that already makes itself felt at Tense difficulty and naturally becomes more severe when moving up to Survival Horror and Nightmare. The chosen difficulty therefore modifies the weight of these systems without truly changing their rules, leaving the player the possibility to decide how problematic they want each individual resource to be.

Less convincing, at least for us, is all the physicality that Wych Elm wanted to attribute to the most common operations. Reloading a weapon, repairing it, or managing certain actions requires a few more steps than we are used to seeing, and the intention is to contribute to the tension. After fourteen hours, it seemed mostly a form of clumsiness, which rarely made us feel more in danger. However, it has a different and, in the long run, perhaps more interesting effect: it makes the equipment less abstract. Weapons seem like objects to be prepared and maintained, not just icons accompanied by a number, and this small dose of friction still ends up making Silver Pines more authentic and slightly more challenging.

Customization comes through Mementos, equipable items that modify some of Red's characteristics without introducing a true character development system. The Smooth Stone with a Hole increases headshot damage by 20%, while the Polaroid Negative gives bullets a 20% chance to pierce the target. These are substantial enough bonuses to change how certain weapons should be used, and as you progress, they allow you to better accommodate your preferences developed during the game.

It's an inconspicuous progression, but suitable for this type of game. Red doesn't have to progressively become a war machine, and Silver Pines avoids transforming the latter part of the adventure into something completely different from the first hours. What improves most is the player's ability to manage what they possess, know enemy timings, and understand when to risk a confrontation or circumvent it. Combat therefore remains quite simple and would have benefited from a richer bestiary, but it performs its task well without overshadowing exploration and mystery, which clearly remain the core of the experience.

A City That Feels Real Even When It Stops Being So

From an artistic point of view, Silver Pines adopts a solution that is immediately recognizable, especially in the movement of the characters. Wych Elm used rotoscoping based on real recordings subsequently redrawn frame by frame, while for many environments the team worked from modified and re-elaborated photographs. The result produces a strange overlap between something extremely concrete and something that, instead, always seems on the verge of deforming.

It works particularly well on buildings and everyday places. Motels, bars, streets, and homes seem to belong to a really existing town, and this makes the moment when some detail starts not behaving as it should even more effective. Silver Pines doesn't need Silent Hill's fog to communicate that something is wrong, even if the connection to that type of horror remains evident in the very nature of the town and the way exploration progressively transforms familiar places into something much less reassuring.

The side view could have flattened everything, turning the adventure into a long succession of corridors, but the arrangement of the environments almost always manages to avoid this feeling. The city gains depth because the player keeps returning to it, opens connections, remembers details, and ends up mentally building a map that goes beyond what is shown by the interface. After several hours, we realized we remembered a shutter seen at the beginning, a still-closed manhole, or a wall that we might have been able to break down, and it is precisely in these moments that the level design achieves its best result.

Not everything is equally elegant. Backtracking can become exasperating, some puzzles confuse more by how they communicate the clue than by the quality of the solution, and manual interactions risk seeming unnecessarily laborious after many hours. Combat, too, while working well within the resource economy, would have benefited from greater enemy variety.

And yet, in the end, Silver Pines stuck with us primarily for the town, not for a single monster, a particular weapon, or a moment designed to scare at all costs. It stuck with us because throughout the entire game we kept asking ourselves if we had truly observed what was in front of us well enough.

The search for Eddie Velvet can be concluded in about fifteen hours, but Wych Elm had the intelligence not to close every door along with the main story. Some questions remain, as do some puzzles that we will probably try to solve again someday. Perhaps this is the best compliment we can give Silver Pines: we left the town, but we are not entirely convinced we understood it.