Silver Screen Story

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 61 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income, and Epic Astro Story established a Simulation style akin to games like Sim City, where you’re building out a town or settlement. And then there’s a template that has you managing not employees but members of a sports team, something we first saw in Grand Prix Story.

Silver Screen Story originally released on mobile devices in 2019, then a port to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2021, then to PC in 2023, then to Xbox One in 2025. And this is one of the “manage employee” sort of Kairosoft games, with players managing a movie studio, deciding what elements to put into its latest movies, and gradually training up employees to do increasingly better work over time.

Despite that the presentation looks quite different this time around, honestly I don’t feel like anything substantial has been added to this formula since Game Dev Story, and in fact the confusing presentation makes it harder to parse information here. What’s more, some of the artistic choices here seem odd – you mean to tell me this game thinks sci-fi and technology are a bad pairing of topic matter for a film? Seriously?

It’s not all bad news here. You do have the opportunity, eventually, to have multiple production studios working on multiple films at any given time. But I think I’d still much prefer Game Dev Story, with its more direct and straightforward gameplay.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals (in this game with a side-scrolling view), paired with chiptune music that works for the gameplay but is not at all noteworthy, along with simple sound effects. For the most part, everything about this presentation is really endearing, though by this point we’ve seen more or less the same thing in numerous other Kairosoft games.

Overall, I think Silver Screen Story is a decent Management Simulation with some of Kairosoft’s usual problems, but it just doesn’t stack up to many of Kairosoft’s earlier works. Unless you’re a movie-lover who likes Simulation games, you’re better off sticking with some of Kairosoft’s other works.

tl;dr – Silver Screen Story is a Management Simulation where players manage the operations of a movie studio, deciding what films to put into production, what elements go into them, and how to focus staff training. The way this game presents information is overly-confusing, and mechanically this doesn’t feel too far advanced beyond what we got in Game Dev Story. Unless you’re dead-set of a game with movies as a theme, I suggest you get that game instead.

Grade: C

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