A private investigator named Red Walker goes looking for a vanished musician in a half-abandoned American town. That is the setup of Silver Pines, which came out October 8 and is now sitting at an 87 on OpenCritic, with 94 percent of 32 critics recommending it.
Wych Elm developed it, Team17 published it, and it is out on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 for $24.99, cut 10 percent on Steam to $22.49 through October 22. Metacritic has it at 85 on PC from 18 reviews and 85 on PlayStation 5 from 14, with a user score of 8.1.
Small Town, Locked Doors, Limited Resources
Team17 calls it a survival horror metroidvania set in small-town America, with creatures to fight, puzzles to solve and resources to ration while Walker works out what happened to a musician named Eddie Velvet. It is 2.5D and hand-animated, which is not the shape survival horror usually takes.
The Two Comparisons Critics Keep Making
CGMagazine scored it a 10 and called it “a masterpiece, blending gorgeous animation, a compelling mystery and rewarding exploration.” DualShockers went 9.5 and called it “a cerebrally divine love letter to David Lynch.” TheSixthAxis, at 9, wrote that it “would not be out of place as part of the Silent Hill franchise.”
The Lynch comparison describes the weather. The Silent Hill one describes the design, and that is the more useful of the two: a metroidvania map, all locked doors and backtracking, is a better container for that kind of dread than a corridor ever was.
Deck of Haunts arrived on consoles the same morning, so October 8 put two of them out at once. The Steam discount on Silver Pines holds until October 22.