In Sylvio, you are Juliette Waters, a woman who is fascinated with Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). While wandering an abandoned family fun park, she attempts to unravel the mystery of what happened, and seeks the souls that still reside there. Originally released in 2015, the game recently gained a remastered update for the Unity 5 engine.
I've been waiting to buy this title for a while now, and so I thought that the most recent 50% off sale was a good time to pick it up. The unique idea behind Sylvio, where you attempt to communicate with spirits with an EVP microphone in particularly, appealed to me as it's a concept I have not seen before. Unfortunately, I feel that the game severely lacks direction in the beginning, which caused me to lose all interest almost immediately.
You start out wandering aimlessly around the park, with no sense of direction or what you are supposed to do. Eventually, I'm not sure if it's a timed event or a certain tile that you need to walk on, you will fall through the ground into a basement where you become trapped. You must find your way out, and in doing so you're led to a garage where the first puzzle lies in wait. Out of nowhere, I fell over and came back to a checkpoint. Confused, I proceeded back to the place where I last was and found out that some big black "smoke monster", that looks like it came straight out of Lost, was headed for me. I grabbed my potato launcher and attempted to shoot it, I tried to use my microphone on it, and for about 15 minutes I kept repeatedly "dying"; which is just a fancy term in this game for falling over and restarting at a certain location.
I became frustrated, especially when I managed to somehow get the monster to go away, only to have it return a few seconds later, so I quit the game. It also doesn't help that the controls are completely convoluted, and there's absolutely zero in-game tutorial to help you get used to them. On top of this, there was hardly any background music or ambiance, leaving my experience very empty and rather boring; I honestly felt no compelling reason to continue playing Sylvio beyond the first half an hour.
It's rare that I will write a review for a game that I have not finished, but Sylvio really lacks anything substantial within the first 30 minutes of its existence. This is an important timeframe, where it's usually make or break for most players. Unfortunately, it's break for me. Perhaps if the game had more direction prior to branching off into an open world EVP/Ghost Hunting game it would've faired better, but I've seen in other reviews that most latter parts of the game are spent needlessly wandering around also. I've actually refunded this title, I think I'll go for DreadOut: KotD instead.
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