Silver Pines

 Having heard good things about it from various sources, and figuring it was pretty cheap at only a bit over 20 bucks, I picked up Silver Pines. The game is a side-scrolling survival horror game, which in and of itself is kind of a fascinating idea. But what has really drawn me into it is the vibes and clear influences: if Alan Wake was heavily inspired by Twin Peaks, this seems to roll them both up like a katamari along with some other elements (one cheeky aspect is that you can find herbs to mix into healing items, like in Resident Evil).

A genre that really got started in the 3D era, the approach here is really interesting: the map is three-dimensional, to a point, but we move in side-scrolling vistas, moving forward into deeper fields "behind" where the previous action was, or moving outward toward the camera toward "shallower" fields. The effect means we get to explore a town that is laid out like you might in a 3D game, but where all the action is presented in a flat environment.

That, I think, does make dodging foes somewhat more of a challenge, at least on a psychological level.

The gameplay is fine - I don't really have a fully formed opinion on it yet - but what really impresses me are the vibes:

Our protagonist, a private detective (maybe) named Walker, wakes with a start in a classic old diner with seemingly no memory of how he got there. He's supposed to be looking for a musician named Eddie Velvet for a mysterious client. It seems his payment here is going to be some kind of debt wiped, though whether that is a monetary one or one of conscience remains unclear.

Thus, we're sent into Silver Pines, a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (which does seem like the go-to spot for American horror - though again, it really traces itself back to Twin Peaks). There's a massive storm coming, and most of the town has evacuated, while the people still here are... weird.

After some quiet exploration with the usual convoluted Metroidvania-like backtracking needed to open up new paths, monsters start to show up - some of them are vaguely zombie-like, while there are also what seem like weird insects. Something is deeply wrong here.

The moment that really clinched my interest, though, was when we go down into a dark basement, and, upon flipping a lightswitch, the entire environment changes - we're now in the bathroom of some music club called The Rabbit Hole, and we speak with a customer and a bartender who are both deeply weird before seeing Eddie perform, only for us to wake up in the basement again once we're given a cryptic clue to Eddie's potential location.

The game has a very precise and detailed but still hand-drawn look to it, and has that kind of spooky and dilapidated aesthetic that I enjoy so much. The deeper I go, the more I question to what degree Silver Pines is a real place, and there's a real discrepancy between the behavior of some of the people you meet, which honestly makes me more worried about the "normal" people than the weirdos.

Walker's disorientation mirrors our own, and I'm not sure he even knows who he really is.

I'm playing on the recommended "survival horror" difficulty, and the game sure seems to be pretty stingy with resources, but there also aren't a huge number of foes. You do get a melee weapon, but this does get damaged as you use it, so ultimately any wasted attack does feel like a setback.

I do think it's really interesting how Lynch's nostalgia for mid-century America has generated its own kind of aftershock of nostalgia. Alan Wake borrows a lot from Twin Peaks (including more or less re-creating the RR Diner with the Oh Deer Diner,) and while I think you could simply assume Silver Pines is just looking at the same source material for inspiration, we also get televisions with weird clips from TV shows, much as we got in Alan Wake (and I believe Max Payne II, though I have yet to play that, and am honestly just waiting for the remakes coming out next year).

Anyway, I started the game a few days ago but didn't come back to it until today, but I think I'm starting to get the rhythms of it (which are, honestly, not too dissimilar to those of other survival horror games I've played recently).