Silt Preview

Developed by Spiral Circus, a Bristol-based “micro games studio”, and published by Sold Out, Silt is a puzzle-adventure game set deep underwater. According to Silts Steam page, the player acts as “a diver searching the deep to uncover long-forgotten mysteries”, where they can obtain great power through defeating massive behemoths of the sea. With such a simple name for a title and beautiful monochromatic visuals, I felt that I had to give this title’s demo a shot during Next Fest.

The demo is playable both with the keyboard and the controller, though I personally felt using a controller offered a more comfortable experience. However, it’s not terribly difficult to get through the demo with either play style and, once the player knows what they’re doing, the demo should only take around 15 minutes.

In my own experience, most of the demo was very easy to wrap my head around. The diver starts trapped, tied to a chain of sorts and floating motionless in the water. Then, a couple of pop-ups appear that teach what some of the buttons do, appearing again later on for additional buttons when other actions become appropriate. At that point, all that was really important was that the diver could possess the nearby piranha-looking fish (called a Scissorfish on one of Silt's Steam news pages) in a truly impressive show of score and spectacle. Possessing the various friendly and unfriendly sea creatures is an important tool throughout the demo, and every time the player holds the proper button to use the ability, the screen goes dark as a tendril of light bursts out from the diver, whipping this way and that as a low rumbling sounds out until it grows close to its target. Once the tendril is ready to take hold, all the player has to do is release the button and now they are in control.

This little moment was honestly the third most impressive display in the entire demo, number one being a time halfway through revealing that everything up to that point has taken place inside of a larger creature's body and number two being a magnificent light show in the demo's final moments. But what makes possession so particularly special is that the sheer spectacle never seems to go away, even when the actual mechanical power behind it falls short.

In any case, once in control of the Scissorfish, with the unique ability to snap through anything long and thin — like the chain holding our dear diver down — there was only one thing to do! Immediately ignore the obvious puzzle solution, and instead see what happens if the Scissorfish tries to gnash its sharp teeth against the diver. This attempt did not end the diver's life, instead merely pooling out some dark substance that might have been blood. Curiosity sated, I set the fish to bite through the chains, discovered that the longer remaining pieces of the chain could be cut again if so desired, and moved the diver on to the next screen.

Most of the following screens held other simple puzzles, each teaching the player something new about the game. These lessons included using one fish to possess another that was too far away from the diver, that these hammer-esque fish called Blockheads could destroy cracked, gray areas, and that those same Blockheads will immediately swim for the diver on sight in an attempt to bash their head in. Throughout these moments, Silt uses these easy-to-understand puzzles to teach a few more subtle rules of the game. Namely, caution. In nearly every puzzle room with a Blockhead, running in without a plan first will get the diver killed in one hit, sending the player right back to the start of the room. When moving from one spot to another, having a goal is of immense importance. Aimless floating is likely to get the diver stuck between a Blockhead and a hard place, so it pays to use the diver’s possession abilities to have a look around the room before putting them in any danger. At the same time, hanging back is not always an option, exemplified with a brief, yet heart-pumping chase scene with three long creatures that cannot be possessed but do possess the will to murder the diver.

Throughout the first three quarters of the demo, I was having a lot of fun. There were these well-constructed puzzles that gave me a good idea of what Silt was about with a visually impressive backdrop of cracks, machinery, and plant life that made the world feel at times abandoned and full of life, sometimes even at the same time.

But then I came upon the demo’s final encounter against a great beast known as a Goliath. A mass of flesh and teeth, the Goliath boss fight seems to be a test of everything the player has learned up to this point, requiring careful planning and the use of both Scissorfish and Blockheads to fell the beast. However, I still ended up stuck in this area far longer than any other. Firstly, I was caught off-guard by the fact that this was a fight at all. Up to this point, the solution had always been “make it to the next screen”, so hurting the Goliath seemed to be a non-option. Secondly, it was visually difficult to understand what I was meant to do. The background elements, while excellent at providing mood and environmental storytelling, got in the way of this puzzle battle. It was with trial and error that I noticed the ropes the Scissorfish were meant to cut through, as I’d completely misread that spot of the cavern as just a wall. Lastly, while having a plan and moving with purpose are very helpful here, the only way one would notice the first clues to taking down the creature is by swimming around to explore right in the face of the single most dangerous enemy thus seen. That seems to go completely against what the demo has been teaching the player up to this point.

Perhaps within the greater context of the game, this would be a lesson that there are times to be slow and methodical and times to be fast and reckless. However, at the moment, this just feels like a strange ending that is disconnected from the rest of Silt. Even so, the demo offers a strong experience that provides several interesting mysteries that could be solved by the full game and a delightful series of puzzles that aren’t scared to teach and test the player at the same time. Silt’s demo is never hopeless, even when it is frustrating. Catch Silt when it emerges in the Spring of 2022.