About 9 years ago a very unique and underappreciated game by the name of Sylvio was released. It dealt with a really curious concept of EVP – Electronic Voice Phenomena and made for a really cool and creepy ghost horror adventure with light combat mechanics. It had just the right amount of ambition for the one-person development team at Stroboskop, so while it was somewhat ugly looking and had lots of minor frustrating issues and bugs, the experience was unlike any other so the game was worth playing anyway. The game was to be followed up by an equally ambitious sequel that would move EVP research from audio to video, but, sadly, the Kickstarter campaign to support the development failed. Sylvio 2 that we got two years later was simplified in most ways in comparison to the original and while it still had cool ideas (and one of its sequences with spectrograms still gives me nightmares), it was somewhat disappointing. A few years after the release of Sylvio 2, the developer decided to stop making games.
However, the rise of the “Haunted PS1 Demo Disc” and “Dread X Collection” communities, releasing short form horror titles, got Stroboskop excited again and after participating in Dread X Collection 5 with the short title “Karao”, they’ve decided to return to bigger games with this new release of Sylvio: Black Waters. Which I’m very happy about… yet I can’t say that the resulting game is very good.
So, how does this game play? This is a first person action adventure that focuses mostly on story exploration with the story itself being a very bizarre mix of sci fi and folk horror. It’s difficult to explain and I can’t say it works in the end, but the idea is intriguing. The game world, just like in the first game, is divided into several linear levels, all of which are conceptually connected to a central overworld. Though in case of this game you get two overworlds – one from which you get to revisit the linear levels (something that the original release of Sylvio didn’t allow), and one where you get to drive a… bike-thing with a radio to follow the light to get to the next linear level. That last transitional type of level is, frankly, odd as it lacks the fun of exploration of the first two games (where you had a car and a boat respectively) and seems to be added just for “cool vibes” I guess?
And you do get combat back, after it was completely absent in the second game. This time around your weapon doesn’t solve puzzles and is just used to fight ghost-like entities, but the main focus of the encounters is changed. In the original game you just had to defeat ghosts that spawned at specific parts of the exploration and that was it. In this game, all ghosts spawn from glowing human statues that you can usually see beforehand. And if you break the statue before it cracks open on its own, the ghost won’t spawn. But some of the statues do not spawn ghosts and your ammo resources are limited, so the gimmick here is basically on noticing the statues from far enough and deciding if you want to spend your resources on destroying them to potentially avoid the fight later. It’s a cute idea, that sets a very good methodic pace to your “exploration”, but I can’t say it was that exciting.
Especially since, I did write “exploration” in quotation marks for a reason. Sadly, for all of the cool ideas with levels changing gravity and folding onto itself and the potentially cool combat mechanics the game is aggressively linear. To avoid players accidentally landing on surfaces before the gravity is the right way around or falling between cracks, there are invisible walls everywhere and all you do is just follow the lights. Not because it’s easier to do, but because you can’t not do that. Granted, there are still plenty of spots you can fall and fly through the game potentially forever (perhaps there is a kill plane but I have not hit it when I had these bugs happen). It’s a real shame because even though Sylvio 2 was also hand-holding you constantly, it gave you plenty of choice and illusion of choice to feel more interesting than it was on a mechanical level. Whereas here, the game is the opposite to all of the cool ambitious ideas that made the original so interesting. It also contrasts heavily with something like Paradise Killer, which is more than happy to let you bunny hop through its world however you want, becoming a huge part of the fun you get from that game.
As for the EVP – it’s still here, but so oversimplified and not interesting, it feels barely a part of the game, despite being vital to the game’s completion. You just gather the creepy voices and the big “puzzle” of the game isn’t about finding them, but about arranging them in order, which is often very poorly executed as there is only one correct solution, even if the lines presented can be set in any order and still be grammatically correct and mean the exact same thing. There is sound manipulation, with a video component included, in fact, but it’s not very interesting or engaging and is done for the optional stuff that doesn’t really lead into anything. In fact, most of the story here is just kinda “vague creepy stuff”. And while the ending of the game might not be as silly as of the second title, it’s still more bizarre than good.
I am glad that Stroboskop is back into making games again. And purely in technical terms, I suppose Sylvio: Black Waters is the most competent project. But it’s also least memorable of the three Sylvio games and ends up feeling in some ways more disappointing even than the second game. I still enjoyed it, it has neat elements and cool atmosphere. But I can also easily see a lot of people completely dismissing this game and I won’t blame them.