Lucy recommends: Silver Pines
Spooky season comes early in this small town survival horror
Hey there folks, hope you've had a wonderful week.
I'm thrilled to be kicking off the lookingforgame recommendation deep dives with Silver Pines: a survival horror Metroidvania that mixes old school Resident Evil with the dreamy (or nightmarish) vibes of Twin Peaks. I absolutely devoured this demo, and I hope you'll love it too. The link to try it yourself is below, but I also have a quick interview with one of its developers, which I really encourage you to read as they talk about their approach to creating the game.
Enough housekeeping, let's dig in!
What is it?
You play as private investigator Red Walker on the hunt for missing rockstar Eddie Velvet. Your search takes you to Silver Pines, an evacuated town with its own nightmarish secrets and horrors. Explore the town, gather resources, and fight the creatures who have awoken there.
Why it caught my eye
Silver Pines had its hooks in me from the start. I've never been to this small town, but somehow it felt like I had.
It feels like a real place: grimy, beleaguered, brimming with the promise of secrets and, crucially, answers, just lying out of reach. Luckily, the search is often fruitful and rewarding.
I am a very particular type of survival horror fan: I explore every nook and cranny, obsess over inventory space, calculate risk at every turn and during every encounter. That fastidiousness is really rewarded throughout the demo, and I implore you to pay attention to your surroundings as you explore. You know a game's resource management is good when you feel utterly torn at the idea of leaving a scant few bullets behind.
Silver Pines employs a neat mechanic in its approach to Metroidvania design that I last saw in 2024's excellent Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Walker carries a Polaroid camera, and at any point you can take a photo of an obstacle or item, and it's pinned to the location on the map for you to revisit later. Not only is it a wonderful quality of life improvement, but it grounds you in the game world. Silver Pines is full of familiar game mechanics such as mixing herbs to heal and a QTE to reload, but between taking photographs and dialing numbers at the phone booth to save, there's a tacit real-world familiarity that I couldn't get enough of.
Which made its horror all the more fun to experience.
Silver Pines lets you stew in normality, giving you time to scramble around the abandoned buildings searching for a lead before things start to take a turn. Walker has a troubled past, and is clearly a capable private investigator, but he is no Leon Kennedy, and your inventory is far from overflowing, so each combat encounter is tense and panicky. A dream for sickos like me.
Silver Pines wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. I mean, come on, you begin the demo in a diner where you make yourself a damn fine cup of coffee (to increase your stamina, of course), but there are a number of other references that will delight fans of the genre. In my interview below, Linus talks about the survival horror renaissance we've been having over the last few years, and I can confirm that with Silver Pines, we're continuing to eat well.
For fans of
Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Alan Wake, Twin Peaks, Signalis, The Wolf Among Us
But enough from me, try it for yourself!
From the developer...
I caught up with Wytch Elm co-founder Linus Larsson via DMs to find out about the origins of the game, how you build tension in a 2D Metroidvania, and why they went from AAA to indie to make Silver Pines. Enjoy!
LFG: What were the inspirations you pulled from for Silver Pines?
Larsson: More than any specific thing, I think Silver Pines grew from a love of the kind of noir revival thrillers that we saw from the 80s to the early 00s and a want for a grown-up and grounded video game experience.
Early inspirations were things like the small town mystery episodes of The X-Files, Twin Peaks, The Thing, 8MM.
The more abstract parts of Silver Pines owe a lot to movies like Mandy, Videodrome, Cure, Jacobs Ladder and Lost Highway.
What were the origins of the game?
The first conversations about Silver Pines happened five summers ago. We were sitting in Skogskyrkogården (Stockholm's Woodland Cemetery), talking about what we wanted to make next. I don’t know if it was sitting there among the pines or the fact that I was binging old detective television shows, but we kept circling back to the idea of a small town detective thriller as a video game.
At the time, there wasn't much occupying that space. IPs like Alan Wake and Silent Hill had been quiet for years and nothing new had been announced in that space. We really wanted more of it and couldn't understand why no one was making it. Eventually, we just looked at each other and said: "Fuck it. Let's do it ourselves."
A few years later, here we are. It’s funny how these things come in circles, the survival horror genre as a whole is back in style, I really didn’t see that coming, it’s a wonderful thing to see the thing you love make a comeback.
A lot of the team's background is in AAA. Why did you decide to work on a smaller, independent title? What freedom does indie give you?
AAA pays great and the games you're working on have fantastic reach. But for me, it became increasingly restrictive. Working as a director on Helldivers 2, more and more of my time shifted toward vision work, problem-solving and managing people. That's the natural consequence of working on something with hundreds of people. The larger the machine gets, the more difficult it becomes to turn.
But I'm a dreamer. I like following strange ideas as they come to me and seeing where they go. In a production with hundreds of people, you can't decide on a whim that something should be in the game and have it happen the next day without stepping on a lot of toes. Big teams are really fragile to change.
Today we're five people.
If somebody has a good idea in the morning, there's a real chance we'll be playing it that same evening. That's a beautiful thing to me. There's got to be room for dreams when you're doing creative things.
It’s a lovely feeling that we’ve all got our hands on everything. We use whatever methods we can, sometimes by necessity, other times for creative reasons. One example is rotoscoping. We make costumes, film ourselves performing animations and then draw over the footage frame by frame. It's a ridiculously inefficient way to work, but it gets some great results you don't see anywhere else, things like the movement in the clothing, the way hair shifts when you move, the little imperfections in how a body moves, it has a quality that's difficult to get any other way.
There are certain mechanics like taking photos and needing money to save at the phone booth. They make the game feel really grounded. Can you talk about the decision to add these?
Immersion and atmosphere have been leading stars on this project. The side scroller perspective is pretty contradictory to that… So we’ve looked at every action you do in game and asked: how do we make it feel like you are doing this, rather than watching an avatar do it? Groundedness became a guiding principle.
One of the strengths of a contemporary setting is that people intuitively understand how the world works and being able to apply your real-world knowledge builds immersion. Everyone knows that a coffee maker makes a cup of coffee. At the same time, it's an incredibly limiting factor. You can't solve navigation with a double jump or power progression with a freeze ray. We’ve really had to squeeze every drop out of the kind of grounded ideas that fit naturally within the world.
The camera, the phone booths, the interactive puzzle set pieces, all of these mechanics exist to close the gap between you and Walker, to make you feel like you're conducting the investigation.
The same philosophy extends to the story. If you want to get the full picture, you'll need to put together the fractured and sometimes contradictory narrative yourself.
I found the demo really effective at building tension. As a designer, what's the toughest part of designing when you have to take player agency into account?
Tension is incredibly fragile. Relentless tension is exhausting, a lack of it is dull. The balance can be a long journey.
A core memory for me is sneaking out of bed one night and watching John Carpenter’s The Thing with my dad. I was far too young to be watching it, and it scared the living shit out of me. Had nightmares for weeks. Over time, though, that feeling grew on me and became a passion. Carpenter is a master of suspense, he's willing to trust a slow burn, lets you stew in the brooding feeling that something is about to go terribly wrong. That's been a huge inspiration for how we approach tension in Silver Pines. We try to make players live in that anticipation. When it's finally time for release we really do it, the guns are loud, the violence is visceral. The contrast between those loud bangs and the slow burns gives those moments their power.
The open game world of Silver Pines creates additional challenges because you’re expected to return to areas you’ve previously visited, so we can't just rely on set pieces. We're putting a lot of effort into making sure the world continues to evolve. NPCs move to new locations, areas become repopulated, and the approaching storm gradually changes the atmosphere of the entire town.
I hope you'll give Silver Pines a try, and let me know how you like it! If you're a paid LFG supporter, we'll be discussing it in our Discord, so swing by!
In lookingforgame news, I'm pleased to say you can now also find us on the Epic Games Store! Weekly recommendations will obviously still be coming via your inbox, but I'll be curating some of my most anticipated games and recent favorites on the storefront too.
Take a look:
http://epic.gm/lookingforgame
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week.