Considering I don’t even do that it often, you’d be surprised how often I find interesting games just by scrolling through Steam’s home page. Today we’ll be looking at Songs of Silence, an early access multiplayer strategy game that recently offered a free demo.
Songs of Silence features a combination of 4X and auto-battler mechanics, neither of which are genres I usually play, but nonetheless I found it an intriguing title.
The demo for SoS (solid acronym) was pretty limited in scope, including only the first campaign mission, but it was enough to give me a decent feel for the basics of the game.
Most of SoS plays out on a turn-based overworld map. This is the 4X side of the game. You command armies led by hero units and use them to conquer settlements, fight wandering monsters, and otherwise explore the landscape. During these sequences you can also upgrade your settlements, level up your heroes, and recruit new units.
Once you enter into combat, though, the game turns into an auto-battler. Your units and those of your opponent attack each other in real time, but you can’t command them directly. Your only way to directly influence events is by the use of your hero’s ability cards, which are dragged onto the map to trigger powerful effects. Battles are usually over pretty fast — most seemed to end in well under a minute.
I have very mixed feelings on these portions. The flashy real time action sequences do a lot to keep me engaged in a way 4X games have traditionally failed to do, but the RTS fan in me kept longing for greater control over my units, and the card game fan in me was disappointed there doesn’t seem to be any deck-building mechanic for customizing your heroes’ selection of ability cards. The cooldowns for your cards are quite long, too, and there’s nothing to do between using them, bringing me back to the “watching the game play itself” feeling that usually sours me on turn-based games.
I also found the auto-battler sequences had some visibility issues. The units tend to clump up very tightly, and it’s not always clear whether the battle is going in your favour or not until it’s too late.
Beyond my mixed feelings on the auto-battler portions, my main frustration with the game involved the fact that it doesn’t seem to be practical to prevent enemies from sieging your settlements. Several times I saw a hostile army approaching my territory, sent my own troops to intercept them on the field, and won decisively… only for the enemy to retreat from battle, run right past my army, and capture my settlement anyway.
You can mitigate the risk of losing settlements this way by building up their defences, but it feels counter-intuitive that heading enemies off on the open field is so totally ineffective. Shouldn’t an ounce of prevention be worth a pound of cure?
My other issues with it aren’t exactly problems, just matters of personal taste. As you’d expect of a 4X title, this is a pretty complex game. There are multiple resources to juggle, and every unit and settlement has quite a variety of stats and abilities to keep track of. It wasn’t enough to ruin my experience of SoS, but it was a bit overwhelming.
It’s actually still quite a bit simpler than other 4X games I’ve played, which does leave me wondering whether it might be too simple for dedicated fans of the genre. It’s definitely a difficult tightrope Songs of Silence is trying to walk, but perhaps this is a case where a good compromise is a solution that no one is entirely happy with.
There’s a lot the game does do well, though. By far its biggest strength is its art. Absolutely every aspect of this game is stunningly gorgeous, from its sumptuous 2.5 cinematics to its vibrant overworld map to the spectacular spell effects in its auto-battles. Even the UI is pretty.
The story seemed a little simple, but I think that’s probably just a function of the fact that the demo includes just the first map of the story campaign, and the execution was pretty strong, with solid voice-acting, plenty of dialogue throughout the mission, and lots of flavour text hinting at some pretty deep world-building.
Looking over the store page, I can tell there’s a lot more to the game I didn’t get to see, with more coming once the game leaves early access (the store page promises a release window in autumn 2024, so presumably that will be pretty soon).
Multiplayer wasn’t included in the demo, but the full version offers both PvP and co-op versus AI options. The full game also apparently features three playable factions with asymmetric mechanics and two different worlds to explore, one of light and one of darkness.
The early access build has four campaign missions, and the full release will double that to eight. If that still sounds a bit small, consider that the missions are going to be fairly lengthy. It took me almost two hours to finish the one in the demo, including reloading an earlier save at one point after I made a questionable strategic decision. It could have gone on even longer if I’d tried to 100% the map. There’s a lot to explore, which I guess isn’t surprising given eXploration is one of those 4 Xs.
Aside from the missing features and content, though, you’d never know the demo I played was early access. It felt very polished.
In a way, Songs of Silence reminds me a bit of Lightyear Frontier. Both are games that are pretty far-removed from what I usually like to play, but in which I managed to have a pretty good time with all the same. While I may have had my gripes, every other 4X game I’ve tried (and I have tried several) made me bored within half an hour, but SoS had me feeling at least a little of that “just one more turn” pull I’ve heard fans of the genre describe.
I’ll definitely wait for SoS to leave early access before I consider spending money on it, but it’s earned a place on my wishlist, and it might be worth a place on yours, too. It’s a unique game that clearly had a lot of love poured into it.
The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.
