![]() Right when you feel the puzzle box clicking inexorably and obviously into shape, the game makes room to get just a little bit heady. This can be satisfying but also kind of hollow.īut, unlike a lot of time travel stories - and a lot of adventure games I’ve been playing recently - it gets richer in the final act. For much of its runtime, it’s just a well-oiled machine, and you play to watch the cogs turn and the tumblers fall into place. The characters aren’t deep, the horrors of the apocalypse aren’t deeply felt, the ethics and mechanics of time travel are hinted at but not really engaged with. And time travel stories can often feel like puzzle boxes more that interesting narratives a bunch of curious loose threads in the first half are all explained in the second half when you see how the time-travel shenanigans played out. It’s not particularly original - as you can guess from the premise, it’s borrowing a lot from Back to the Future and Twelve Monkeys. So far as inventory puzzles go, The Silent Age’s inventory puzzles are not at all bad, but, given there’s a much more interesting time travel mechanic right there, it’s a missed opportunity.Īs for the story, for much of the game, it seems purely functional. But inventory puzzles have always been the path of least resistance - they’re the simplest to design and the easiest to program. I made a point in my Monkey Island video that the opening three trials each involves a completely different part of the engine: learning patterns in the dialogue system, interpreting information in the picture window, and possessing without necessarily using inventory while the game makes jokes with the sentence line. I’m ambivalent about inventory puzzles, because an adventure game engine is generally designed such that you can fit rather a lot of different kinds of puzzles into it. Any object that looks like it’s important, you need to slap another object on. The time travel mechanic seems like it would lend itself to some real clever braintinglers, but time travel mostly exists as a way of getting around locked doors, sneaking past guards, and giving you two versions of every room to look for inventory in. It doesn’t help that every single puzzle is also an inventory puzzle. Outside of a few sequences where your time travel doohickey is out of power - which have some of the better solutions - every puzzle requires a jaunt forwards or backwards through time. It’s a clever hook, and it makes a fairly standard set of adventure game puzzles more interesting, though you’ll jump back and forth in time so much that becomes mundane. What we have here is a smattering of puzzles with the twist that every location exists both in the “present” and the post-apocalyptic future. You inherit his portable time travel doohickey and… well, solve a bunch of adventure game puzzles. ![]() You’re a janitor in the 1970s who has a run-in with a dying time traveler who tells you basically everyone in the future he’s just arrived from has died of a horrible plague, he’s come back to prevent the outbreak, but now that he’s dying it’s your job to finish his task. Game and want to purchase it, you can support the developers by doing so here.I think I first heard about The Silent Age on an episode of Idle Thumbs at least a year ago? They implied it was a neat bit of time travel malarkey, and that’s exactly what it turns out to be. This download is completely free and won't cost you a penny. Then, launch the game through the desktop shortcut. ![]()
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