I’m sad to say that Ayasa: Shadows of Silence represents the second time in as many weeks that I’ve had to stop and review a game before the end, because it was too broken to continue. In this case, I was exploring some subterranean bunker full of piles of food, coins and whatever else. On the way back out, the ceiling suddenly disappeared and the whole world seemed to shift down. The lighting messed up and the doors vanished. Even reloading from a checkpoint didn’t fix it. It was well and truly broken.
My only recourse left was to restart the entire game from scratch. Maybe if I was a consummate professional, I would attempt that. But the thought filled me with depression. The preceding hours had been filled with frustration, you see. Because, while Ayasa might have moments of nice atmosphere, it’s also full of an inexcusable amount of bugs, and the bits that aren’t bugged needed a bit more thought put into them.
Teeny-Tiny Bad Dreams
Ayasa: Shadows of Silence has one of those plots where it prefers to show you an assortment of things and help you piece the themes together along the way. In this case, one of the first things it shows you is a big old nuke going off in the middle of a city. Bit of a conversation stopper, that one. Shortly after this, our protagonist wakes up in the middle of a forest and proceeds to start running to the right. She quickly finds that the world has gone very wrong. For one, everything and everyone wants to kill her.
This is a story that is firmly dedicated to show don’t tell, which is admirable. Though critiquing Ayasa‘s story is difficult. Partly because I couldn’t finish it, but also because I was never sure I quite got the story. There’s a lot of striking imagery at play, with grotesquely deformed monsters and big sad statue heads everywhere. The metaphors do get a lot less subtle in the back half, though. I’d wager money on Ayasa‘s final message being about the connection between war and greed. That’s based on the big artillery guns constantly firing and the literal giant pig eating a bowl of money.
Anyway, regardless of subtlety, one thing that Ayasa gets right is the atmosphere. The woods feel appropriately haunted, any buildings you come across seem moments from falling down, and all the people you see behave very strangely. Then as the game progresses, everything gets more and more grotesque. Sound design is generally okay too, with some nice mechanical noises. Though all the enemies make the gurgling noise from The Grudge, which is a bit weird. Maybe the long hair is coming in a future patch.
Unfortunate Infestations
Visuals and atmosphere can only get you so far, however. Now we need to talk about Ayasa‘s gameplay, which is where things go off the rail a bit. I have issues with it on multiple fronts. Ayasa is, at its core, a puzzle-platformer. It’s done in that ‘almost but not quite 3D’ style, where you can move up and down as well as side-to-side but the camera is fixed. The platforming itself is incredibly floaty, and with this 3D-esque style, it makes landing basic jumps a challenge. Hell, even walking along a log becomes challenging, especially given the camera’s tendency to whip around to the least useful angle.
As for the puzzles? To be glib, I’d welcome some. The majority of Ayasa‘s puzzles are solved in seconds, like pushing blocks onto matching tiles, or just aren’t puzzles at all. A prolonged section has us just going up and down underground lifts, as we turn off poisonous gas. It does nothing but stretch out the time. The rest of the gameplay comprises of stealth sections, where you have to creep past the Grudge monsters. This is the source of most of the frustration, as being stealthy only works about ten percent of the time.
That’s probably a bug. No matter if I crouched, or even went invisible, I was spotted immediately. I had to beat these sections by jogging around in circles, waiting for them to get stuck on the scenery. It joins the large ranks of other bugs. Frankly, I’m hard pressed to think of a time there wasn’t at least one bug. I was constantly falling through the floor, and quite often respawned in the same floor. The worst ones came at the end of long platforming sections, or in the middle of stealth sections. Even the monsters would bug out, rapidly vibrating and moving unpredictably. The best ones were when I’d walk through a door and the camera wouldn’t follow me. Exit Ayasa, stage left.
Ayasa: Shadows of Silence – Broken Beyond Belief
And so it came to an anticlimactic end, with Ayasa standing in a completely bare room. No exit, nothing to do. Just existing. I don’t know the ending, so maybe that fits. Still, I was a little sad that it ended like this. Ayasa‘s contemporaries are games like LIMBO, INSIDE and, of course, Little Nightmares. Explorations through bizarre worlds. But these games were very tightly designed. LIMBO has clever puzzles, and INSIDE blends its world with its gameplay much better. And, crucially, Little Nightmares has predictability in its monster chase set pieces.
Ayasa: Shadows of Silence feels like it’s barely holding itself together. Even aside from the bugs, it’s difficult at times just to figure out where we’re meant to go. Even when we do, it feels odd. Like a clock puzzle where we have to adjust clock hands to drop safely off a cliff. Except I frequently bounced off the hand and died anyway, so I was never sure that I was doing the right thing. The bugs do drag Ayasa down, but there’s a lot of old-fashioned poor design on display here too. For all the atmosphere of its world and visuals, Ayasa needed a lot more playtesting and fine tuning before it was ready to step out into the real world.
