What do you call a kingdom without a king? A princess has encased herself in her own tears. Luckily, seven travelers have emerged from the abyss, the same abyss the king jumped into many moons ago. This is where we find ourselves in Silent Hope, a roguelike action-RPG by Marvelous. A game that boasts a job/class system, a persistent dungeon, crafting, and cooking. Though the combat and crafting are perfectly cromulent systems, the job/class system could use a little work. Is this the new roguelike to take center stage or is it another in a long list of games that couldn’t quite make it work?
Silent Hope
Developer: Marvelous
Price: $40
Platforms: Nintendo Switch (reviewed) and PC
MonsterVine was provided with a Nintendo Switch code for review
As a roguelike Action RPG, you can expect to spend most of your time in Silent Hope running as far through the primary dungeon, the abyss, as you can before dying or returning home. A dungeon run is primarily attacking enemies, collecting resources, and completing objectives given by a thorny princess statue at the beginning of some stages. The abyss is made out of layers, each one different and with a consistently ascending number of levels in each layer. Each layer has enemies that drop specific materials that can be used to craft new gear and items back at home, so you have a reason to go back. There aren’t many permanent upgrades to make your journey any easier, merely equipment but the equipment growth is fairly satisfying. Grinding away at the abyss I’d get deeper and deeper with enemies getting more and more difficult to take down. Back home, I’d upgrade my equipment and head back down to the abyss, suddenly monsters weren’t taking as much time to kill, and I wasn’t taking as much damage, it’s a very satisfying growth cycle.
Unfortunately, the satisfaction stops there. Each class has three abilities that can be upgraded 5 times. Each time you level up you’re given a single upgrade point, each ability requires more and more upgrade points to upgrade the abilities. My issue stems from ability growth, which did not seem very strong. My main was the Bomber, one of the advanced Archer classes, whose abilities are primarily based on using bombs to stun and displace enemies. Half-way through the game I had already maxed out two abilities and they weren’t so stellar that I felt like they were good enough to carry me through to the end. And sadly, that’s it, you don’t get more ability slots or a way to swap between ability sets. This is when I started to notice the chinks in Silent Hope’s armor. While this game looked great and had a fun gameplay loop, there were some notable design flaws that really bugged me.
For example, Silent Hope boasts seven different characters to play as, allowing you a variety of play styles. While this is true, choosing to play another class resigns yourself to starting far earlier in the abyss than where you’re currently at. I had made it down to the second layer of the abyss before swapping from Wanderer to Archer. After doing so, I was able to grind through a few levels of the second layer as Archer to get myself caught up, but by the time I was on the fourth layer and wanted to try out the warrior, it was impossible for the warrior to catch up in a satisfying way. I’m still a little surprised by this. There’s no catch-up mechanic for the other classes to stay competitive and equipment simply does not do the trick. Health is primarily determined by your character’s level, so while I had all legendary gear on my level 5 Warrior, she went down in two enemy attacks.
These issues also brought to light a few other issues I was starting to have with Silent Hope. There are traps all over the abyss, primarily red explosive barrels (which, of course, we’re playing a video game) that explode when you hit them to deal damage to the baddies. The later you get into the game the more health the enemies have so naturally, the traps deal less damage. Not a big deal but kind of a bummer, I went from wiping out a bunch of enemies by luring them to the traps to mostly avoiding them because they weren’t helping very much. Likewise, the stages started getting obscenely long the further into the abyss I got. Silent Hope starts out as a fun roguelike where you can sit down and grind out for an hour and ends up being this long-winded crunch that just takes too long. I was still having fun in the end but I felt like my time was significantly less valuable as the game went on.
Silent Hope comes across as very lighthearted visually, with chibi characters and some goofy monsters you’ll be fighting. Monsters like Gecko Knights, Turnip Tricksters, Wicked Weasels, and Flame Turrettles. While the enemy variety is fairly wide with each new level of the abyss adding new enemies, many of the enemies are merely palette swaps from previous levels. Impressively though, there’s a monster encyclopedia that gives you information about where you’ve encountered the monster, how many you’ve killed, their element and weakness, as well as the items they drop, provided you’ve received the item from them. However, that’s not very impressive or out of the ordinary, what’s impressive is that each monster has a line of dialogue or a paragraph about the monster in the monster encyclopedia. They’re not just one-off lines or anything either, it’s looking to give you specific insight into this monster and its behavior.
This is where you start to see the juxtaposition between the lighthearted art style and the rather grim story. A king who stole the words from his kingdom and dropped into the abyss, the princess encased in her own tears, and the seven travelers who came from the abyss. It’s a bizarre story to be sure but a sorrowful one as well. After beating a boss, which is the end cap of each layer of the dungeon, you’ll find a stele with a story written on it that’s a little dark. Stories of the king knowing certain doom is coming and allowing his people to believe everything is fine. This kind of thing is right up my alley, the story definitely doesn’t take a front seat in Silent Hope and that’s probably for the best, much of what the princess says can largely be ignored. However, what nuggets the game does let you experience are delightful.
At the end of every layer of the abyss is a boss fight. Boss fights are about what you’d expect, a boss has several attacks that fall into a pattern and you just deal with the pattern while taking potshots at the boss. There’s no new ground being broken here. One little nicety is that the introduction to the boss is always this in-engine cutscene that brings the camera in and is very chaotic. The boss fights themselves are nothing to write home about but I really enjoyed the camera work of the introductions.
Once back in camp, you come across the other six travelers that came from the abyss. Each traveler has their role in the camp be it cooking, farming, or smithing, everyone has a role. In the abyss, you’re mostly coming across raw materials. Branches, seeds, and tails are among the materials you’ll find in the abyss. Once back in camp, you’ll need to refine them into usable materials, this takes time. I think the goal here is to set up your camp, go down into the abyss, and grind away and by the time you get back, viola, your materials are refined. This works and by the time you’re ready to upgrade your equipment, you should have enough refined materials to build your upgrades. Each store in the camp has two slots that can be increased the more you use them. This is a weird mechanic at first but as you begin to refine more and more materials it progresses very well and makes a lot of sense. It seems the time assigned to how long a material will take to refine is based on enemies in the abyss killed, as far as I can tell.
I liked Silent Hope, I want to make that very clear. But there are some design decisions that I really struggled to make peace with. The class system being so isolated and individualist is a struggle for me when changing classes could have been a pivotal and enjoyable piece of the gameplay loop is instead just a mechanic that exists. Instead of making enemies more difficult they primarily just have their health increased and the stages of the layer longer, that didn’t vibe with me at all. That said, there’s a lot of good in Silent Hope as well. Advanced classes paired well with the primary classes allowing for a variety of abilities that were quite enjoyable. The equipment growth did a great job of making me feel more powerful, and the base camp refining pairs very well with the equipment growth.
The Final Word
Though not without issues, I think Silent Hope is a good game at its core and is hopefully a jumping off point for more games like this from Marvelous in the future.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
