The house the silent age Pc#
The house the silent age series#

You are more or less confined to the relevant areas, so you can’t accidentally backtrack to somewhere you no longer have any reason to explore. Granted, that may not sound like a big leap forward, but if you’re an adventure game veteran, being able to solve problems without having to stretch the suspension of disbelief to its breaking point is a welcome breath of fresh air.Īnother factor for The Silent Age‘s status as more of an Adventure Lite game is that the experience has been streamlined and condensed enough to where it is almost impossible to get bogged down or stuck. Generally speaking, the puzzles here follow a mostly normal line of reasoning, for example, at one point, you’ll have to steal an ambulance from a morgue, which requires you to find, well, the keys for the ambulance… which will be laying around somewhere in the morgue itself, in the kind of place where you wouldn’t be surprised to find the keys. For one, the biggest bugaboo of games like this, the sort of Adventure Game Logic where you end up having to try everything in your inventory on just about every available object in the area twice because the solutions to puzzles are so convoluted and esoteric that there’s NO conceivable way a normal human being would have drawn that conclusion, is effectively nowhere to be found.

The house the silent age Pc#

Now, even though this does play very similarly to a classic PC adventure game from back in the day, The Silent Age does feel more like an “Adventure Lite” kind of game, more LucasArts than Sierra, let’s say. Irony: A katana but nobody to slash with it. This means that on top of your usual adventure game puzzle skills, you’ll have to factor in jumping between the parallel timelines to make progress, and while it’s not quite overly demanding, it does add a mostly enjoyable extra layer to the gameplay. Y’see, wherever you are, using the device will bring you to the exact same spot, just either forty years forward or backward, meaning that say, a door that is closed and locked in 1972 might be missing entirely in 2012, or an area that’s been flooded out in 2012 might be bone-dry and passable in 1972. This is where the big gimmick of the game, your time travel device, comes into play. You click around to move Joe around the various environments, examine objects and your general surroundings, and acquire items that can be used to solve puzzles around you. Before the cops come to arrest you for doing the dirty deed, the man slips you a device that jumps back and forth between 19, and it’s up to you to escape police custody and find out just what the hell is going on at Archon.Įffectively, The Silent Age feels very much like a throwback point-and-click adventure that plays very much like it came, well, back from the mid-’90s. When Joe heads down there, he finds signs of violence, including a dying man bleeding out from a gunshot wound. When Frank, one of Joe’s fellow custodians, quits one morning, Joe is assigned to assume Frank’s duties as well, including cleaning up the laboratories. The Silent Age casts you as Joe, a Vietnam veteran who has returned to carve out a new life as a maintenance man for Archon Technologies in 1972.

The house the silent age series#

And, sure enough, video games have also waded into these particular waters, ranging from strategy titles like the Red Alert series to legendary RPGs like Chrono Trigger, and now including today’s piece of the Big Steaming Pile, The Silent Age, developed by House On Fire.

After all, the ability to leap forward to see what the future holds for humanity, or to go back and correct the mistakes of the past makes for some rather substantial speculation. Wells to BACK TO THE FUTURE, time travel has made for a pretty well-trod genre in fiction.

Big Steaming Pile, House On Fire, The Silent Age, Video Gamesįrom H.G.