Sylvio 2

Auf dieses Spiel muss man sich erst einmal einlassen. Hat man jedoch zu dem Spiel gefunden und herausgefunden, dass es ganz viele Secrets zu entdecken gibt, die die Story ausschmücken, kann man nicht mehr aufhören zu spielen :) Das Spiel hat zwar kaum Action, jedoch übertrifft die Atmosphäre und Spannung die meisten anderen Spiele um Längen. Es ist auf jeden Fall einen Versuch wert.

Disappointing. The original Sylvio was flawed, yes, but it was full of unique ideas and unsettling moments with a beautiful soundtrack. It’s one of the scariest games I’ve ever played, not because of jumpscares but because of its atmosphere. But unfortunately, Sylvio 2 basically throws it all out the window. The puzzles have been completely removed, as have the enemies. And instead of searching for EVPs, you get a dot showing you where to go. So the game went from searching for EVPs, solving puzzles and trying to figure out what’s going on to go here, listen, go here, listen, go here, listen, okay, good, next section. The story feels more like 7 different stories wrapped up into one. I know they were going for more of an anthology style, with every location having its own separate story but the levels were so short that it barely mattered. The original overarching story seems like it barely matters. There’s barely any reference to the first game’s story, except for a couple words at the beginning. There are some good points. There are several points in the game where I could feel my skin crawling and had to pause. There’s a moment near the end of the game that uses the Spectrogram AMAZINGLY. It honestly scared me near to death. But a few moments don’t make up for the strung-together story. And the ENDING, Jesus. Until the ending, I was holding out hope. I didn’t think the game was so bad, it definitely had its moments that made my heart race but then the ending comes out of nowhere and honestly? It ruined the whole game. [spoiler]You finish the game, finding out that Jonathan and Captain Walters are dead and you’re in this really emotional moment. Juliette’s dead boyfriend tells her how much he loves her as she escapes the light house.[/spoiler] [spoiler]AND THEN THERE IS A UFO?? AND ALIENS?? AND IT TAKES YOU AWAY AND BADLY EXPLAINS THE STORY OF THE GAME IN A COUPLE SENTENCES?? APPARENTLY ALL THE HUMANS ON EARTH ARE DEAD BECAUSE IT’S 175 YEARS IN THE FUTURE NOW??[/spoiler] The ending felt more like they had no idea how to finish the game and instead, just slapped together whatever they had. And I know, people are probably thinking ‘Well, at least it was explained??’ but a poor explanation is far worse than NO explanation. It’s like walking up a flight of stairs and instead of getting to the next landing, you get hit in the face with a bat and fall down the stairs. On the technical side, the game is full of bugs and glitches. Some of the little terrain is unfinished and it’s easy to glitch out of the world. You can get hard-locked out of a save due to a bug involving the game’s main mechanic, video scrubbing. If you leave without finding all the voices in a video clip, when you reload the save, you will find the same recordings again and you will not be able to find any more. You will be locked out and have to start a new save. If you don’t complete the tutorial in the exact way they intended, the game will soft-lock and force you to restart. Don’t buy it. Pretend that Sylvio never had a sequel and you’ll be fine.

Interesting game mechanic and a must have for those interested in so called ITC paranormal investigation.

Is this a rant or a review? Yes. This rant review is sort of for two games at once: a) the prototype and b) the actual game we got in the end, which, sadly enough, differed a lot from the prototype. The Kickstarter campaign meant to turn the prototype into a full game failed (to my honest surprise) and the developer ran out of funds, which meant heaving to cancel a lot of what made the prototype show so much promise. I played [i]Sylvio 2[/i] before [i]Sylvio 1[/i] and enjoyed it for what it was, but after having played the first game, I was also really disappointed in what the second game became, and even more so after having watched someone else playing the prototype. Had I played the two in the correct order, I might not have enjoyed the second one at all: The reel to reel player/recorder from the first game was gone and while it could have been replaced by a similar device, but with video recording/playback capabilities added (as shown in the prototype), it wasn’t. What we instead got was a mere shadow: the handheld camera was gone, the monitor with editing controls was gone, and instead we got a simple tripod, which could only be placed at very specific spots, and a fullscreen view of the recorded footage, with the illusion of actually editing a video as shown in the prototype, creating a wall between me and the ghost world around me, protecting me from it and taking away the sense of immediate immersion and the sense of possible danger. With the exclusion of the things we fought in the first game, the danger and threat of a possible death was also gone. Overly obvious quest markers, which couldn’t be turned off, had been added, and made me simply go from place to place, like a herded sheep. The quest markers could at least have been disguised by using the microphone (from the first game) as a homing device, but weren’t, and even the microphone was gone. Then, to top it all off, the most cliched thing of all things cliched turned up in the form of a pentagram. I could say that the whole thing turned into a generic, steam horror game, but I won’t, because it, although just barely, managed not to. Although almost all the things that made the first game so great was gone, we could still analyse ghost sounds, which was great, but to get that, I could simply have played the first game again. The added ghost videos, while pretty creepy and well made, didn’t add much at all. The puzzling from the first game was also gone and we didn’t get many puzzles at all—if any. My favourite weapon was of course gone too since there wasn’t anything left to gun down. The story got pretty cheesy towards the end and while the ending sort of made sense, the story as a whole felt too disconnected from the events in the first game to make sense as a series. Now, it may sound like I really disliked everything about [i]Sylvio 2[/i], but I honestly didn’t. It wasn’t great, but I still enjoyed it: being able to “borrow” the captain’s boat and go from island to island, while listening to the engine and the horn (and the music too, I guess, although now I don’t remember it much) was nice, the boat’s navigation system was a nice touch, exploration was still rewarded, it had the same spooky atmosphere and unique style of the first game, sound analysis was still in, and most of the things shown in the prototype were still there (although in a disappointingly rudimentary form). Can I recommend Sylvio 2? Hmmm, weeell, I want to, but it depends on how high you’ve set your expectations: - if you expect things to be like in the prototype, then no. - If you played the first game and expect the second to be like that, or even better, then no. * If you haven’t seen or played the prototype nor the first game, than you might enjoy the second game. + If you have played the first game and didn’t like it, because it was too hard, had puzzles, didn’t have enough direction, or you really prefer obvious quest markers and a game being “on-rails”, then, yes. Full review: https://maskinkultur.com/2017/11/03/review-sylvio-1-2/ (scroll down for Sylvio 2)