The Haunted Hoard: Ayasa: Shadows of Silence (Xbox Series X)

The atmospheric puzzle platformer Ayasa: Shadows of Silence kicks off with a scene of a city being bombarded by bombs, an elephant laying among the dead, and an army of naked eyeless humanoid creatures marching towards the explosions mindlessly. It’s a bombastic opener that raises many questions, especially on how Ayasa, our fragile young female protagonist, might factor into this, but the game isn’t quite as explosive as the opener and, unfortunately, you will have witnessed its most tightly crafted moment before you ever gain control of an obnoxiously rough experience.

 

Ayasa: Shadows of Silence is a mostly wordless narrative experience, but most sections of the short adventure are introduced with little bits of text to put some of the themes forward. With chapters based on Faith, Hope, Love, Greed, Indifference, and Betrayal, we are told what is ultimately a pretty clear anti-war story with each chapter usually laying out how the related virtue or vice connects. This doesn’t mean it’s totally direct, there is plenty of room for the player to ponder the intention behind less direct visual metaphors, and there also seems to be some general religious undertones with elements like coming across a group of women crucified or a ritual from hooded figures that gives you the power of invisibility. The game’s store page spins quite a yarn about this taking place in the Inverted World where light and shadow coexisted under someone called Tas the Absolute. A war fractured this peace and your goal is to collect Tas’s light as you move through spaces related to the war like a village under attack, ruins, and a secret testing lab, but the extra context doesn’t really enhance a game leaning mostly on its gift for striking visuals that can be grotesque and uncomfortable in ways that only occasionally whip out blood and viscera to enhance the impact.

Unfortunately the graphics are one of the first places Ayasa: Shadows of Silence comes up short. There are times some artistic intent does come through, strange bulbous goblin men and well spaced landscapes of horrific sights doing their job properly. At other moments though, the game struggles seemingly with technical issues to convey its world. Lighting is constantly having issues, adding an ugly fog to some moments. Sometimes creatures move with unusual twitchiness that, if intentional, still looks cheap and like improperly looping animations. More than once, some elements for a scene that were meant to load in simply didn’t, like a point where towering red figures were stomping on a group of people willingly marching to be crushed… except the people weren’t there so the animation looked strange without its haunting context. Some points there seem to be actual visual glitches like a pool of water appearing to be green and at others it is clear that the issue was already there like a corpulent giant who smashes its arms on the ground but with such weak force it looks like it was holding back to avoid hurting itself. Visuals can even be outright deceptive like a particular moment where another giant appears between a wall of eyes and blows a strange vortex of green wind to block your path. He periodically stops and you can try to run through, but you’ll die abruptly even if the wind isn’t blowing. This is because the wind timing isn’t the relevant part of the puzzle truly, but it’s not the only moment where awful design and display issues intermingle to make something far worse.

 

Ayasa: Shadows of Silence is a puzzle platformer, but even in the first area where you’re mostly running, jumping, and pushing boxes to assist with that, you’ll encounter some weird issues. For whatever reason sometimes the jump would be disabled with no clear cause for a bit, and even when it does work it sometimes felt like the jump still wouldn’t trigger elsewhere in the game or, when jumping from a slope, it triggers with a delay so it can’t actually carry you the distance you need. Oddly enough there are a good deal of moments in the game where you need to jump just right to clear a gap and it is obnoxiously precise, and while death will set you back to a nearby spot fairly often during these, slow load times also make the process irritating as you try to figure out how to accommodate the control issue into the jumping. Many times challenges that should be simple are made weirdly difficult by needing to perform an action absolutely perfectly with it almost impossible to get it right on the first attempt. One of the first powers you gain as Ayasa is the ability to roll back time on broken objects, often reassembling a structure temporarily like a bridge or entryway. For some reason, the bridges are often spaced so even if you run and you try and jump right before it falls apart again, you still likely won’t make it across in time and fall to your doom, Ayasa’s plain universal death animation often looks even worse too when her falling death just has her land in midair rather than actually hitting something on the way down. An aggravating amount of time in Ayasa: Shadows of Silence will be spent not solving proper puzzles or trying to outrun a real threat but instead hoping you get the jump timing just right as you repeatedly attempt to cross a falling bridge or leap across some oddly spaced platforms in lava, and naturally the occasional control issue does not contribute to this well.

 

Ayasa: Shadows of Silence does get a few other powers over the course of the adventure but they’re rather underwhelming. One is just her taking out a light that isn’t even needed in the game’s already fair visible but still moody environments. Temporary invisibility is certainly a useful tool, the eyeless naked humans for example a frequent fiend meant to encourage a stealth section and once you get invisibility you can mostly bypass these without incident. This would be a shame if stealth was better handled, but it feels like the glitchy movement of the fatter and more dangerous eyeless ones frequently makes trying to treat such section seriously a losing battle, although you are at least faster than most foes who pursue you and many of the common ones have to come to a stop to attack meaning you can often just run without incident unless there are more monsters ahead or some tricky level geometry to slow you. Bigger baddies will pursue you more closely and won’t be thrown off by you going invisible, although there was a tall creature that I managed to accidentally make disappear for half of his intended section by not triggering the scene where he falls through a bridge so he can harass you later when you’re down below. You never really get the sense you just barely escaped a foe and often instead can see the artifice that the monster is going just the right speed to not catch up, although a swarm of black hands that emerge from the sand for one section can be a danger because its appearance can sometimes be inconsistent with the rules of how it moves meaning even playing into the puzzle of trying not to disturb it can still lead to it appearing underneath you to instantly kill you. Worst of all, the final and only boss can be made to actually leap out of its battle arena if you get too close to it, but while that makes it unwinnable without a reset, it is at least a consequence of your actions that might not emerge compared to moments the game is just functioning improperly on its own.

Ayasa: Shadows of Silence does have puzzles that aren’t related to its monsters or more basic tasks like just trying to leap across a few gaps without the controls getting you killed. Some of these are incredibly uncreative though, like a maze where it’s just a matter of walking to each switch that you can easily see to open the way or another one involving a bunch of valves and pipes with poisonous gas where you go back and forth over and over to clear away the gas streams with no other complication. Sadly some of the best puzzles in the game are as simple as a puzzle involving blocks with glowing letters and finding fractions of the answer on walls in the nearby area. Some areas give you enough room to move around so you might not realize where the tools for a puzzle are but this can be a bit interesting since you’re asked to figure out what to do a bit compared to other straightforward moments, but there’s no puzzle that really comes forward as truly interesting or one that really tests some logic or understanding beyond that basic level.

 

There is a secondary aspect to the adventure involving the chapter themes and an optional moment where an action can be taken to play into them. Some of these really are just walking up to the right thing though and a purple lantern usually helps you know where the optional activity is already, but one involving a big pig businessman and his smaller pigs consuming slop as he feasts on gold at least provides one of the more memorable visuals even if the pig people feel like a sudden strange shift in the kind of visual language the game usually relies on. These will usually nail in the message of the chapter with one more little chunk of text, although strangely if you die nearby it will reset the action you took to assist. It is still registered as completed for the sake of getting the game’s better ending, although it does feel weird to have to ignore the old couple sitting by a burning tree simply because you died or even just walked a bit too far away and undid the little scene involving them.

 

Now, when I turned on Ayasa: Shadows of Silence, I did get a message saying that I should share any glitches with the game’s creators on Discord or the like so they could be fixed rather than mentioning them in a review. It is quite possible some of the specific glitches and visual failings are also unique to the Xbox Series X port, and I compared my game experience with various playthroughs of the PC version to see if that was the case. It’s how I knew some things even happened like the tall monster that didn’t fall through the bridge briefly disappearing from my experience or that the pool shouldn’t be green. However, while the PC version definitely has far superior lightning that really draws out the best of the game’s visual direction compared to this version’s more hazy look, I also saw that there were many issues that had existed in the game since launch and still hadn’t been rectified despite the PC release happening in November of 2025. A little less than a year later and the game still hadn’t gotten its act together, and while maybe this message will be removed for regular players, it’s hard to believe that Ayasa: Shadows of Silence will end up in a truly tidy state, and even if it did, it sadly has very little that would be good if it worked as intended that it’s hard to see this game coming together into something far superior to the mess we are currently left with.

THE VERDICT: Ayasa: Shadows of Silence can hit you with a striking visual or an atmospheric scene even when the lighting and other glitches are working against it, but that’s pretty much all it has in a buggy, messy, and obnoxious experience. For some reason the hardest moments in the game are the seemingly straightforward jumps while outrunning monsters is often basically the same as just running forward unopposed since they can rarely catch you. Few puzzles go beyond basic ideas and when they do you sometimes get moments like the green vortex that trick you with meaningless distracting elements. Even if every single bug or visual flub was rectified, you still can’t extract enough from its decent eye for uncanny or grotesque designs to make up for the uninspired gameplay in this mercifully short puzzle platformer.

 

And so, I give Ayasa: Shadows of Silence for Xbox Series X…

An ATROCIOUS rating. I can’t remember exactly which time when I timed a basic jump a third of a second off and slid off the landing spot to my doom and another loading screen that I realized I could not recommend this game to other people, but it was certainly not the last time it happened. I can believe that maybe eventually the pool will be patched to not have a color glitch, or maybe that the red giant will get to step on the marching people properly later down the line, but it was truly the fundamental flaws that made it clear there was little hope for this experience, especially since it’s apparently gone through some overhauls already and still turned out like this. While visual issues can impede the art direction I can at least see that it had potential in a greater project even if its unspoken interpretative layers maybe aren’t that compelling for how overt they are or how they are much of the time. However, not being able to jump properly during mundane moments is a shockingly basic element that was flubbed. You might be able to miss some of the frustrating moments if you get lucky on your first attempt, I am shocked I perfectly performed a jump across lily pads while the dark lighting made some of them almost invisible on my first try and fear how it might impede other players who aren’t so fortunate. The very basic and uninspiring puzzles aren’t going to bring much enjoyment even if the rest of the game got its act together, and it’s actually a bit sad how the monster pursuits are so underwhelming even before you get the invisibility, although a player is likely not to mind missing out since anything that causes restarts in this game only prolongs a very rough experience.

 

I try to be discerning in which review copies I accept now and I thought Ayasa: Shadows of Silence’s visual presentation would lead to at least an atmospheric experience if nothing else, but it was hard for the effective environmental and monster designs to be seen amidst technical issues and a poor approach to general gameplay. Even after the game opened with the message about the developers still trying to work out issues felt like perhaps a holdover from a time where it was more flawed, but it seems Ayasa: Shadows of Silence is saddled with some inherent issues no matter the system even if the port to Xbox Series X came with possibly new problems. It can be hard to take any time to even try and unwind the meaning behind the game’s story when your mind will so often drift back to the frequent instances of obnoxious obstacles to progress and issues with the basics. I can’t rate a game on what it might one day hypothetically be, especially when this is the state the game is in after it’s already undergone apparently ineffective refinements before.