Horror games are a trend. There are many horror fans in Iran, and some scary movies have been produced there during the last decade. But the bigger picture of such products is reflected in Iran video games because the freedom of creation and the novelty of indies abled the developers to set higher standards. Lexip Games is one such studio that proved they can make things look scary. We have reviewed the Dark Room in Bazinegar, Lexip’s point and click adventure with horror themes. Now it is time to deal with their latest in line; another scary adventure, but this time in 3D.
Silence Channel is the newest in line from Lexip Games and is currently exclusively available on Steam (released on February 2021 by the developer). It is a 3D first-person horror adventure about the dark and mysterious history of a hunted house. SC claims it is inspired by a true story but there are not enough clues and hints for the player to find out what is going on. You are John Martin, a journalist that decides to decrypt the secrets around some cases of people going missing in a certain house. The story takes place during the last years of the 20th century. At first, he only needs to take some pictures, but step by step, he is drawn deeper into the house and in order to escape needs to find his way through. As you go on, the secrets, the dark history, the background of the owners, and clues to the horrific things that happened are little by little revealed to you.
Narrative
The narrative style and the plot of Silence Channel is one too familiar for the horror fans; so much that almost every scene has been recreated at least once before in an earlier movie or video game. SC exploits a lot of jumpscares and keeps draining them to the point where they do not work and do not aid the plot. Scenes and architecture are generic; the storyline is not novel and the paranormal creatures are cliché. SC lacks creativity and stands among the many B-movie video games in this genre, making it preferable only to the hardcore fans that need to fill their schedule. The game has an exciting start but grows boring and stale very quickly.
Gameplay
Silence Channel is about exploring, interacting, and solving puzzles with the purpose of entering the next area. You can walk, run, crouch, interact, and check your inventory. There is also a very vague hint system that gives you one riddle-like sentence. Puzzles are not innovative or fully logical; they do not fulfill any narrative role. More than half the time you are lost and the only way out of the situation is try and error or struggling to interact with every possible item in the environment that more than often proves futile. There is not much joy in finding the answers. The Steam achievements are the worst case; they are (similar to puzzles) forced and somewhat absurd. Compared to the Dark Room, SC tried bringing the point and click mechanics into a 3D world that in the current case, turned out to be a disaster.
Graphics
SC’s visual atmosphere is a mixture, more a mishmash. The level of fear and the nature of horror is not consistent throughout the game; once you get stuck behind a puzzle everything freezes. The game opens in a yard-like location and moves into tight and dirty corridors and rooms, then into a multi-story old wooden house (everything looks much like Resident Evil Biohazard). Visual effects such as noise and grain made the scenes reminiscent of Silent Hill and Japanese horror movies. Bloodstains, dirty walls, and old items try recreating a form of ‘long ago’ feeling for the player, but due to low-quality textures, crude modeling, and inaccurate lighting, everything looks unreal and the player’s mind will have a hard time trying to adjust to the atmosphere. There are some shared objects between Dark Room and Silence Channel, yet the latter is no match for the visual quality of the former.
Sound
You might have heard this a thousand times: the sonic experience in the horror genre is almost as important as the visuals and if the product fails to deliver a good sound package the product fails to do its purpose, i.e., frighten the audience. Lexip Games proved they know what the sound is and they know how to make good use of it. In titles such as Dark Room or Ritbon, we were eared (faced) with exemplary OST and sound design, but it seems Silence Channel could not reach the heights of those two. The ratio of dialogue to the storyline is low; after uttering some sentences, John Martin goes into a ‘silence channel’ and only voices his fears or mumbles. Sound effects are the most generic ‘scary sound effects’ you can download from anywhere. Even if we consider them all original, they lack novelty. Finally, soundtracks are only there to intensify the atmosphere; they cannot create a memorable and artistic bond with the player.
Silence Channel is a mediocre horror adventure that lacks novelty and caters nothing fresh to the genre. Low graphics, generic puzzles, cliché scenes, too visible inspirations from well-known titles, lack of strong logic in the narrative, and the exclusive publication on Steam devalue the product. Maybe if it was not developed by Lexip, it could have scored higher. You can watch the game trailer here.
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