Art that gets under your skin
Set in a town that's equal parts Silent Hill and Twin Peaks, Silver Pines puts you into the gumshoes of private investigator Red Walker as he tracks down missing musician Eddie Velvet. The investigation hits a slight hiccup when ravenous monsters that want to eat your flesh down to the bones start to impede your enquiries.
We've known about the sidescrolling metroidvania for a while, but it's now got a Steam demo you can play and a release date you can hunger for. October 8th, the creepiest 8th day of the month in the year.
Although Silver Pines is a sidescrolling metroidvania, its world isn't a flat sprawl like in Metroid and Castlevania. In those games you travel east and west, and climb up and down its world, in Silver Pines you also travel deeper into it. So the diner where you begin is on the outskirts of town and the lighthouse you can see in the background from its car park is somewhere you will travel to as you progress in the game. It's a slight play on perspective that speaks to some of the other discomforts I found when I played the opening hour of Silver Pines at a Team17 event back in January.
I was swiftly drawn in by its realism-aping art style. There's something I find both enthralling and repulsive about rotoscoped animation. The technique, which involves artists drawing over video footage, creates 2D animation that has an eerie reality, but it can also creep up to the uncanny valley. In older examples of rotoscoping, like the original Prince of Persia and Flashback, where the pixel count is so low, it simply creates smooth, realistic animations. But, in more modern work, like Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, the detail of the art and the realism of its movement makes my skin crawl – which is precisely the point in the sci-fi film about drug-induced psychosis.
Likewise, in Silver Pines developer Wych Elm looks to be leaning into that same tension between reality and unreality. Every member of the development team appears in the game as the model for different characters, something of them bleeding into the world they've made. Though not everyone will have the uncanny experience I had of sitting next to the developer as they play, seeing them both smiling in reality and then their gaunt and harrowed horror persona on the screen.
Maybe any physical release for Silver Pines should come with headshots of the development team all giving great big beaming smiles to reassure you they're really very lovely people. Honest.