Silent Hope (Switch)

In Silent Hope, a once great kingdom fell to ruin, the king so driven to despair by his people’s decline that he stole away their voices and threw himself into a great abyss. Leaving behind his darling daughter, the princess mourned for 100 years, her tears fusing together into a great crystal that sealed her away in the ruins of the lost land. However, in this wordless world, seven heroes step forward to plunge down into the Abyss to try and get answers on the king’s actions and restore the gift of speech to the world. Strangely though, despite the lack of voices being the set up for this dungeon-crawling role-playing game’s story, it ends up feeling like it has little impact on how the story unfolds.

 

Part of this revolves around how the seven heroes you’ll play as first start their quest, finding the princess’s crystal at a base camp near the Abyss’s entrance. Despite being sealed in her crystal, the princess manages to be the only person who retained her ability to speak, her voice reaching the seven silent protagonists with ease. At first, this is a nice touch, the princess able to tell her perspective on the kingdom’s decline, and the English voice actress does a good job of making the princess’s quirks and charms effective. Dani Chambers can sell the subtle joy the princess gets from reminiscing but also leans into the sadder moments quite well to make them feel authentic but not overwrought, but one thing that does harm this element of the story is the game makes her far too much of a chatterbox. At first this almost feels like it could be an intentional trait; she’s gone so long without having anyone to talk to, of course she’d be a bit overeager to speak her mind. She does stay relatively reserved when you are exploring the abyss, but at base camp when you have many small activities to do to prepare between voyages, she’ll comment on most every action and repeats certain lines far too frequently, turning her observations into pesky noise over time that will bug you as you’re trying to do important tasks. The seven protagonists being voiceless feels a bit irrelevant too, they can work together solidly and never face any issue because of it, and RPGs already have made silent protagonists a standard idea so it doesn’t feel out of place even. The narrative does eventually make a few points about the idea of stolen words to justify the premise and some payoffs rather deep into the adventure do make it an interesting touch, but Silent Hope doesn’t feel like a game built around its narrative concept all that much.

For the most part, the time you spend with Silent Hope will involve plunging deeper and deeper into the Abyss to learn more about why the king forsook his kingdom, and one interesting part of this large dungeon is how it is divided up. Every section of the Abyss culminates in a boss fight before you head to the next one, the amount of floors to each layer varying, but the theming of the different layers actually coincides with the history of the kingdom itself. Rather than it just being a large subterranean dungeon, you’ll find a section themed around a harvest festival the princess has warm memories of or the winters where the royals happily mingled with their subjects. Admittedly, some layers aren’t quite so inspired, it’s almost laughable when you reach the lava-filled layer and get told straight-faced that the kingdom experienced a sudden unexpected volcanic eruption, but at least some effort was made to make the different layers have some thought behind their design beyond just a shift in visuals. Excursions into the Abyss won’t see you starting at the very top and trying to fight your way to the very bottom though. Any time you reach a new layer or a camp fire you’ll be able to return to that spot later as your entry point, and you will need to head back to base camp often to turn the various items and materials you find in the dungeon into useful gear or resources.

 

For your adventure, you will have seven characters you can play as. A warrior who wields a massive broadsword, a wanderer with a sword and shield, a sage with a magic casting staff, a maid who fights with two daggers as a rogue, a plucky young farmer with her pitchfork, an oddly posh fighter who uses her fists for fighting, and an archer comprise your team, but the game will technically never force you to play as any one of them. Instead, you choose who you plunge into the abyss as, fighting with one hero at a time, but there is an advantage to varying up who you use. Should you find one of the princess’s crystal tears in the Abyss, it can serve as a way to return to base camp to regroup, but you can also call in one of the other heroes to take over. Swapping heroes during a dungeon delve will give you a bonus to elements like your move speed, defenses, attack speed, and more, meaning varying up your adventurer will let your team get gradually stronger the longer you’re in the Abyss. Also, while every hero has two potions to heal up with while exploring, these only rarely can be refreshed, meaning bringing in the back-up can mean you can swap out the worn down character for someone with health to spare. Early on when your team is fairly weak and they haven’t yet leveled up and learned any useful abilities, swapping heroes lets you push further, a well-balanced team able to make more productive runs. However, over time it can be a bit rough to try and invest in all seven characters despite the incentives, but you’ll eventually figure out whose fighting style you prefer and be able to winnow the group down to focus your efforts on the ones who click so they can be strong enough for the lower layers.

 

Part of the reason the group as a whole becomes harder to manage though is how the base camp visits are handled. Between fighting monsters in the dungeon and trying to reach new checkpoints, you’ll have to drop in back at the entrance to invest in some crafting tasks. Each hero has a designated workspace save the wanderer, who swaps in for whoever you are playing as currently. For some of the characters, this work is absolutely crucial with keeping up with the rising danger the Abyss presents. There is an area for refining ore you find into metal, another for turning wood into lumber, and a blacksmith for combining those into new weapons and equipment based on the Mementos blueprints you find in dungeons. However, the farmer and rancher will produce food items for you with the seeds and fodder you find, but these go towards the kitchen where you can cook food for small bonuses when entering the Abyss. The food isn’t useless, but it is far less impactful and easily overlooked compared to the other half of the base camp tasks, making it feel like a time sink with little reward. Additionally, tasks at the base camp only progress as you fight your way through the dungeons, and with limits on how much work you can do, sometimes even a fully busy camp won’t really have produced much for you in your absence. This is one reason why keeping the whole team comparable in strength becomes too big an ask over time, because even as you improve the camp’s work areas to do more, they can only do so much and investing that time in gear for your less preferred heroes feels like it will slow down your efforts in exploring the Abyss.

The base camp work might have been better balanced if exploring the Abyss was a richer experience than it ended up being. For the most part, areas in the Abyss will be lightly randomized spaces where you only ever need to find the spot to drop to the next layer, but fighting monsters and breaking objects will be crucial to acquiring useful loot or growing your characters. The real-time action isn’t often that difficult, monsters usually only have a single trick or two, and with each hero letting you set up to three abilities, often an encounter is a quickly resolved skirmish where you use all three powers and maybe poke them a bit with your weapon if they’re still standing after. Abilities do have cooldowns though, and if there are other monsters nearby, you will need to start thinking a bit more about who you target, how you want to cycle your abilities, and if some options like boosting your character instead of actions like a high damage blow or stunning strike are worth having as options during a busier encounter. Despite only having one trick for the most part, some enemies can be quite dangerous, either because they’re something like the succubus that can quickly rush towards you, the wicked weasels who can launch air scythes from afar to pester you when you’re busy with others, or big baddies like the turnip monsters or bears who not only can knock you around but block the way to something like a tiny healing bunny that is making the fight last longer. It is a shame the game so quickly starts rehashing monster types as later layers are more likely to introduce recolored creatures rather than new foes, but the combat does benefit from being quick at times but complicated if the monsters are placed together well or nearby to environmental hazards that limit the smartest strategy of unleashing your three attacks and then buying time until you can do so again.

 

The somewhat simple fights do their job well enough even if they’re not often particularly exciting, the player incentivized to clear out floors to earn experience points and loot but also needing to balance how much health they can afford to lose while doing so. In the later game when you start getting more advanced skills like the maid’s ability to chain together ambush strikes it can get quite satisfying to tear through foes, but there are still moments that can really test how well you can fight like little battle arenas with very limited space to move and the Memory Rifts. Memory Rifts send you to a space with foes far stronger than what you should be facing on the current floor and can often tear you to shreds with only a few attacks, meaning they really test how well you can manage a crowd. The rewards are proportional to the risk, but they are also the most likely place you’ll die, and death does have a cost. Beyond just meaning you’ll need to dive back in at the last available spot to try again, you will lose a good deal of items you found, nothing so rare that it feels like a devastating loss but it does mean the base camp return will likely be less fruitful than you’d hope when it already feels like such visits can be a bit weak when done intentionally. Extra challenges on regular floors can also be undertaken for some extra bonuses and bosses do have more advanced attack types to make for fights with more to react to, but for the most part progress in Silent Hope will become something you can handle relatively well despite it being quite repetitive, only broken up sometimes by a chance for something riskier or more dangerous to invigorate your adventuring a bit.

THE VERDICT: Silent Hope doesn’t really have the follow through needed to make its ideas hit as hard as they could. The world without words functions feels more like a piece of lore rather than an active element, adding an interesting enough backstory even if the talky princess feels a little out of place for it. Heading back to base camp to prepare for another dive into the abyss ends up having necessary work feel so slow you can’t afford to balance the attention you give your seven heroes despite mixing up who you’re playing as being one of the entertaining elements of trying to attempt a deep dive into lower floors. The dungeon-crawling action is at least snappy albeit repetitive, the complications of monster crowds and Memory Rifts helping to add some tension and form a decent enough loop of risk and reward to keep the premise afloat even if trying to conquer one long dungeon could have been made more involved and varied.

 

And so, I give Silent Hope for Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. For the most part, Silent Hope is a dungeon crawler with the interesting gimmick of being able to occasionally swap your character out for someone who fights a bit differently, and its the fact the other systems don’t support it as well as they could that the execution only ends up feeling decent rather than exciting. Devoting half of the base camp to the temporary boosts of food items that only last until you leave the Abyss and don’t have that big an impact feels like a waste of the available conceptual space, armor and weapon forging having much broader value and deeper considerations since they will remain consistently impactful and in an appreciable way. Even those are hampered a bit by the time it takes to do work, a player who wants to get the maximum value out of the crafting needing to exit the dungeon far too often and even then won’t be able to make too much out of what was recently completed. It can make the loot you find feel less interesting since you know the process of getting value out of it is slow, but at least the action itself finds a good mix of being quick and simple much of the time so it’s not too tedious. The combat can be a bit engaging too when the game does focus in on providing you a proper challenge. So many repeated enemies does help a bit in keeping regular exploration snappy since you will know what a creature can do since you’ve seen earlier versions of it, and when things do get a bit tougher you get those moments that better test your ability cycling and movement. Almost everything feels like it can be made more robust or better intertwined though. Quicker camp work could make loot feel more valuable, moments that make the enforced silence on the heroes meaningful would mean we have more than the princess to provide some narrative weight to the premise, and a broader range of baddies could make dungeon exploring more enticing since you can expect more surprises and fights that make you think a bit more. Thankfully, there is at least enough to each part at present that the game doesn’t become dull, especially since even with its limits placed on your progress, you won’t spend too much time retreading the same spaces unless you do so by choice to better improve your power.

 

Silent Hope’s premise of a world without voices intrigued me when I first heard about it in a Nintendo Direct and I was a little sad to see how inconsequential the concept was to the experience, but this adventure still works as a simple RPG to devote some time to. It’s not so demanding you need to lock in and focus nor is it so empty that it feels like endless grinding, the game not exactly relaxed but it is an easy experience to return to as you attempt another dive, regroup at camp, and see if you can get a bit further next time. It could have handled most of its ideas better, but having seven heroes to swap between helps stave off the repetition and provides a neat twist to the idea of trying to tackle one giant dungeon gradually.