If there’s one thing that struck me about Songs of Silence, it was its art direction: it’s very, very beautiful, and I say that as an artist too. There’s been no shortage of effort put into every piece of art available in the game, from its interface, character images, color palette and even its character models, which are close to the Nouveau art style.

A Challenge Even for Genre Enthusiasts

Well, I’m quite fond of games in the 4x genre and I’ve played a lot of them, especially if they’re more focused on combat than on building, which is more the case here. However, I felt a little lost when playing the campaign, which tries to serve as a tutorial, but most of it is in the menu and with a lot of text, which I don’t think is very interesting for someone who wants to learn a new game. After all, as well as being a strategy game that requires a certain learning curve and being a slower game, text-based tutorials end up making the experience more tiring than something more interactive, and as much as the campaign tries, I feel it wasn’t that effective for me.

The interface was something that bothered me, although it’s beautiful, it’s not very functional for those who want to learn the new game, everything is very stylized and it’s a bit confusing to understand so much information being thrown at you at once. And if you’re going to cover this game live, without having studied or practiced beforehand, both the streamer and the audience will probably be confused and won’t have a very pleasant experience.

Songs of Silence is A Fun Yet Repetitive Experience

After playing the campaign and checking out a bit of the skirmish mode, which would be free to choose the faction, how many players and have a game outside of the campaign, I felt a lack of a basic option that exists in almost every game I’ve played in the genre and even though it’s a simple thing, it could have had, to give a certain level of customization to the player, it’s not possible to choose colors, player 1 will always be a fixed color and successively the other players as well.

So I can’t, for example, have my armies colored yellow if I’m player 1. It’s a simple thing, but it’s something I missed in order to have a little more preference in something I’m going to spend hours playing and an option that’s been around for many years doesn’t make sense to me.

Missed Potential of Songs of Silence in an Intriguing Campaign

Going back to the campaign and gameplay, the story is interesting, the dialog is well done and the art direction works very well. But it wasn’t engaging enough to make me want to go all the way. Its real-time combat is very interesting, but not exciting either. Due to the lack of charm, so to speak, your army doesn’t have a very flashy attack, or a battle-instigating song, or a special move when you charge a bar that brings a unique animation and excites you every time it happens. You just sit there and wait for the life bars to drop. Which, if you want to go live or play it over time, gets tiresome and repetitive.

Even with its theme of using cards to interfere in combat, I didn’t find many of them made much difference to the gameplay, and sometimes I spent more time trying to remember the effect than relating it to the image of the card.

The game is translated into 14 languages, which is quite a lot and will certainly make it much easier for new players to embark on this adventure and for the public who follow it to understand it a little better.

Tested on the PC version via steam, the game requires an average machine, but it should run well overall, I didn’t encounter any problems during my playthrough in terms of performance.

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Summary

Overall, Songs of Silence is beautiful, a work of art, but its repetitive gameplay, with a large and confusing learning curve, ends up showing that beauty is not enough, especially in very complex games.