Sylvio

When it comes to poltergeists and other sort of angry spirits, the visual medium of movies and the interactive medium of video games give us nearly endless possibilities to explore. One of these concepts is explored in the game Sylvio, Kickstarter-funded and Greenlit by the Steam community, and is published and developed by Apostrophe. Being a horror game, especially one in first person which appears to be a rising trend in recent years thanks to Amnesia and Outlast, Sylvio has quite a lot to live up to, and it has a similar tone and atmosphere to the aforementioned games. In many ways, Sylvio succeeds in differentiating itself from the pack, but a few shortcomings prevent it from being the shining star it could have been.

Technically speaking, Sylvio isn't very polished. It's actually quite buggy at times, and while that is to be expected with games, no game is perfect after all, some of the bugs in the game can completely wreck the mood that the game is tiring so hard to set. Things like items clipping through the floor, getting stuck in random places and having to restart from the beginning of the game. When you design your game to have it only autosave at the end of chapters, and if the player wants to save in the middle of it and you don't let them, there's something wrong. Building up tension is fine, but there's nothing worse than having to turn off the game because it freezes or something happens and you have to start from the beginning of the chapter all over again. Especially when the game itself has such a great concept and you have to muscle through it because of technical issues.

The idea of solving a mystery of what happened to the beings in an abandoned amusement park is an interesting one, especially when you factor in the “Ghost Listening” mechanic of the main protagonist. Juliette Waters is there to “listen” to the ghosts with her audio equipment, a reel recorder and a microphone, but she ends up getting stuck in the park and has to find her way out. To do this, she must investigate the park further, rummaging through lockers, safes, and random rooms in order to find out just what she needs to escape the decrepit park.

The story is told to you by Juliette, and while she does point out the obvious a lot, she does act as a good narrator for what happened. It's an abandoned park and she reveals through her monologue that no one ever comes to the park because in 1971 there was a landslide and the park has been closed ever since. The atmosphere of the game is built up very nicely, making the player feel truly alone in this environment. The graphics, despite how outdated they are, actually benefit the game's storytelling, making it look like an ancient park that nobody has been to in years. Juliette is all alone and can only talk to herself (which she does a lot), as well as attempting to talk to some ghosts in order to elevate her own fears of this place.

Juliette can't talk to ghosts though, not as well as she can listen to their startled cries and moans. One of the main game mechanics is the audio recording device she uses to capture the voices of the ghosts. The player uses a microphone in order to record what they are saying and they change the speeds and tinker around with the recorder in order to get a clear message. It is by far the best part of the game and it makes you want to collect as many of the ghosts' messages as you can. Each message marks something special on your map, which means you can grab collectibles if you're actually using the mechanic frequently, and it can also track the locations of things with the little number in the center of the microphone showing how much closer or how much farther you are from your location.

There is one problem with it the microphone. While it can lead you to some amazing things and really builds up the atmosphere of the game, it also can cause you to die. It's hard to tell where the microphone is leading you to, a trap from the big bad in the game or to a cool object that you can collect like a piano strip or another audio recording. There were times while playing I would find myself thinking that the loud static was the main antagonist when it was, in fact, just another cool thing to get. The way its conveyed is pretty sloppy and it could have used some polish before release.

Speaking of the villains, let's talk about one of them: it's a giant black blob of evil. No, this isn't a joke; it's actually a giant black blob of evil. Now, this isn't to say that it can't be scary, take the novel A Wrinkle in Time for instance. The main villain, It, is a blob of evil and it is built up in a way that shows it's true power and how much power it has over the residents of its planet before its revealed. The blob in Sylvio just appears and more than half the time, it'll kill you right out of nowhere and it's not even in a scary way, it just looms over you and kills you. That's right: it's a floating black blob of evil that has no build up and you can almost never tell when you're going to die because the hit box on it can range from anywhere between several meters away to right next to you. All you can do if you see it (because sometimes it doesn't even appear correctly and will instantly kill you) is to shoot it with a screw gun or run.

Luckily there are other specters that are far more threatening, like the human life forms, which quickly become sponges for the very little ammo that you have at your disposal. They also move very fluidly and you can tell when you're getting too close to them. AI-wise they go above and beyond, and despite not attacking you outright, the fact you have to séance them afterwards proves just how much of a threat they are. They're intimidating, and the music that comes on when you fight them and the sound effects are completely sublime. If these towering behemoths and the atmosphere they produce was what made up most of the game's enemies then that'd be fantastic. Unfortunately, the game's tone isn't consistent and amidst the genuinely tense and scary moments silly things pop up that are just frustrating.

Another thing about Sylvio that sticks out like a sore thumb: the “gun” you use to ward off the specteres. Quite frankly, it completely ruins the mood of the game when you whip it out and try to blast the blob or the human formes. It just seems extremely out of place in a game like this, and while it makes sense that it's not an actual gun because that would be even more jarring, the introduction of this potato/screw gun hybrid makes the game far more laughable than it should. Up until the point you get the gun, the game built up a genuinely scary environment that you had to run, jump and listen to in order to figure out what's going on. All of that tense build-up gets ruined by that gun, because it makes you feel like you're in a comedy game rather than a horror game. Yes, it does give you an explanation in game for why it's there and why it's being used, but it doesn't change just how silly it is.

Tutorials are a fairly common thing in games these days, and it's unsurprising that Sylvio has one. It may come as a surprise though that sometimes it's nearly impossible to get rid of the tutorial prompts. Whenever you try to open a locker, the game immediately pops up with the “This is how you open it,” no matter what point you're at in the game. It does it for multiple game mechanics, and at times the black box that gives you the instructions doesn't go away so you have to work around it. It's frustrating when you really want to enjoy this game and the game itself prevents you from doing so.

Sylvio is a game with good intentions but it ends up getting bogged down by its own technical issues and lack of build up for many of the game's major set pieces. It's tonally inconsistent and while some aspects just make your heart pound others become silly rather quickly. When it's good it's amazing , but when it's bad it really does sink to the bottom of the haunted barrel.

Angelina Bonilla, NoobFeed (@Twitter)