The Haunted Hoard: Silver Falls – Undertakers (Wii U)
In March of 2023, the Wii U eShop disabled all purchases, locking hundreds of games away and making many unavailable through legal methods. There was a warning that this closure was coming, and while most companies would see this as a reason to avoid the platform, that’s just not how Sungrand Studios operates. Often relishing in the chance to release games for outdated platforms, it’s little surprise the last two official releases for the Wii U eShop were from Sungrand Studios. One of them was specifically designed for the Wii U, but to make this odd situation even more unusual, the other, Silver Falls – Undertakers, was a port of a 3DS game. The 3DS eShop was also closing at the same time, meaning this game essentially just went from one sinking ship to another. A new mode was added for the Wii U release though, this not totally a port done for the pure novelty of it all.
Silver Falls – Undertakers contains three game modes, two of which uses graphics more reminiscent of an Atari 2600 game from the 1980s rather than a Wii U title released just under the wire. Game A and Game B modes both have visuals that are more advanced than what you could find on old Atari hardware, but it seems the visual style is meant to match the way the game unfolds, some clear inspiration taken from the infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Atari game. Not quite as obtuse as that much maligned classic, Silver Falls – Undertakers instead uses Game A to tell a horror story that actually can inspire a bit of unease despite the limits of the presentation style. A child named Bull Brandish is out camping with a friend when he goes wandering into the night in search of firewood. While many other people can be found around the forest, what makes this truly a dangerous idea is the presence of large black creatures that will drag Bull across the whole forest to the nearest pit should they spot him. These are the Undertakers, and while Bull can easily climb back out of the holes himself, others are not so lucky, the kid unfortunately becoming the only hope for many others on this eventful night.
The old school look for Silver Falls – Undertakers doesn’t impact its ability to create an eerie sense of mystery as much as you might expect. The limited blocky designs of characters and screens often empty save for a couple trees or lines to mark walls make it a bit unclear how far the game is even able to represent things, which makes the designs of the Undertakers harder to parse. Their dark unusual shapes look more like a tree’s roots than something with clearly defined limbs, but at the same time you can almost make out a fanged mouth atop a hunchbacked body. No clear description is given for them and the way the grab you and drag you across the world without moving makes it almost feel more like enormous gnarled hands are floating about the forest seeking prey, but there’s a surprisingly human sort of horror here as well. While nothing to really terrify the player, Bull can’t be more than ten and yet he stumbles across situations involving other people in the forest that are far too mature for the young boy to really grasp. While this is poked fun at when you stumble across adult magazines, you can also find unsavory sorts or people in dire straits, and while the graphical style can’t exactly whip up a grisly sight, it can still make what blood and dismemberment it does depict feel unnervingly out of place. Since a good deal of importance is given to figuring out the people and actions needed to be taken in Silver Falls – Undertakers to clear Game A rather than the actual difficulty of it, you do tend to focus in more on the peril these people find themselves in and there is a proper course of events with new details to follow.
Being on the Wii U instead of an Atari 2600 does mean that it’s not so much a technical feat that it can actually portray a small story, but it still does subvert one’s expectations a bit as you aren’t sure where its limits may lie. Admittedly though, your work in Game A is mostly about exploring and finding items to use in other situations. You can only carry one item at a time, but it still does sort of line up with adventure games in that your way of progressing is using inventory items properly. Silver Falls – Undertakers will come right out and ask for the required item in each situation, but the forest is pretty large and you might not even have a lead on where something like a flashlight or rope is. Furthermore, these can often be the reward for completing other actions, so figuring out the lay of the land and how to effectively ferry items around to make progress ends up being your involvement in this small tale. Some elements of it do feel like they’re setting up details for other Silver Falls titles, but as an unusual tale about one boy’s horrible night out in the woods, some of the unanswered questions can feel like intentional mysterious elements since he’s not exactly able to dig deeper into the affairs of the adults and Undertakers.
Game B takes the elements of Game A and turns Silver Falls – Undertakers into a more action-oriented rogue-like experience. In Game B you set out to earn a high score as you can now actually fight back against the Undertakers, the player able to pick different weapons based on the characters and bonuses you earned in Game A. For example, helping the dog in Game A will make him a possible companion in Game B provided you grab the bone pick-ups during a round to attract him. The Undertakers aren’t aiming to drag you to holes in Game B, instead drifting towards you to try and wear down your health. Beating them back will earn you points, but the Wii U Gamepad also has a danger to consider. While your character on the T.V. is running around shooting Undertakers and grabbing pick-ups, large Undertakers will slowly crawl out of a hole on the Game Pad, and if they make it all the way out, a strong and durable Undertaker will appear in the play field. You need to tap the touch screen to keep the pit crawlers at bay while still opening fire on the television, this making things a bit more hectic since it can otherwise be a bit easy to guide Undertakers around at first.
Once enough Undertakers are killed in a round of Game B, a level is completed and you go to a screen where you can grab a power-up. Some will only last for your current scoring run, things like increased weapon power still useful to have even though they don’t last. However, if you choose to grab comic pages, they’ll be carried across runs, and once enough are collected, they provide a consistent boost that can even be upgraded further with more pages. While Game B does have a high score to try and beat, later rounds do get pretty hard to manage, it easy to spot a difficulty wall but you can also fight against that with the right upgrades or more comic pages, meaning there is reason to plunge back in and try again to beat your score. Collecting the comic pages gives a decent long term goal even if the style of play does become predictable after a few rounds, but it does work well enough as a score challenge and a reason to return to the game after you’ve completed the short story of Game A.
Silver Falls – Undertakers for the Wii U’s unique mode though is the weakest part of the package. SurviVS feels rather disconnected from the rest of the game, assuming a top down 3D visual style that does not do it any favors. Already Silver Falls – Undertakers does have many small graphical and technical quirks, things like text scrolling at its own pace while also being unskippable, the dog in Game B flickering to look like a little boy, and every item you can pick up in Game A can be “fired” which leaves a duplicate of whatever it is laying on the ground until you fire it again. SurviVS is hard to make out with how dark it is and how far the camera is zoomed out, but the actions taken in it also feel unpolished. In this multiplayer only mode, one player uses the Game Pad while up to four others can participate using Wii Remotes. The Wii Remote players move their characters about on the T.V. screen, running around a forest at night looking for useful items or upgrades. The player with the Wii U Game Pad though is on the Undertakers’ side, able to summon in monsters that will attack the players as they work. The monsters behave in odd ways, their animations don’t match their attacks well, and the human survivors have attacks that don’t portray their effectiveness very clearly. With the Game Pad player only getting to spawn in a few creatures and rather slowly, unless they scatter them across the map effectively to gang up properly, they likely won’t win the day. Conversely, the humans might lose because they can’t tell if their attacks are doing much, this mode overall hard to get invested in when it is often pretty tame and during its flashpoints of action it feels unwieldy and sloppy. SurviVS is best avoided and thankfully its feels pretty disconnected from the rest, the game’s option to “import” characters from other Silver Falls games with a code even sticking to Game B content rather than touching this messy mode.
THE VERDICT: While it won’t terrify you or anything, Silver Falls – Undertakers is able conjure some unnerving situations despite its deliberately antiquated old school visuals. Game A is a decently told story about a kid trying to help despite being out of his depth both in adult matters and in saving people from the unusual monstrous visitors in the forest, and Game B is able to add a more action oriented survival challenge that’s worth retrying thanks to the page collection system giving you bonuses to shoot for in the long term. SurviVS is a complete waste of a multiplayer option feeling half-baked in concept and execution, and while there are definitely elements in the two main modes that feel rough around the edges, they can still pull off their ideas with enough relative success that Silver Falls – Undertakers can hold your attention for a bit.
And so, I give Silver Falls – Undertakers for Wii U…
An OKAY rating. Game A really does come through with its effective eeriness, the forest feeling massive, the Undertakers lurking in unpredictable patterns, and most of all, the gore and character situations feel like they rub up against what the game can depict in an interesting way. It can’t portray a dismembered body realistically and that almost makes it more effective, the attempts it makes a stark contrast to the world around you. In the same way, the childhood innocence of Bull Brandish makes the moments you walk in on some adults doing things they’d never want kids to hear a little alarming, unease the main feeling Silver Falls – Undertakers evokes rather than terror. Game B tosses that away admittedly, focusing in more on quick uncomplicated action, but it also makes the limited longevity of Game A easier to stomach. You can’t save and quit in Game A, the game easy to finish in an hour or two though and perhaps smart in keeping your eye on the story the whole time, but unless you missed something like the dog then there’s not much reason to pop back in after the first run. Game B gives you something with some more substance, the comic collecting element making it easier to invest more time into it and really start to figure out ways to potentially get further in your next run. SurviVS feels incomplete though, it pretty poorly realized all around. Perhaps it was to ensure the game did make it on Wii U at all before the deadline that this mode is so paltry and dull, not enough refinement put into making the systems balanced for an actual intense battle between monster summoner and survivors. There’s just not enough depth to either participating side, your ability to react too limited and even the impact of your actions feeling rather minimal to the point the announcement of a victor often feels sudden.
Take away SurviVS though and Silver Falls – Undertakers can hold your interest because it works well within the two other spaces it builds. Its eerie tale in Game A contains interesting sights to find even if your role in making it unfold is just delivering items about, but the mystery is strong enough that you want to press forward. Game B won’t change too much between rounds, but it keeps you involved enough as you need to manage the many areas Undertakers approach from while figuring out how to invest in temporary or permanent boosting options. Its release situation already meant it was a novelty, but it feels like its design is meant to make it a bit of a curiosity already, it not able to construct the strongest systems or stories but able to present things in an interesting enough way that investing your interest in it for the short time it lasts is not a waste.