Silver Pines - Town Pour (Review)
Silver Pines
Released: October 8th, 2026
Developer: Wych Elm Games
Publisher: Team17
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch, Switch 2 (reviewed), Xbox Series
How many horror games inspired by Twin Peaks is too many? I’m not bored of them yet, so I played Silver Pines, a horror game inspired by Twin Peaks. It’s pretty decent!
With its serious tone and oppressively grim atmosphere, Silver Pines emphasizes the darker side of David Lynch’s influential series, cutting back on lighter eccentricities to deliver small town horror of a more sobering variety. Our protagonist is Red Walker, a private detective on the trail of missing musician Eddie Velvet, and the search has taken him to a right proper shithole that's been largely evacuated due to an encroaching flood. Oh, and there are monsters of course.
It’s an inoffensively familiar plot setup and the ensuing story is interesting enough to keep one invested in its mysteries, even when things feel a bit rote. Side characters are typically furtive to varying degrees and their conversations with Walker are usually dry, though a few hammier personalities show up from time to time. While I may sound unexcited by the script, it’s not poorly written or even all that underwhelming. It’s efficient and competent, doing what’s required to drive the player forward, and that's not bad.
Where the game truly excels is atmosphere. It’s visually bleak but beautiful in its detail, the overcast sky and perpetually damp environment nurturing a murky feeling that relentlessly portends hostile weather. I derive a personal comfort from the setting as an Erith native - wherever it’s grey, wet, and dilapidated is home to me. Environments are loaded with visual details and background animations, giving every location a “lived in” feel despite the lack of inhabitants.
Survival Horror tropes abound in Silver Pines for better or worse, with early Resident Evil acting as a clear muse for some of its more archaic mechanics.
Saving is literally not free, requiring a dollar for a pay phone every time you want to record your progress - unlike the Spencer Mansion’s ink ribbons, money is considerably more abundant, but this generosity’s weighed against how cash is also needed to buy resources from vending machines. I’m not a fan of economized saving gimmicks ordinarily, but it’s exceptionally well balanced here, probably better than I’ve ever seen it done. There’s a substantive decision to be made whenever you spend your coins, but they’re not so rare as to feel too precious to use.
Less well executed is the obligatory inventory restriction - you can only carry as much as you can fit into a small Item Tetris grid, including keys and other critical objects, because of course. While slot upgrades can be found at a solid pace throughout the game, early portions can be downright strangling, producing the kind of system where you feel punished for not being clairvoyant. I’ve never seen the entertainment value in being unable to pick up a crucial item because you collected too much useful stuff or brought one bullet too many, then having to backtrack to a storage box. It’s not scary, it’s not fun, and it risks killing the tension of a horror story, especially since return trips can easily turn a frightening location into a familiar, mundane one.
Progression relies on a stock rotation of genre classics, from keys to codes to arrangement puzzles. One clever gimmick is using a camera to take photos of anything the player chooses, which are then stuck on the map screen. More than simple geographic markers, photographs can record visual and written clues so you don’t have to memorize them. It would be more convenient to have clues logged automatically a’la most other games, but some ideas are just too cute to begrudge and this is one of them. I just wish photos were quicker to access instead of being in a map screen submenu.
Silver Pines is all about manual input. Saving requires dialing out a phone number and pressing “Call” every single time. Key pads and vending machines are activated the same way, which may not be a hassle if you’re clicking a computer mouse but it’s a pain in the ass with a controller. The problem’s compounded by tedious item management and cumbersome puzzle interfaces that put me in mind of Silent Hill: Townfall (albeit to a less egregious degree). I don’t inherently dislike diegetic inputs - in fact I’ve always loved manual phone numbers as a concept - but it all comes back to how repetition can hurt a horror game, and the amount of time spent pressing virtual buttons for routine tasks borders on excessive.
Monsters are an inevitable fact of small American towns, and Silver Pines’ are eerie indeed. Regular enemies are rendered as dark silhouettes with a sickly green tint to them, ostensibly recognizable as people or animals but shifting in subtly persistent ways, as if struggling to maintain their shape. Humanoids tend to loudly sob or make anguished groans, and their movement looks like they’re either learning or forgetting how to walk. The early ambiguity surrounding these creatures is communicated really well without putting a spotlight on it, and their pained noises serve as both warning and threat to approaching players.
Since this is a survival horror with traditional sensibilities, conflict is presented as a sometimes necessary but often unideal solution. You can bet your ass that weapon durability is a big part of proceedings and ammunition is dangerously scarce, so the prospect of a fight is none too appealing. Unfortunately, neither is leaving dangerous creatures patrolling commonly trodden ground or following you across multiple screens. Ideally, our grim detective can dodge into enemies and push through them, but it’s never a risk-free solution with the way some creatures unexpectedly lunge and how hitboxes can feel a bit off. Stealth is a wholly underutilized aspect, limited to creeping past anything with its back to the camera, which is a shame because stealth mechanics are usually great for 2D horror games.
When it comes to actually hitting stuff, the most immediate problem is Red's miserable stamina bar, which decreases massively upon dodging and sternly governs your melee attacks. Unless you can keep putting distance between you and them, groups of two or more enemies present a real problem for a character who doesn’t swing very fast and can’t protect himself at all after a few seconds. Thank fuck sprinting (more like casual jogging) is a free action. By far the easiest (if least enthralling) way to deal with suitably spaced out mobs is to charge and hold a strong attack until an opponent’s in range - the blow usually sends them reeling enough for you to regain your stamina and prepare another hit. Given how weapons break unless perpetually maintained (of fucking course), light attacks are relegated to the status of desperation move, usually when fending off multiple aggressive attackers.
Firearms are effective, but liberal use will eat up ammo in no time. This is an example of a good videogame resource dilemma, as a gun’s all but guaranteed to make any room safe as long as you can sacrifice the security that comes with having actual bullets. Knowing when to shoot becomes pretty intuitive, and like with coins, judicious gun use leaves enough wiggle room to shoot some extra enemies for a treat. By default, reloading a weapon involves yet more manual input, this time a QTE that plays with each round you put into it. While I appreciate the attempted tension of having to pull a Revolver Ocelot in the middle of a fight, I’m glad there’s an option to disable this mechanic entirely - the interface is clunky to begin with, let alone trying to concentrate on it while ghouls are charging.
Very much like the script, combat does its job effectively enough. It harkens to retro survival horror mechanics while not being quite as harsh, offering a typical 2D battle system that’s simple and methodical. Boss fights rear their ugly heads at certain intervals, eager to drain Red's resources and inadvertently expose the drawbacks of Silver Pines’ slow paced combat by quite frankly sucking. They drag on, they make reloading and healing animations excruciating, and they compensate for a lack of mechanical nuance by spawning mooks to contrive some otherwise nonexistent challenge.
Silver Pines verges on being one of those games that'd be better with less game in them, like a sidescrolling SOMA. By far the best part is simply exploring each area as it becomes available, soaking up the atmosphere and discovering story beats. While no one component is poorly made, the compound effect of its more contentious mechanics nudges the overall production against the border between immersive and ponderous. It’s an incredibly well made game with a keen mind for survival horror, and some genre fans are going to love the very things I find unappealing.
That’s another horror game inspired by Twin Peaks in the bag.
7/10
