Fade to Silence Review

"Frosty and Tedious"

Campaign

May 10, 2019 at 4:40pm

This is a different take on the whole survival genre, providing a frosty environment and focusing on Dark Souls-esque properties. This is a hardcore game where you start with one of two options. The first is a casual narrative driven setup where you have unlimited lives, it should be noted that you can’t earn Xbox Achievements that way. The second is the regular way to play and it features a permadeath system.

If you die, you have to restart from the beginning and even do the tutorial all the way through again. It’s a bit weird honestly, and I played that way as it seemed like the normal experience. It’s a bit of a shame however, you do get some bonuses upon death yet I just despise games like this. It all seems like a waste of time, especially since you can perish so easily. Fade to Silence does have some really unique mechanics, and it’s a shame that those don’t get a chance to shine. You’re constantly bothered by this mystical being as you play and that drives you to survive.

You’ll need to keep the fire going and gather supplies. You’re basically running a bit of a camp, and can even build certain housing types to assist with that. You’ll meet other survivors by exploring this hostile cold world, and engaging in small missions. This is one issue, it feels more like just a survival game as opposed to having a structured narrative.

At the start it feels as though it could be story heavy, but it isn’t. You complete basic missions and then battle to clear outposts in order to get a better camp. This will in turn provide you with better ways to explore, I won’t mention how as its fun to discover. That’s quite a lot of this game, discovering things with it really not being very complex.

Gameplay

Fade to Silence can be rather cumbersome at times. It does present a rather lovely world despite it not being Xbox One X enhanced. There’s an enticing large open world snow based landscape to explore. The weather is also fairly dynamic here with freezing blizzards rolling over from time to time. You do actually need to survive, the cold will eat away at your health.

The various enemies will as well. If you want to face this alone you can, but the game also features online coop for two players. The combat feels rather awkward in this, its stamina based and so slow to perform. It’s not very dynamic and comes across as stiff, it wasn’t very pleasant. There are some dynamic elements as you gather more resources and craft better tools, but even that system wasn’t anything too thrilling.

There are some technical issues with this one as well that I noticed while playing. It’s also rather hard to understand what you’re doing, what the focus is. I spent a fair bit of time just looking for twigs as my super vision really wasn’t all that helpful. Some items didn’t appear to work properly for me, whereas others did.

The Conclusion

Fade to Silence as some really unique ideas, they’re just layered behind a boring and tedious set of systems. It teases a narrative, but just dives into the realms of a generic survival game. I had fun initially, but it quickly became boring and lacked a sort of spark to drive me forward in this. You just didn’t have any focus, yet it was setup almost linear in style despite being an open world.

The general control system felt stiff, slightly awkward and combat wasn’t engaging. It certainly looked great, but I would have appreciated an enhancement for quality here. The two player online coop is appreciated, a nice extra touch. There were some issues, too many flaws here in this one for me. I also generally feel the whole choice system at the start isn’t a good way to introduce people to what this is.

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Fade to Silence Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 4.0