For ruling over subjects stricken with silence, the Princess at the center ofSilent Hopeherself sure does talk a lot. After crying herself into a crystal of her own tears, her wish to undo the silent spell her father placed on their ruined kingdom summoned seven heroes, now tasked with becoming stronger and diving deeper to face the Big Bad at the bottom of the Abyss that opened in what was once the kingdom.
In this layered chasm lurk monsters of all types, standing in the way of your group as they fight their way through to unravel the game’s mystery. Your heroes each have their own unique combat techniques, complete with powerful spells that unlock progressively as you become stronger, and you find yourself relying on each of their specialties before long regardless of your usual dungeon-crawler fighting style.
A skillful mix of melee strikes and ranged attacks is necessary to progress, with powerful builds for each hero crucial in later levels. There’s a hero for everyone in Silent Hope, with the classic mix of physical and magical attacks, but you’re encouraged to try new combat styles throughout. In fact, you need to, as you won’t get far in late-game levels with just one hero strong enough to handle what’s ahead.
While this can lead to variations in your gameplay that keep Silent Hope fresh, it’s too easy to push ahead with one hero early on, leaving them much more powerful than the rest when it counts. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a strong character to fall back on for tricky boss fights or combat-heavy Monster Rush trials, but it does leave you scrambling to catch the others up when you realize they’ve fallen so far behind.
There will come times when you need as many heroes as possible to endure long treks through challenging later levels, but they won’t do much good if they can barely endure a hit. Forcing you to use all the available characters would have resulted in a more rounded experience, and eliminated the scramble to level up the straggling classes.
This does invite re-exploration of areas you’ve visited, but doing so feels redundant more than enjoyable. By the time you circle back to level up the rest of your team, you’d much rather be pushing ahead with so little to explore or discover the second time around. There’s no real consequence for failure on any given level, outside of dropping some loot and runes before returning to the surface, and when the next part of the game is so tantalizingly close, going back to completed layers feels more like a task than a treat.
Because of this, clever builds and constant switching between heroes serve you well as you dive deeper into the Abyss. Earn experience each time you enter the fray and work toward new combat classes for each hero to make them more powerful, which brings improved stats, new skills, and a cute outfit change to boot.
But the outfits aren’t the only cute thing about Silent Hope. It’s easy to forget the violence and somber story at the center of the game because so much of Silent Hope is adorable - even the creatures trying desperately to kill you. The main draw is in the gameplay itself, however, as the Princess’ narrative is vaguely intriguing, but it’s told sporadically enough that you find yourself glossing over it as you push on through the Abyss itself.
That said, the Princess is impossible to ignore at Base Camp, to the point that she becomes a nuisance. She has a quip foreverything- processing resources, collecting those finished materials, forging weapons, making dishes, changing gear, upgrading literally anything, completing challenges, and more all bring about the same four or five lines of dialogue. While the banter is charming at first, more variation in the Princess’ lines (if not an outright reduction in how often she delivers them) may have prevented me from muting the game when I visited Base Camp.
I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt - her kingdom has been forced into silence for decades now, and she’s surely got some pent-up conversation to get out of her system. However, after deaths caused by button inputs not responding at inopportune times that frustratingly sent me up to Base Camp before I was ready to head back, her chipper, sing-song voice quickly got on my nerves.
These button failures were almost never inconsequential - it was when I was trying to use potions at critical, life-and-death moments. If you don’t reach a save point as you go through the Abyss, you’ll need to re-enter again several levels back from your last save point, and having been so close multiple times just to pass out in battle by no fault of my own was frustrating. I know I was hitting the correct button - spamming it, actually - but my heroes just did not want to listen. Maybe I just got too aggressive in hammering the button, but it seems excessive that they’d literally rather die than listen to me.
That said, when your heroesdobehave, your progress is tangible, and as they continue to grow stronger and hone their skills, you’ll experiment more and discover new favorites along the way. Usually, I go for archers and swift swordsmen in games like this, but I found myself using the Warrior and her slow but bulky broadsword the most once she was powerful enough to spin her way through enemy waves with hurricane force.
It’s remarkably easy to tell yourself you’ll do just one more expedition, only to balk when the Princess tells you how long you were down in the Abyss. I caught myself desperate to push on just alittlefurther, to level up justonemore time before I went back to Base Camp, leading to late nights that I’m not upset to have spent grinding my way to prowess and power. As long as you can handle the Princess chatting your ear off while you’re at Base Camp between expeditions and occasionally passing out and being brought back there before you’re ready, the hours you’ll effortlessly sink into “just a little more” of Silent Hope will be a joy from beginning to end.
A review code was provided by the publisher.
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