Songs of Silence Review

Videogames that lore-dump before the start screen to catch the player up usually continue rambling on to their detriment, to later on be cut down to a quick five-minute YouTube video explaining the plot. Songs of Silence doesn’t need the latter, deciding to get on with what it's meant to be… a videogame, not an interactive movie.

In short, primordial gods make the world and everything, including eyeless people, then celestial gods come along and give people bright eyes, which sets off a civil war that splits the two sides onto two planets. The game’s story takes place during the rise of a new foe.

In Songs of Silence, there are eight chapters of the main campaign following protagonists like Queen Lorelai and her remaining countrymen displaced by the invasion of blood-red cadavers brought to life in a scourge spread across the world called the Silence. The people you play as also have a lore-related old grudge that squeezes in between fighting the local fauna and flora and hiding from much larger enemy armies in forest terrain.

The main goal of Queen Lorelai is to find refuge from the destruction of her kingdom in hopes of a better future for her people, and your skills in battle tactics depend on how many people survive.

Songs of Silence is a 4x strategy game, as in, the active movement of armies, upgrading and sieging of settlements, and the overall pace of the overworld is turn-based, while combat is real-time with commander special abilities coming in the form of cards. These cards and the amount you have are specific to each commander and settlement. Levelling up grants two additional cards to choose from or an upgrade to an existing one for commanders and new defensive attacks for cities when besieged.

In combat, the buff triangle stereotype of swordsmen, bowmen, and wizards is flipped on its head by not making it clear in hindsight whether your army is stronger than the opposing army until it’s too late and you have to do the load-save waltz to the defeat music. A well-supplied, diverse, and manned army can take on opponents much larger than them with a little skill and luck, but a squad of elite troops can get wiped because you only have one catapult and the other guy has two. You also cannot join armies together in battle; rather, use the lesser one as a reserve line for the greater during the turn phase, which I personally haven’t seen before.

The models are quite detailed considering how far the camera is from them, as well as the developers and creators of the game considering other mounted creatures for cavalry than horses like highland cows and hogs. It helps at a glance who is who during a fight and what type of troop it is without needing to move your cursor over them. My favourite mob is between the Aardvark Caravan and the Flower Giants from the first chapter.

However, the second chapter, which I won’t spoil, is a great tutorial for manoeuvring and the game’s sneaking mechanics as your army is surrounded by the Silence, who will add your dead to their ranks the instant you make a mistake. Not wanting to wait to be noticed, you have to move in short increments to safety. This chapter is optional but worth doing because it is great storytelling and introduces the player to the very thing the game is about. Why it’s optional to play is beyond me.

Songs of Silence is one of the nominations for Outstanding Visual Style in The Steam Awards 2024. Though, the visual style can best be described as excerpts from those colouring-in book apps mums play. Yet, Songs of Silence has hit the mark if it was going for a storybook art style. The art-nouveau portraits and backdrops throughout the game illustrate everything a lot clearer than the animated figurines and castles dotted around the map, which in themselves don’t clash with the overall aesthetic. The illustrations on the tarot-like cards are the better depiction of why the game is nominated, but games like Dragon Age: Inquisition did the same thing, but with more expression and detail, like gilded lines over the portraits of royal and wealthy people and personality other than stoicism or happiness.

Where a lot can be said about the visuals, the music score is best described as generic horns and flutes, but not royalty-free. If you can imagine a high-fantasy game’s orchestral score accompanying the visuals and mood of the campaign without it sounding heartless or mass-produced, that’s what Songs of Silence’s soundtrack is. The music was composed in-house and is available on its own and attached to the deluxe edition of the game (which is not a physical copy, so in my opinion, not worth having). If that’s your jam, put some money in Chimera Entertainment’s cashbox.