Video Game
Silver Falls 3 Down Stars is one very ambitious Nintendo NEW 3DS video game. Silver Falls is a third person horror video game that resembles the popular Resident Evil and Silent Hill video game franchise’s, but it also is its own thing. To advance in this game you must solve some basic puzzles, explore the town and survive. The core aspects of Silver Falls are solid, but it has many problems that keep it from reaching its full potential.
The story of Silver Falls 3 Down Stars is captivating. Silver Falls is the name of the town that you explore in this game. As your character(s) explore the town you notice that the residents have been frozen in time. The animals are not behaving normally, as they are violent and appear to be mutated. UFO’s have also been sighted within and flying above the town. All of these strange spooky things are happening at the same time, and you are attempting to uncover the mysteries of Silver Falls. You play as several different characters, each that have their own motivations and attributes. I give them credit; the game is more mature themed than I expected it to be. I really liked the thought provoking adult nature of the story. The story elements are intriguing, deep and they definitely got me hooked to see what happens next. As a survival horror video game, Silver Falls succeeds in setting up a scary atmosphere. In some ways Silver Falls feels like an old episode of the Twilight Zone. I adore the original Rod Serling Twilight Zone, and the fact that this game reminded me of that excellent television series is high praise. This game successfully scared me and gave me a sense of dread several times as I played this game. The game starts fairly open ended, and it ends in a more linear fashion. I feel like the second half of the game is stronger than the first half. The enemies become more terrifying and bizarre as the game progresses. Sadly the story progression can be very jarring as it transitions between the various characters. In an annoying fashion the game doesn’t give you the option to skip cut scenes, or to quickly advance dialogue with a specific button press. The story is sloppily put together, but it is fascinating in its presentation. So what exactly is going on in Silver Falls? How can you fix this peculiar situation ? To get the answers to these questions you will need to play though Silver Falls 3 Down Stars.
Sadly I had many issues with this Silver Falls 3 Down Stars. One issue that I need to address are the various technical problems. I had dozens of game crashes that caused me to restart from my last save point. The game crashes were so severe that it would force a restart on my New 3DS hardware itself. The game developer has acknowledged and taken responsibility for the technical issues. I give them credit on this regard, but the fact of the matter remains, this game is prone to crash and it is buggy. Please save your game often because you never know when the game will crash. I don’t entirely blame the developer because the crappy Unity 3D engine is very limited. Nintendo has helped this developer but updating 3DS games is a cumbersome and slow process . Regardless of who is at fault it can be difficult to enjoy the game because of the various technical issues. The game’s performance is also far from stellar. It works, but I wish it would overall flow better and have a more stable and faster frame rate. I don’t know what the specific frame rate is in this game (30, 60, or whatever), but it just feels like an old choppy Nintendo 64 game. Sometimes the various enemies may glitch on the environment itself. Once I even clipped through the walls, and fell into an out-of-bounds area where the geometry wasn’t functional, and it was entirely impossible for me to continue without restarting the game. I can forgive some bugs and glitches, as no game is 100% perfect, but sadly this game is very rough around the edges. The technical issues are enough to disrupt any enjoyment that this game provides.
Silver Falls is a huge game, and this aspect is both a good thing and a bad thing. The size of Silver Falls in-game world is simply too huge. I like having big environments to explore, but this open world is mostly empty with environments that all look very similar. Simply put it becomes boring to explore the game’s world. You may encounter some random enemy battles, but that hardly does anything to alleviate the vast boredom of a empty huge world that takes too long to traverse. The game has few things to find and interact with in this vast world. Eventually you gain the ability to teleport your character to specific areas in the game world. Sadly this fast travel system this is poorly implemented, and it becomes accessible way too late in the game. The game gives you a map of the main area, but it’s a basic map that’s limited to the pause menu. The map does not show your character’s current location in any way. The map is also only available for the main town of Silver Falls, and I wish that you had maps of all the various locations in the game. I understand having maps of all the areas could potentially spoil the explorative horror aspect of the game, so why not include one of those basic maps that fill in as you explore the specific area? That way the player doesn’t need to memorize all of the areas in such a large game. The mines and the sewers are the best areas in the game. These areas are very scary and they make great use of there claustrophobic environments. When this game narrows its scope is when it becomes a better more focused gameplay experience. The game has two modes - the main story mode and an additional mode called Frontier Fighters. The Frontier Fighters mode remixes some of story mode levels and gives the player a basic mission to complete in a specific timeframe. For example, one mission was to defeat all the enemies with limited ammo and health items. Another mission in Frontier Fighters mode was to shoot all the hidden targets in the level. The Frontier Fighters mode gives you the ability to upgrade your characters abilities, items and weapons. The Frontier Fighters mode is fairly meaty, and is a fun remix of the core gameplay. I definitely feel like the player will get their money’s worth with this game as the main story mode and the Frontier Fighters mode can take dozens if not one hundred or so hours to complete it all.
Unfortunately I was not a fan of the puzzles in this game. The various in-game puzzles are too vague, and they left me cluelessly wondering around the various game environments. I eventually figured things out, but it was annoying to play a game with so many cryptic solutions. You play as different characters in this game and at one point you can freely choose who to play as. This makes some of the puzzles more complex as you have to remember to go to specific area with a specific characters in a specific manner. I definitely want my video games to mentally challenge me, but I felt like the clues weren’t as clear as they could have been. Unfortunately for the player the game has no hint system either.
How the controls are implemented in Silver Falls is also another problematic issue. The game controls themselves are fine, but how they specifically execute some gameplay aspects are the underlining issue. The game’s tutorial is hidden away in the ‘extras’ menu. The tutorial shouldn’t be in the extras menu, where it can easily be missed by the player. This tutorial mode is also fairly weak and I didn’t find it to be very helpful. At one point the game teaches you some dodging controls, but this interaction feels totally awkward and is out of place. The game even comments on this in a fourth wall break that is too cute by half. Camera controls are also a big annoyance for me. The game does give you full camera control which is awesome, but you need to go back to the main menu and reload the game before you can demonstrate the changes. Most games allow you to tweak camera controls in-game and allow the player to perceive the difference without fumbling through menus and reloading the entire game. It’s very tedious to simply adjust the y / x axis sensitivity for your adjustable camera. The process of getting the camera sensitivity to my liking took about 10-15 minutes of trial and error, when usually I can do this in other games in a matter of seconds. I also would have liked some sort of auto aim feature or lock on feature. All the enemy encounters are loose and it can be annoying to gather your bearings and aim when you are being attacked by an enemy. I also would have loved and a simple way to recenter the camera. The game also has issues with inconsistency of gameplay mechanics. For example, some items are used automatically and other items are not. For example, if you get some keys those keys will automatically open the locked door. On the other hand let's say that you find some wire cutters in the game. To use the wire cutters you will need to go to the menu, select the item, press A to active and hope that the game registered it correctly. The game can be finicky to precisely where the player needs to be to activate certain things. Eventually I figured out the controls and got my feel for the game, but it took way too much time. The game is definitely unpolished when it comes to its controls.
Another issue that I had with the game was with the music. The compositions are fine and fit the overall tone of the game, but they are strangely absent from many environments. The music only kicks in during story cut scenes and during certain segments of the game. Most of the time the game has no music and it defaults to basic environmental sound effects. Having more music could have helped make the game less boring to play. The game desperately lacks an over world theme of some sorts.
The graphics in this game are wildly inconsistent. Fog is ever present and is annoying to try to see where to go next. I understand the game wanted to set a mood, but this fog reminded me of the bad old days of 1997 with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Nintendo 64. Fog is even in the various story cut scenes. The human characters look great, but some of the environmental textures look blurry and ugly. The game’s graphics take some time to load in between areas. The loading times are not terrible but it can kill the flow the of the game. This isn’t helped by the loading screens that don’t show a traditional loading bar or helpful tips like other games. This game shows you a black screen with some animated alien language that isn’t helpful, interesting or useful to look at. The mountains in the background are constantly glitching. Like I previously said, the game doesn’t have a consistent frame rate so it can get fairly choppy. The interior areas of the game look much better than the exterior areas. Maybe the game engine was optimized for interior areas because the difference is stark. A few locations are too dark and it makes it difficult for the player to see. I raised my Nintendo 3DS brightness levels to maximum and I still had issues. I understand that they want to create a mood, but I found it more annoying than scary to be in darkly lit areas. In some of the darker levels the game the player itself will produce a light to help guide the player. This light generates from the characters chest instead of a more natural hand flashlight. This is very odd looking and its awkward to see the characters in cut scenes. The chest light is functional but damn is it awkward and takes me out of the experience. This game definitely has its graphical flaws but overall I did overall like the visuals of Silver Falls.
The item management is another issue I had with the game. Each character has their own limited inventory and a dog serves the purpose of larger inventory management. Interacting with this dog let’s you can store items and weapons to be accessed later in the game. This dog mechanic doesn’t make much sense, but its a video game so I can let this go. What I find frustrating is the fact that some items can be discarded and others cannot. I don’t understand that logic at all. There might be an instance where I need to carry an item, but my inventory is full. In this instance I would need to find the nearest dog and dump some items into the inventory dog and return to where I was. As you can imagine this can become tedious. The game doesn’t give you an option to upgrade your character inventory either in the story mode. Where the dog seems to hang out isn’t always a logical location. I would have wanted this inventory dog to always be near save points, but that isn’t always the case. I would have loved to have the option to use items instantly. For example if my character is low in health and I see a food item nearby I should be able to go up to the food item and use it without first adding it to the inventory. This could have been handled by a simple prompt when you see an item - press the A button to put in inventory, and the X button to use right away. This would have been super handy, but the developer didn’t implement it this way in the game. How the game handles weapons is intriguing. You have a main weapon, sub weapon and an emergency weapon. If you are surprised by an enemy attack you can use your emergency weapon but that will cause the weapon to be destroyed. I really liked this system of weapon management. You can also go to different time periods in the game and restock your supplies, I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature. Overall the item management is pretty good but it could be handled better.
I totally understand that many people may find my critiques to be nitpicking, but it all adds up to be a less than stellar experience. Your experience may vary, but overall the various little things did enough to dramatically decrease my enjoyment of this game. I can see many people love this game despite its flaws, and I get that but I imagine that most people will agree with my critiques. It’s frustrating because I feel like many of my issues can be patched up with game updates. Silver Falls 3 Down Stars is sorta-like a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO (Popular Mechanics hottest car of all time), but this Ferrari has broken windows, an engine that needed an oil change 20,000 miles ago, and someone projectile vomited all over the interior in 1985 and it was never cleaned it up. Yes this metaphorical Ferrari is drivable, but it’s far from mint condition. Don’t get me wrong this is not the worst game ever, but it definitely needs many quality of life improvements.
Silver Falls 3 Down Stars for the Nintendo New 3DS is a video game that I wanted to love, but sadly I cannot. It's a valiant effort, but ultimately it's hard to strongly recommend this game. Silver Falls is a fantastic game that is held back by its many rough edges. Many aspects of Silver Falls 3 Down Stars are well executed, but the overall package is lacking in many regards.
Final Verdict:
6/10
Now 7/10
