i didn’t look into Project Silverfish that much when i clicked the download button, to be frank. it caught my attention simply because it had a shooty-bang-bang trailer and a short description that painted it as a single-player survival game, seemingly being much more focused on the action aspect as opposed to survival. and it’s unbelievable how much i want a game like that.
i’m wary of any game that presents itself as open-world survival. most of them suffer from the same tired game loop that the developers, for reasons unclear, find very hard to resist. these games feel like an unsolicited training in accounting, with how many of them revolve around tracking five arbitrary gauges. you have to build a house from shit and sticks as the means of basic survival, settle down in it, then get an office job and land a part-time gig as a security guard, as your belongings need to be guarded at all times due to the game being multiplayer. game studios, one after another, keep overcommitting to “realism” so hard that they forget that real jobs give you money instead of taking it.
i don’t hate open world survival as an idea, though, hence why, from time to time, i give in and give some of those games a shot. the experience that i’ve been longing for is one that is more shooter-oriented: a sort of tactical experience where I can have fun shooting things while also having a playground where i am exposed to meaningful stakes that let me weigh my decisions before committing to my actions.
what i did not realize is that the game that i wanted to play all along was STALKER. Project Silverfish made it abundantly clear by wearing that inspiration right on its sleeves.
broadly speaking, it has many of STALKER’s mechanical mainstays: factions, anomalies, some semblance of life simulation, not unlike the famed A-Life system that made STALKER games so dynamic, and the very premise of being injected into the Zone, with the caveat that you do so not out of desire to find some kind of truth, or become mega-rich [although it’s clearly a running theme in both games], but to pay off a massive debt that you cannot afford to pay off.
this game’s spin on the zone seems quite intriguing, and so is the lore. at least as far as my speculation goes, it’s something along these lines: the humanity is basically extinct, and its remnants have seemingly been turned into some sort of Fake People that act as murderous zombies. you represent the brand new, animal-like species that came to replace humanity, yet seem to share a lot in common with them. you are just as much a piece of flesh as the humans used to be, and, provided the whole human extinction thing, you have to fight for survival just as hard, having to make allies and fend off enemies based on your group alignments.
unlike STALKER, this game is more open-ended, with elements of procedural generation being dialed up slightly more than usual. the game does not have manual saving per se, with the only meaningful way to save being beds, where, if you die on a standard difficulty, you can respawn with only 7 items from your previous inventory. the game has multiple difficulty options, neither of which are made with predictability in mind. you know where you respawn, but the world that’ll unravel after you die will not be the same.
the game is still in early development, and some things really show that. there is barely any exposition, so trying to piece things together on your own will require some intensive exploration [or, if you’re like me, discord interaction]. some of that is fine, but i wish there was more writing scattered around the world and proper ways to reference it after it gets picked up. so far we have a STALKER-esque journal, but it only shows the map and the faction info, with an “add entry” button that does absolutely nothing. it’s not even the lore stuff, i just want more hints on where each place must be located. it could be good exposition.
although, frankly, i think my yapping about the apparent issues this game has might be down to a skill issue on my end. i am too squeamish to play the games where my decisions have so much weight i cannot turn back and roll the dice again. i kept yearning for the predictable outcomes for so long that my choices became boring and i became an effective god of all the universes i’ve ever conquered. and that’s quite boring, frankly.