Silver Pines Review

Silver Pines is a 2.5D survival horror metroidvania set in a nearly evacuated Oregon town in 1993, and the store data says it is very good: 97 percent positive across more than 2,600 reviews, an Overwhelmingly Positive label. Its biggest strength is atmosphere — rotoscoped animation, murky light, a jazz-tinged score and a town that feels actively hostile. Its biggest problem is the other side of that coin: combat and traversal are deliberately heavy, and for a minority of players that weight turns into friction. Players describe the whole thing as Twin Peaks by way of Silent Hill and classic Resident Evil, and the game rarely pretends otherwise.

The core loop is old-fashioned and tight. You explore, solve puzzles, scavenge scarce ammo and key items, then use a new tool to open a route you could not reach before. Guns need to be reloaded and reloaded again; melee weapons wear down; the inventory is limited. Players who click with it call the balance brilliant, with one noting the resource squeeze eases once you get established. It is not a fast action game, and that is the point — the tension comes from knowing you cannot simply shoot your way through.

The camera is the smartest idea in the game

Backtracking is the classic metroidvania tax, and Silver Pines pays it down with a camera. You can photograph a spot you cannot yet pass and pin that image to your map, so a locked door becomes a picture instead of a memory test. Players single this out repeatedly, some calling it the best thing in the game, and even a reviewer who admits to hating metroidvanias credits it with making the return trips bearable. It is a small feature that quietly fixes a big genre annoyance.

The atmosphere is where the praise piles up. Reviewers linger on the rotoscope animation, the portraits, the 2D-and-3D staging, the voice work that sounds off-putting in exactly the right way, and a soundtrack one player compares to Terminator 2 and Disco Elysium. The writing leans hard on mystery: a missing musician, a client who gives little away, a town full of people speaking in riddles, and three endings that reward collecting the scattered documents and broadcasts. Some players finish wanting more explanation than the endings give, and that ambiguity is a taste question rather than a defect.

Combat is the price of admission

Here the split shows. Fans praise the gun handling — emptying a barrel between shots, recoil, the sound of a reload — and the build crafting that lets a single bullet punch through a line of enemies. Detractors call the same system stiff: a slow melee windup, awkward turning while aiming, no reticle, and bosses they describe as bullet sponges, with one player giving up at the second boss over what felt like a whack-a-mole fight. A few also complain that new abilities do not match the number of locks, so late-game exploration becomes a long walk. These are minority voices against a 97 percent score, but they point at the same design choice from the other side.

Technical rough edges exist but rarely bite. One player reports visual glitches and collision bugs with no serious consequences, plus janky climbing that did hurt. Another hit a soft-lock when a boss and the player died at the same moment, and a third found a spot in a second playthrough where an infinite-stamina upgrade left the character stuck in a drain with no way out but a reload. Saving costs coins at payphones, which some find atmospheric and others find punishing when a run goes wrong. None of this looks systemic; it looks like the seams of a small production.

At $24.99, most players call it money well spent, and one fan who could not stand the genre finished it in a single sitting. The holdouts want something closer to $30 or less, arguing the scattered clues mean too much walking for the price. That is a thin complaint against a game this dense, but it is worth knowing if you bounce off slow exploration. The review curve also cooled sharply after launch week — daily positives fell from the hundreds to the dozens within a month — which may simply reflect the launch crowd moving on rather than any drop in quality.

The onboarding is gentle on puzzles and harsh on habits. Documents carry the answers if you read them, and one player notes that careful reading prevents most dead ends. But the game will not pause while you dig through your bag or stare at the map, and there is no autosave — the payphone is your only friend. Players who grew up on this school of design call it romantic; everyone else should budget for a lost hour. If you want a metroidvania with snappy movement and forgiving checkpoints, this is not that game.