Silt is one of those great Robert MacFarlane words. I want to lift it to my ear in a quiet room and close my eyes, so I can hear those sands shifting, tiny rocks brushing one against another. There’s beauty to it – deep time and nature’s endless grinding patience. But there’s horror in that very patience: this world will take a billion gentle years to bury you completely.
- Developer: Spiral Circus
- Publisher: Sold Out
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Coming to PC (Steam) in early 2022
Silt seems aware of this – the horror and beauty of certain words, the poetry of them. This is an adventure that starts with a poem – in short, there are beasts out there under the waves and you need to collect their eyes – but the second time I played through, I wondered: poem or incantation? Is there a difference? Just what is being summoned here?
You are a lithe diver with the classic brass helmet. Flippers slightly too long, body slightly too slim. I suspect what is under all that brass is not entirely human. And I’m quickly proved right. As you move about the two-dimensional world, deep under the ocean, the murk rendered in sooty, throbbing Buñuel greys and blacks, you can send out a sizzling beam of lightning, threading it through the bubbles, to possess any nearby creatures. Little fish might get through gaps. Bigger fish might be able to bite through reeds blocking your path. Sharky things might ram blocks and smash them.
Chaining these possessions together seems to be a lot of the fun here – seeing how far you can move from your little diver and then somehow oxbow back to them bearing a bit of progress. But like Limbo, a game to which Silt invites very superficial comparisons, this is a puzzle game that never feels like a puzzle game. Under water, so far from the surface, it feels like life and death. You have, as a Wall Street type might put it, a serious position in the market.