Silver Pines Review - A Twin Peaks Metroidvania That Mostly Works

Every October brings a pile of horror games, and most of them are the same haunted corridor with a different coat of paint. Silver Pines (Wych Elm, published by Team17, out October 8 on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch) is not that. It's a small-town mystery that plays like someone fed Twin Peaks, Silent Hill and an old-school adventure game into a metroidvania and let the result ferment in fog.

What it is

You are Red Walker, a private investigator who wakes up in an abandoned diner with no memory of how he got there. A ringing payphone tells you to find Eddie Velvet, a musician who vanished in this half-dead town, and everyone you meet is hiding something. The whole town is one interconnected 2.5D map: locked doors, blocked tunnels, red-lit back rooms, and a lot of backtracking once you find the right key, tool or clue. My run took a little under ten hours, and I was not bored for any of them.

The highs

The atmosphere is the headline. Hand-painted, rotoscoped animation gives every character a slightly wrong, dreamlike motion, and the fog and red neon do more with less than most AAA horror budgets. The voice acting - Chase Brown as Walker especially - carries scenes that would fall flat on paper.

More importantly, the game respects you. Puzzles are rarely explained; you read notes, graffiti and overheard conversations, then combine items and work it out. When a solution clicks after fifteen minutes of poking at a mural, it's a real rush. Resource management is proper survival horror: bullets are rare, you craft medicine from scavenged ingredients, and hidden mementos quietly expand what you can carry. Four difficulty settings mean you can tune how mean the scarcity gets.

The lows

Combat is the weak link. Red moves with a deliberate weight that suits the mood but makes melee feel clumsy, and ranged fights are more about rationing than skill. It's "fine" - which, in a game this good at everything else, is a letdown. Each district ends with a boss, and a couple of those are long attrition grinds rather than interesting encounters.

Puzzle logic also slips occasionally: a trick that works on one object refuses to work on a near-identical one two rooms later, and I lost twenty minutes assuming I'd missed something when I hadn't. I also saw a few enemies clip out of bounds on PC. Nothing blocked progress, but it chips at the immersion the game works so hard to build.

Price and who it's for

This is a budget-tier release - $24.99 in the US, and it launched with a discount - which in our region makes it an easy yes for anyone who misses the pre-Resident Evil 4 era of horror, loves Lynch, or wants a metroidvania that is about reading and thinking rather than air-dashing. If you need tight, satisfying combat, you'll feel the stiffness every time a dog comes at you.

Verdict

Silver Pines is a confident, strange debut that nails mood, mystery and puzzle design, then asks you to forgive combat that never gets interesting. I forgave it, mostly. It's one of the best horror surprises of the season at a price that makes the flaws easy to live with.

Score: 8/10

Image: Firth m / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_Tapulao_pine_forest_in_fog.jpg