Silt review – swimming with the fishes
GameCentral reviews new indie puzzler Silt, which looks like Limbo but is very much its own game.
The UK’s thriving indie developer scene offers the perfect riposte to those who maintain that the modern games industry has become too corporate and cash-obsessed, and Silt might be the very epitome of that. It’s charming, inventive, distinctive, and thoroughly playable – and is the first game made by a two-person team previously employed as a visual artist and a behavioural scientist, although one suspects they will simply call themselves games developers from now on.
With its monochrome graphics and side-on view, Silt has inevitably been likened to 2010 indie classic Limbo, but in reality, it has more in common with the likes of Flow or In Other Waters. It’s wonderfully minimal, with no dialogue or any attempt at a narrative beyond an initial scene-setting poem, but the underwater world it presents manages to be weird and intriguing, yet sufficiently rooted in familiarity that you’re always able to work out what you must do in order to progress.
Silt puts you at the controls of a diver equipped with flippers, a head-torch which can be toggled on and off, and, crucially, the ability to possess most of the marine life you encounter. Each species of marine life in the game’s underwater world has a unique ability and from one fish you can transfer control to another, which breeds the possibility of some surprisingly complex, but always rewarding, puzzle-solving gameplay.
As in the real ocean, Silt contains a hugely diverse array of aquatic fauna. At first, you encounter pretty simple species – tiny fish that can wriggle through inaccessible spaces, piranha-like biters that can sever cables which are getting in your way, and
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