Project Silverfish

You owe yourself a first playthrough of Silverfish. Imagine a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game that discards visual fidelity to craft a very tense solo extraction shooter that makes you earn every bit of information you need, instead of using UI crutches. Want a sense of direction? Here's a map and maybe a compass. Want a quest marker? Play Stalker 2. Want to live longer than a minute after entering an area? Unlearn to shoot when red crosshair and learn to tell friend from foe. Want to tell friend from foe? Use a special item or find clues in their behavior. The game is either an opaque mess or a beautifully crafted tutorial how to play itself depending on how well you can read. Everything you need to know is in the game, if you know where to look. The in-game notebook is a necessity, you have an ability to save any speech or text and the game expects you to use it. It's very much an information game, so it leaves an Outer Wilds-like sadness from inability to experience it without knowing anything again, even with permadeath random quickruns, hence the unreasonable playtime for an unfinished game. There's no story but lore, the factions are pretty bland, and writing works excellently as part of a whole and as flavourtext, but there's still not a lot of substanse behind the style, and the ending is basically missing, though you can leave the Zone (and delete your save T_T) if you figure out how. What you will get is a narrative of your own (mis-)adventures, and this narrative more than makes up for lack of an actual one. Project Silverfish achieves immersion not by showing you the most stunning autumn cloud sky, but by making you act as if you were there, and live with consequences of your actions. You will feel a genuine sense of achievement when you manage to survive your first night, and reading a stolen book of esoteric knowlege in your hideout to the tunes of public domain oldies music on the radio will give you a feeling of cozyness of an adventurer with a new story to tell.

[i]Project Silverfish[/i] is a curious little experience I'd blindly suggest to anyone who is interested in [i]Stalker.[/i] The overall experience here is solid, offering one of the best implementations of emergant gameplay and slow burn character progression. Many aspects of the game can be tailored to your personal tastes, and as long as you are aware of the minor shortcomings of indie projects like this one, you'll be in for a beautiful ride. [h1]WHY DOES THE WALKING ANOMALY WITH THE BURNING SKULL OF A CROW LOOK THIS DOPE?[/h1] For anyone who is going in blind, [i]Project Silverfish[/i] can be summed up as a sandbox where you'll try to survive, improve, then thrive. The main loop of gameplay here is not your usual trope of following quests and marks, but choosing your own individual expeditions. Based on the character you create, you may be a shoot on sight target for everyone or a neutral individual trying to pay off a debt; meaning the areas you access and your general experience differ strongly based on the character you have in mind. A cultist will be an enemy for everyone, a free scavenger will fare alright in earlier areas and vice versa. The emergant gameplay here is simple but proactive, people you encounter will be naturally going against others, and you might even act as a vulture picking off the free loot from dead bodies. In this regard, expecting a more formal way of being seen is pointless, the game offers you a sandbox akin to [i]Anomaly[/i] and certain roles you embody won't be marked by the game; run your imagination and you are in for a beautiful ride, do not engage in your role plays and you'll probably find this aspect a little bland. Regardless, the core here is solid. Different roles you pick at the start of a playthrough will be fundemantal in how you experience certain areas and who you will be mostly killing. It's also a fluid state, where if you start butchering people neutral to you, you naturally become their enemy. Dodging anomalies while traversing the land, collecting and learning artifacts and clearing out dungeons and hunting bosses are all fun in their own. Unfortunately, since it is an early access title, various areas do not fully reflect the same positives. The quests and such are a little half baked; enemy AI might go commando on your backside; the artifacts you hunt might turn you into Superman et cetera. It's a rather short list though, especially considering the game is being created by only two developers. The shiny side of the coin here is that everything is cohesive, since there are only two heads running the entire operation. The updates have been solid as well, they engage with the playerbase and I do expect the title to flourish after full release. If you are interested up to this point, grab it right away, it's already a relatively complete experience. Now, for anyone who is already well versed in this little, niche, pocket genre... let's go pedal to the medal. First of all, this is not comparable to [i]G.A.M.M.A.[/i] It doesn't make any sense to compare it directly anyway. [i]Anomaly[/i] consists of three literal games strung together seemlessly and [i]G.A.M.M.A.[/i] adds an enormous amount of content on top of it. Sure, the general premise is the same; no, it doesn't make any sense to compare the work of hundreds of people, spread over nearly a decade and a half, to a tiny indie project. [i]Project Silverfish[/i] is a great entry to this environment, and stands tall enough on its own. I've spend hundreds of hours on [i]G.A.M.M.A.[/i] and I did enjoy my time here, and so will anyone who doesn't expect an apple to taste like a pear. Now, have a good day and hunt some cultists in my stead.