Sylvio: Black Waters (PC) Review

If you want the TL;DR version of this review, Sylvio: Black Waters is a game for existing fans who are willing to accept declining interest means a sequel that pushes the narrative forward while scaling back ambition. It’s not as “walking sim”-ish as Slyvio 2, but it’s still an incredibly linear and restrictive experience, built using the bare minimum of assets, and featuring limited gameplay that barely evolves over its short runtime. As such, it’ll only keep you engaged if you’re already invested in the protagonist and her ongoing journey.

Juliette Waters returns for a third outing, still trapped in some sort of shifting purgatory after encountering a vengeful spirit at the end of the first game. She finds herself exploring familiar ruins on what seems to be an alien planet, inhabited by human spirits trapped in an elaborate mental simulation, with the only way out a spacecraft abandoned by visiting astronauts. As in the prior games, the storytelling feels wilfully vague, weird, and confusing.

Shortly after discovering the aforementioned spacecraft and a password-locked terminal alongside an ominous-looking lake, Juliette stumbles into a dark and twisted realm with only one surviving resident, “Lee”, a voice over the radio who was supposedly at the lake she just passed. This begins an uneasy relationship as Juliette tries to find the code and her way back to the spacecraft, occasionally guided by Lee who wants to escape with her.

For the next five or so hours, that’s all the narrative context you get. The focus instead switches to Juliette trying to understand the nature of the place she’s exploring, the fate of the now aggressive spirits who died within it, and whether Lee can be trusted. What that entails, gameplaywise, is following glowing fragments of spirit shells through dark, labyrinthine environments; collecting ghostly snippets of dialogue and piecing together the story behind each victim; finding artwork to match phrases and unlock short poems about the lake; and interacting with scrambled video recordings to extract ghostly phrases and open a path forward through the gloom.

It’s not a particularly complex game, even with the return of basic combat and resource management – which you can disable from a menu that looks like it belongs in a prototype build. You plod along in a linear fashion between light sources, using a handy watch to highlight interactive objects. Snippets of ghostly conversations are automatically recorded from glowing fragments as you approach them, and added to a crude text menu where you can try rearranging them in the correct order. At frequent intervals, you’ll scrub through distorted audio – forwards, backwards, fast, and slow – which remains as weirdly compelling as ever and is the only mandatory activity.

When it comes to defending herself, Juliette collects several air gun variants, pressurised cylinders, and projectiles. You can load and fire “rocks” to shatter distant spirit shells before you get close, or just blast pressurised air to disperse them if they detect you. Aside from some nice particle effects and a few cheap scares when they’re tucked out of sight, it adds very little to experience and resources are abundant. Those only interested in the light puzzling elements and narrative won’t miss much by disabling them.

Now, while it’s great for creating an eerie atmosphere, Sylvio: Black Waters features way too many dark and repetitive environments – ranging from gloomy forests to gloomy farmland and gloomy ruins. Although Juliette is quite mobile and can jump around awkward geometry with ease, she’ll stop and complain it’s “too dark” if you try to wander off the lit path. Using ladders that shift gravity and take you back through areas from a new perspective adds some excitement to traversal, as does cycling outwards from the hub area while listening to distorted singing that sounds like it belongs in another Lou Reed and Metallica collaboration. To its credit, this structure controls the pacing, keeps you focussed on the banter between Juliette and Lee – both of whom provide excellent yet unsettling voice work – and it allows the developers to sync the music and on-screen events effectively.

That said, Sylvio: Black Waters is still only for fans of the prior games. The focus is on delivery a fresh narrative on a budget, which it does with great writing and voice work, but this comes at the expense of evolving gameplay and interesting environments. From a gameplay perspective, the first hour feels much the same as the sixth, and the environments coalesce into an indistinct blur. It’s not a bad game if you know what you’re getting into, and the characters and storytelling are high points but, much like Sylvio 2, it doesn’t come close to recreating the weird but enthralling magic of the original.

Sylvio: Black Waters was reviewed on PC using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher.