Game EXP: Silverpine Creek (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Silverpine Creek 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.]

Silverpine Creek
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: March 25, 2025
Publisher: Phantom Toast
Developer: Phantom Toast
Time Spent: 
First Play Playlist on YouTube

Silverpine Creek is a first-person exploration walking sim akin to the Slender games of the early 2010s, with a distinctive Eastern European aesthetic presented in a found footage format with a rather unique take on the mechanic of "lives" in terms of video games.  And the microphone is active.  That's a bit to unpack.

First off, the game is presented as found footage.  When the game starts, the visual is that of loading up a video cassette into a VCR, complete with date stamp and tracking lines.  If you die, ie, are caught by the witch, it presents as an error in the video playback, and you continue from a nearby shed in the village of Silverpine Creek that you're exploring.  What I find odd, is that the text before the game starts says that you have only "three lives" to complete the game, find all of the ritual items and place them at the burn site in the starting area, but there is a counter when you die showing " /5 Footage Error" with the number increasing after each death.  I'm guessing that the original plan was to only give the player three lives to complete the game, but at some point during QA testing, that the lives was increased to five due to how much of the game is a mix of trial and error and fuck around and find out.

I bring up the Slender: The Eight Pages comparison because in Silverpine Creek, you are also tasked with finding a set number of items scattered throughout an enclosed area, and the location of these items is randomized with each playthrough so while you might have a good mental map of the village after an initial playthrough, you are still required to look through plenty of nearly identical houses and huts looking for the specific items to take back to the burn site.  Being able to do this with three lives does seem rather difficult, but that's coming from someone who wasn't able to beat the game, so that should also be taken into account.  In one instance, however, I believe that the bell, the Echoing Chime, is always located within the church since that is where I found it in each attempt while the chicken coop, the alchemist shop might move around and there might be more than one well that the Lantern of Sigil is associated with.

What the game doesn't tell you, or maybe I missed it, is that you're only able to carry one ritual item at a time, with the exception of the three herbs needed to make the Wolfsbane Potion and any gate keys you find along the way; although presumably once you make the Wolfsbane Potion, you're only able to carry it and not another item.  While this does make sense due to an important mechanic that I'll get to shortly, I did find that in my first attempt, the Echoing Chime I was holding disappeared once I picked up the Lantern of Sigil.  I tried looking back at the church, thinking that it would have respawned there since that's where it originally appeared, but it wasn't there, nor was it at the location where I picked up the Lantern of Sigil.  A glitch, maybe?  I would say that I'd need to try and repeat that, but time is too valuable a commodity when playing this game.

Another glitch that I think occurred was during my second attempt, when I could actually see the scarecrow actively moving while looking at it.  In my first playthrough, I noticed the scarecrow closer to me only after I turned around.  I found this method of creeping out the player very effective because you couldn't see it happening.  I could walk backwards while watching the scarecrow and it wouldn't move, but the second I turned around and turned back, it had moved and was noticeably closer, but not so close that I felt threatened.  Jump to my second attempt, and I could watch it actively moving closer to me shortly after unlocking the gate to the main body of the village outside the church.  Once inside the church, I watched in bemused horror as the scarecrow slid into the church, through the corpse pit, and up to the lectern.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to avoid the scarecrow while trying to complete the puzzle in the church, so I walked up to and through it, just to see if anything would happen; maybe it could kill you?  But no, the scarecrow didn't do anything but continue to follow me, which makes me think that it's a glitch and not a feature.

Once you lose the fear of something, a large aspect and functionality of the game is lost.  I found this happening during my first playthrough, as there seemed to be jump scares happening every couple of minutes.  While looking through a hut in the village, a ghostly face would jump out from a darkened corner of the room.  While walking through a field, a skeletal face jumped out from nothingness.  While walking across a bridge, and shadowy pair of hands reached around from behind me, raking its ethereal claws across the screen.  Seemingly at random, a figure jumps out of the ground towards the camera, only to disappear in a burst of static.  My guess is that these events happening are supposed to scare the player so that they literally "yelp" out, drawing the witch to their current location.  This would work well for the active and animated streamer or Let's Play video on YouTube, but when you're playing in the dark with a person sleeping next to you, there's more of a real-world incentive to not yell out, thereby nullifying the microphone mechanic.  Additionally, when you see the same figure jump out at you using the same animation 15 seconds apart, your sense of fear again is severely diminished.

There is a context-sensitive mechanic that happens after you've placed the second ritual item, regardless of how many other tasks you've done (e.g., if you've found other items, completed puzzles like in the church, or photographed bodies of the missing people you were sent to locate).  After placing the second ritual item at the burn site, the time of day immediately transitions to nighttime.  This is surprisingly effective, as evidenced by my first playthrough, where I had gotten a decent grasp of where I was while only glancing at the map, but once the sun went down and my field of vision was nearly limited to only the weak beam of light from the flashlight, I felt that I was easily turned around.  A very effective mechanic, you could say.  The strategist in me thinks that the way of exploiting this, without knowing what happens after you place any more of the ritual items, is that you could possibly gain access to the rest of the ritual items without collecting them, photograph all four of the bodies, then start placing the ritual items at the burn site.  That way, you're not searching aimlessly through areas of the map you only just gained access to in the dark, increasing the likelihood that you miss something.  Let alone trying to find a black building with a red roof in the dark, which I wasn't able to do when it was still daylight.

Presently, I know how to obtain three of the six ritual items (mirror, chime, lantern), and I know how to obtain a fourth (potion), and I'm pretty certain I know where I can find the fifth (tome), but it's just a matter of solving at least one puzzle that I can't figure out.  Finding the sixth (amulet), I'll have to chalk it up to luck and looking in the right area of the village.  I'm pretty sure I can find the bodies again, but I'm not sure if they move around in different playthroughs the same way that some of the ritual items do, too.  That being said, I still haven't finished the game.  The game feels like it takes a time commitment of at least 90 minutes, assuming I'm able to not die five times, and I'm willing to bet that the frequency and intensity of the witch's attacks ramp up the closer you get to placing the sixth item at the burn site.  And that 90 minutes of silent gameplay is a commodity I can't find while at work during my breaks, and playing this kind of game at night after The Squire goes to bed is difficult because it's late (for me), and I'm already kind of tuckered out, and even with the minor adrenaline bursts from the jump scares, I find it's not enough to keep me awake to get to the finish.  Plus, in both of the videos, I quite back to the main menu, coincidentally after dying in the chicken coop, I just felt that I was done playing and I wanted to stop.

Silverpine Creek is a fun game with fairly simple mechanics and an easy-to-understand plot.  The explorable area is just big enough to get lost and turned around at the flick of a switch, but not so large that it feels overwhelming.  I do think that I'll be able to finish it at some point, maybe some time while at my in-laws' house in the high-desert forest while The Squire and Conklederp are both asleep, and I know the espresso I drank 45 minutes before will keep me awake past the witching hour.  And maybe then I'll finally be able to figure out those damnable shrieking chickens.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian