Silver Chains Review

Silver Chains was reviewed on a PS4

Are you ready to explore another abandoned Victorian mansion filled with spooky ghosts? If the answer to that question is yes, then Silver Chains is just the game for you. While it doesn’t bring much originality to the genre, Silver Chains is still an entertaining horror game. It’s tense atmosphere is more than enough to deliver a few frights during its playtime.

Silver Chains is the first game developed by Cracked Heads Games, a company of five talented developers that work in the heart of the coldest city on earth, Yakutsk. This Russian city is located in Siberia, and due to the overwhelming amount of snow it receives during winter, their internet’s connection often lags and even turns off at times.

The resilience of Cracked Heads Games and their ability to develop a game such as Silver Chains in these agonizing conditions is inspiring to say the least.

What is Silver Chains?

Silver Chains is a first person horror game that takes clear inspiration from other horror walking simulators such as Layers of Fear and Amnesia. The game starts with you crashing your car in the middle of nowhere.

You soon wake up to find yourself standing in front of an abandoned derelict Victorian mansion. Our protagonist, Peter, loses consciousness again only to find himself waking up in the middle of one of the dusty rooms of the mansion.

The story is slowly fed to you through the pages of the diary of a woman that lived in the mansion in the 1900s. You’ll find the pages laying around as you solve all of the puzzles that the creepy rooms have to offer you.

I appreciated that the story is clear and straightforward, there’s not any metaphors or symbolism here, and you’ll understand everything by the time you reach the end. While it is a bit cliché, I still enjoyed watching it unfold as I progressed further into the game.

The Mansion Itself Is Impressive

The puzzles though are nothing to write home about. In the later stages of the game, they boil down to simple fetch quests. The mansion itself is realistically designed. By the end of your five or so hours of playtime, you’ll know its rooms like the palm of the hand. That knowledge is useful since about half of your playtime is spent backtracking and searching each floor to collect the items you need to proceed.

This is because the mansion itself is small and the developers have tried to stretch the game’s playtime as much as they can with these boring scavenger hunts. It would’ve benefited the game if the playtime was halved and the pacing was handled a bit better.

I really can’t stress how much character the mansion possess. Even after I finished Silver Chains, I replayed it just to see how fast I could speed run the game. Meaning there is some replay value if you’re someone who likes to do speed runs.

There are no collectibles in Silver Chains. Your second playthrough will be identical to the first. You’ll pick up the same items and read the same notes, there’s no extra incentive to replay the game. Silver Chains is an easy platinum. All of its trophies can be collected during the first playthrough if you’re skilled enough.

Let’s Talk Graphics

Graphically, the game doesn’t look good on the PS4. It’s painfully obvious that the game was downgraded massively from the PC version. The PS4 version is plagued with low-res textures and bad lighting. If the PS4 version looks this bad, I can’t even begin to imagine how bad the Switch version is.

Ambient spooky music and creaky floorboards all work towards immersing you in the game. You’ll soon though have that immersion taken from you by the blurry textures. It’s a shame really, as I would have enjoyed Silver Chains on the PS4 much more, if the graphics were half as decent as the PC version.

Meaningless Encounters

What disappointed me most in Silver Chains are the ghosts themselves. At times, a deadly ghost would burst into the room and all you’ll have to do is hide in a closet for a few seconds before she disappears again. There’s no imminent danger, she doesn’t roam the hallways looking for you. She doesn’t even chase after you, she’ll only appear each hour or so for a few minutes. All you have to do is hide in a closet before she disappears again.

The game does feature a chase scene later on in the game, but it’s set in a very enclosed space. This design choice felt very out of place since the player already memorized the mansion’s layout. We’d fare much better if the chase scene was set in the mansion itself. Instead, they decided to put this chase scene, which felt very out of place, in an entirely new location.

I enjoyed Silver Chains as a horror game. Even though the jump scares were a bit excessive, they still managed to get a fright out of me occasionally. I was even a bit tense at times during moments when I wasn’t sure what to expect next.

Overall,

Silver Chains is hard to recommend on the PS4 due to the downgraded graphics, but if your PC can handle it, then check it out. The game nailed the horror aspect of exploring the mansion, even though the jump scares were a bit too much at times.

The mansion was well designed and I had fun exploring all of its nooks and crannies, even if the backtracking got a bit tedious halfway through. The story is well told through the pages of the diaries that you find, and it connects with the protagonist’s background in an intriguing manner.

Do I Recommend Silver Chains?

If Silver Chains was a bit more creative in its approach to horror, I would’ve wholeheartedly recommended it. It’s held back by meaningless fetch quests that act as nothing more than useless padding. This lack of originality and repetitive mission design made the game a bit tedious at times. The ghost encounters aren’t fun, or tense. Their only job is to get you to slow down for a few moments, for no absolute reason.

All that would be forgiven if I was immersed in the game’s mansion, but I wasn’t. The downgraded graphics are the worst thing about playing Silver Chains on the PS4, I truly hope that the developers fix that in the future, as Silver Chains is, despite all of its flaws, not a bad horror game.

While far from being a perfect game, it’s still a good effort from Cracked Heads Games, and I am looking forward to what they come up with next.

I encountered no technical problems, the game ran smoothly, and my first playthrough took me about five hours to finish.

Special thanks go to the publisher Headup Games for providing us with a review code.

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You should play Silver Chains if you

• Would enjoy exploring a haunted mansion
• Enjoy Horror games
• Love a good yet clichéd story
• Enjoy “Doll” horror
• Wouldn’t mind the blurry textures
• Wouldn’t mind the short length
• Don’t mind fetch quests and backtracking
• Don’t mind the jump scares

Silver Chains’ Score

6/10