Silent Hope

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

Silent Hope, released in 2023 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is an Action-RPG set in a medieval fantasy world where the king has stolen the voices of everyone in the kingdom and the princess is trapped in a crystal tear, with seven brave heroes heading off into an abyssal cavern to try and retrieve what was lost.

As stories go, this is pretty silly, and the game isn’t even all that consistent about it – your characters grunt and shout as they attack, and the princess herself talks a lot throughout the course of the game. At times, it seems like she won’t shut up. All of this is to say, you won’t be playing this game for its story.

That’s not to say there aren’t some merits to the presentation here. This game uses 3D visuals in a chibi-esque art style with squat, diminutive, cartoony characters. However, the world they’re in is colorful and charming, if somewhat repetitive. But the real treat here is the excellent anime-style soundtrack, with some good examples being Opening Song, Into Oblivion, The Rush of Battle, Festival of Fools, Buried Beneath the Snow, and Twilight Castle.

The gameplay here has players taking the role of one of the seven classes (not characters – none of these has any individual personality) and heading into the game’s randomized dungeon, fighting enemies, and trying to progress enough floors to reach a campfire so they can skip to that campfire on their next delve into the dungeon. On a pretty frequent basis you’ll encounter crystals that will either let you swap out your class or return home with your loot. There, you can use said loot to craft weapons and other helpful equipment and items to enable you to do even better in your next run.

Everything works here and is enjoyable, but also seems… lacking. Combat is reasonably fun, though it can be repetitive, and I would have preferred one character with a greater variety of abilities to choose from, rather than seven with a limited selection of customization. What’s more, players will quickly find the two or three classes they like the most and just stick with those, save for when a mission specifically calls for a certain class. Contrast this with a game like, say, Children of Morta, which gives players some really good incentives to play every class and not just get stuck in their comfort zone, leading to even more repetitive gameplay as a result.

The “crafting” part of the game feels half-baked too. Back in your town’s home base, there are multiple crafting stations, though this is highly misleading, as what you can do at each is extremely limited. Some crafting stations can take two or three raw materials and process each over time into usable resources, or take usable resources to purchase actual equipment and goods. The thing is, processing raw materials requires players to kill time in the dungeon, building equipment and goods requires collecting recipes from the dungeon, and everything requires the game’s currency to buy, even if you have the recipe and the resources.

The result of all of this means that you never quite get the thrill of finding a great sword in a dungeon run – at best you’ll find a great recipe, which is worthless if you don’t have the ingredients, or don’t have the cash to process and build it. And even if you have all of that you may be unable to actually use it until you’ve gone through another dungeon run while your materials are processing. This slows down the “grinding” process and overcomplicates it, making it far less satisfying than it could have been.

All of this on top of the fact that this game is single-player only, where plenty of other similar games on Nintendo Switch, like the aforementioned Children of Morta and Diablo III Eternal Collection offer a robust multiplayer mode. If this game was $10-$15 it would be acceptable as a smaller, more scaled-down experience, but at $40 Silent Hope just doesn’t seem like it can compete with similar games.

Despite these issues, I do still enjoy Silent Hope. The core gameplay is good, it still manages to have a decent gameplay loop, and the presentation is quite nice. But at the same time it feels like it is actively fighting against letting the player actually enjoy the game, and there are multiple better options on Nintendo Switch for this sort of gameplay, ones that not only avoid this game’s problems, but also offer other features like multiplayer. I suggest you play one of those games instead.

tl;dr – Silent Hope is an Action-RPG where players swap between seven heroes heading into a cavern to try and retrieve the kingdom’s stolen voices. The core gameplay here is enjoyable, and the presentation is nice, but progression is stymied by over-complicated elements that drag down the pacing, and the lack of multiplayer is disappointing for a Diablo-style game. This game is still decent, but you have multiple better options on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}