Demo Time: Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: December 21, 2024
Publisher: Aya Games
Developer: Aya Games
Time Spent: 58 Minutes
Playthrough Video on YouTube

The shortest way to describe Ayasa: Shadows of Silence is a mix between LIMBO and Little Nightmares but with significantly looser controls and at times all with a very confusing depth perspective.

The game starts out in an oddly visceral pan through a serene forest, follows a butterfly through acrid pink smoke past the rotting corpse of an elephant to reveal a clear-cut forest on the outskirts of a large upwardly constructed city right as an air raid siren blares and a nuclear bomb is detonated in the heart of the city while an army of naked, eyeless and grinning humanoid marches on the said city.  A lot is going on in this opening, all happening in fewer than 30 seconds.  I don't know what it all means.  The game then opens as the camera pulls back from a young girl, who we'll call Ayasa because it seems like a name and I can't find anywhere on the Steam store page that says it isn't the name of the character, as she wakes up, presumably immediately after the bomb went off in the opening.  It certainly is an impactful opening, to say the least.

Once the game started, I moved the graphical settings down from High to Medium since the game was maxing out at around 22 fps on High, and around 45-55 on Medium.  I kept these settings throughout the rest of the game as it seemed to run fine and needed no further alteration.

Then at about 4:08, the chase began as the left side of the screen filled with purple and black smoke as withered grasping hands emerged from the encroaching storm.  And then I ran off the cliff and died.  I respawned back at the beginning of the stage, forced to watch as Ayasa once again woke up next to the wooden crate.  What was a little frustrating was having to sit through this 21-second sequence (I timed it) before you could start running towards the right side of the screen hoping to get maybe a split-second headstart on the cloud of hands.  And then I ran off the narrow plank bridge.  And then I waited another 21 seconds before I could take control of Ayasa again.  In total, I died four times trying to get across the bridge, which isn't too bad, but at the same time, it does feel a little excessive considering this is the first seconds of the game.

Because this is only a demo, I felt like nothing I did made any kind of sense.  There were areas with large sentient plants that looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland, there were giant ROUSs, there were the naked smiling creatures, and again, there was the purple and black pulsating cloud of flailing arms.  Everything seemed to be after Ayasa and everything was a one-hit kill.  Thankfully though, unlike the very beginning of the game, there was never again a requisite 20-second unskippable cutscene upon respawning, because the section in the burning village would have been more of an absolute nightmare than it already was; because who enjoys dying 15 times in just as many minutes if they're not playing Celeste?

Once the Ayasa makes it inside a few of the buildings in this burning village, the game truly feels influenced by Little Nightmares, although there isn't a lot here before the demo ends.  There are some building interiors and just as much crawling through tunnels and ducts before you reach the penultimate room, but that is about as close as a comparison as I can make.  The camera angles are similar, but the structure of the rooms feels more normal and less fantastical than the oversized proportions of the rooms in the Maw.  The penultimate building was interestingly designed in that you start in a foyer and have the choice of an anteroom that one of the naked creatures inhabits, but that is a dead-end room, which is only revealed after you reach the door and discover that you can't open it.  Or a flight of stairs that leads to a large open room where a massive floating eye scans the room with a red light that incinerates any organic flesh it touches.  The exit is a well-hidden hole in the wall on the second floor, but because both of these rooms contain easily triggered one-hit-kill enemies, it can be very easy to become frustrated and lost.  But once you find the hole in the wall and fall through to the room below, the demo abruptly ends.

I don't know how to feel about the Ayasa: Shadows of Silence Demo.  On one hand, I like the art style and I like the homages that the game is pulling from without feeling like it's trying to be either LIMBO or Little Nightmares, at least from what is present here in the demo.  I don't like how floaty the controls feel, especially when you're trying to run over a narrow bridge followed by a non-skippable 21-second intro scene.  I also really hated that sequence in the burning village where I died 15 times, but maybe that's just on me?  I feel like I'm partially curious about who and what the naked smiling creatures are as well as the giant eye and how they're all related to the nuclear explosion at the beginning of the game, but I'm not so curious that I would buy the game on day 1.  I'd probably wait until it's been out for a few years and maybe pick it up during a future Steam sale or if it's included in a Humble Bundle.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

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