Spirits of The Silicium Forest Reviews

Simple yet good story. Nice music. Hard puzzle-fights in rogue-lite mode on max difficulty.

It’s getting a thumbs up. Context: I’ve played hundreds of hours of Slay the Spire, Griftlands, Monster Train, Hades, and other roguelike deckbuilders and character-builders. The Good: 1. The game introduces enough unique mechanics and fresh ideas to carry its runtime. 2. The story is engaging. 3. The visuals are unique, vibrant and fit the tone. 4. It’s clearly a labor of love from a passionate, creative dev. The Not-So-Good: 1. It’s missing key refinements to be a hidden gem: which is disappointing because it almost is. 2. The dialogue needed another pass—some modern/casual phrases break immersion. 3. The art leans a bit into NSFW-adjacent territory. Not necessarily bad, but it stands out. 4. The roguelike elements feel underdeveloped—too many repeated enemies/bosses and unbalanced mechanics. Verdict: Despite its rough edges, the game’s fresh ideas and passion make it worth your time if you enjoy the genre. You won’t regret experiencing it. I’ll be keeping an eye on this dev and looking forward to future releases.

I went past the 2h mark because the game was finally getting interesting. I dont regret it. I wanted to know the end of the story. It s sad and depressing. And in the end, the mechanics didnt grab my interest. So depression + mokay mechanics = I feel like 6h played is already enough. I don't recommend. Hard pass.

The game is pretty neat: The story is not elaborated but interesting enough; The artstyle is unique, very well done; The music is just phenomenal. Easily one of the strongest points of this game. There is also a rogue-lite mode. It is good enough to keep you playing for a couple more hours. Considering the price, I think everyone should give it a try.

I wanted to complete the achievements before making my review. It's a solid little card battler that has a strong amount of replay-ability in the rogue-lite mode. The story is definitely really short and not really the main focus of the game. It gets more difficult with the "not beginner" classes for the achievements, sometimes frustratingly so. The rogue-lite part is where the most amount of love was shown for the mechanics and replay-loop. The story does seem more like an after thought after the game's concept was made. If you're looking for a story driven card-battler this is going to follow short of your expectations. That said, the story though short, is personally to my tastes and I ended up liking the way it started and ended. Pros: - The variety of classes/skills/build-options - The art is excellent. The Mesoamerican themes are really nice to look at - The story. It's short, but it tells a lot in a short amount of time. It's definitely on the dark theme'd side - The replay-ability in the rogue-lite mode - The music. It only has a few tracks, but I really think most of the tracks fit in excellently. There's only really one that I asked myself, "The hell is this? This doesn't belong tonally", but it gives you the option to change the music track any time you want with a single click, so it ends up being a non-issue for me - The game is pretty forgiving if you make a mistake. You can start over with the current "battle" whenever you want. You only pay the price of your time - Enemy variety outside the story offers a good amount of variety Extra Pros (Not game related): - The developer is very active on discord and is willing to push you in the right direction with builds and class scenarios when asked on how they are supposed to be played - The developer is very generous. I ended up asking for a few keys for this one to give out to friends and they were kind enough to throw some my way. The Dev only asked for an honest review, which is refreshing that they weren't trying to influence my review by "buying me off". Now I just gotta get my friends to leave reviews too. Cons: - The price-to-gameplay seems a bit lacking in content. If it was $5-7 it's absolutely worth it in my opinion - The difficulty spikes at the "boss" levels can be really lame. It feels like they are poorly balanced if you didn't get the right skill/chip drops - The builds when you get a bad run sometimes makes it actually impossible to win and if you're over halfway through or on the "final" boss you basically wasted your time - The "Chips" you get for each run can't be changed out. You get 6 and it's completely locked out from swapping them. So if one made sense for the early-mid game but is worthless in the late game, you're stuck. This is incredibly annoying and it should have been a "remove this with a penalty" type of thing. - There's skills and chips that seem significantly worse than others that are unlikely to be used in many (or any) runs. I found myself getting most of the same spells if I wanted to win (especially on harder difficulties) - The class descriptions and/or class "tutorials" could DEFINITELY use some love. It's make a huge difference for players to get an idea of what they're getting in to - Story choices. There's only a couple and I'm not sure why they are even there. They don't effect anything other than a couple dialogue options. It teases you with some sort of consequence-related illusion of choice without it actually doing any of that The Nuetrals: - The story is not a "and they all lived happily ever after" one. It's a dark story. Personally I like it, but if you're going for the "feel goods" or anything out of this one, you ain't getting it. Adjust your expectations accordingly - The whole game can be completed in under 20 hours (honestly could be done in under 10 in every mode if you used the same tactics every run) - There is a mechanic that punishes you for not steam rolling each battle called "deep wounds". If you barely made it past a battle and your health fell below the deep wounds level, you lose health permanently for the rest of the run. The chips that lower the deep wounds level end up taking a permanent chip slot that could have gone to something else better. It really feels like it should have only been a debuff for the next round (or next two rounds) instead of for the entire run. It feels like the game punishes getting too creative and barely scraping by in a battle and leans more towards a more "meta game" approach. All in all I would recommend this one. For what it is, I had a good amount of fun, had a good challenge, and didn't feel like I wasted my time at all.

Очень приятная, компактная игра для всех любителей поломать голову над тактикой по вечерам. Про нее я узнал из ТГ-канала "НАШЫ ИГРЫ", за что ему большое спасибо, иначе пропустил бы эту маленькую жемчужину российской инди сцены. Игра привлекла свои описанием мира - сочетание древнего общества и высоких технологий. Нечасто такое встречается в наше время. Приятные сюрпризы продолжились, когда разработчик связался напрямую и предложил ключ. Но я отказался, так как считаю, что надо поддерживать хорошие начинания не только словами, но и деньгами. Сразу же после первого запуска очень порадовал графический стиль, очень способствующий быстрому погружению в атмосферу вселенной - пост-апокалиптический мир ацтеков в смеси с высокими технологиями. А саундтрек от команды Tyagotenie идеально в нее вписался. По механикам игра представляет из себя смесь пошаговой тактики с РПГ и карточным рогаликом. Смесь, не сказать, чтобы совсем необычная, но вот ее реализация здесь довольно нестандартна. Вместо колоды карт у нас всего один герой, которому мы подбираем умения для достижения максимальной эффективности в бою. При этом в самом бою необходимо уделять много внимания позиционированию на поле боя и полоскам инициативы (а-ля Final Fantasy), что добавляет еще больше тактический глубины. Тут есть над чем как следует призадуматься во время сражений. К сожалению, в паре моментов мне показалось, что некоторые умения работают не совсем корректно (например, воровство "феникса"), а система рун несколько не интуитивна (не очень понятно, как они работают) и ощущается неповоротливо (бои, обычно, заканчиваются быстрее, чем успеваешь нормально воспользоваться этими эффектами). Также отдельно хочется выделить сюжетную кампанию. Она в меру сложна, но, увы, коротка. У меня на прохождение ушло где-то 2,5 часа, что непростительно мало! Ведь за этот короткий промежуток времени разработчикам удалось за счет, по сути, всего нескольких катсцен и десятка-полутора коротких диалогов создать крайне увлекательный, необычный, мрачный мистический мир, в котором хотелось бы задержаться подольше и раскрыть все его тайны и загадки. Увы, но сюжет обрывается на самом интересном месте! Надеюсь, что авторы будут развивать свою новую вселенную, и нас ждет еще не одно увлекательное путешествие. Итоги: Сильные стороны: + графический стиль с заимствованием древней ацтекской стилистики, что довольно редко встречается; + нестандартный взгляд на тактические бои, с большим вниманием к позиционированию на поле + режим рогалика с бесконечной реиграбельностью, позволяющий полностью прочувствовать все механики игры + отличный атмосферный саундтрек + интересный и необычный сеттинг, в который хочется вернуться снова + цена Слабые стороны: - одно из умений не всегда срабатывает, как надо - крайне непродолжительная кампания, которая отлично знакомит игрока со вселенной, но не дает погрузиться в нее с головой. Вывод: Твердый первый шаг на пути к большой интересной игре. Рекомендую к покупке всем любителям тактики.

I feel kinda sad about this game. It's not bad - actually, core mechanics are fantastic. It has great strategical depth, is fun to play, relatively easy to understand, everything you'd want from the combat system in a game like this. The problem is with everything around the core mechanics that is kinda medicore... Both campaign and rogulite modes feel kinda short. There is not enough room to see strength progression during your run. Options for upgrades also are a bit bad - there are generally too few items to choose from, some of them will of course not fit into the build you're going for, so the pool of viable upgrades becomes super small. You start run with around 6 abilities and there are 15 slots total. One would expect that you'll want so many abilities and will not have space for them, thus needing to choose between them wisely. That's not really the case - picking new abilities usually feels underwhelming, because most of them seem weak. Shops aren't that good - it never happened to me that I wouldn't have enough gold for something I'd want to buy, meaning that I'd avoid any money-making upgrades thus making the pool of viable upgrades even smaller. Perhaps some "legendary", more expensive items showing in the shop sometimes would be a good idea? Anything that would tell me "you really want to have a lot of gold for this very cool item" would be welcome. The music feels a bit weird. It's pretty good on it's own, I really liked it. But it feels a bit disconnected from the game - as if someone just assembled a spotify playlist independently after the game was made. I also had some technical issues with the game, although I was playing on Linux through Proton, so that's not the dev's fault. The game seemed to have some kind of memory leak (?) and I'd need to restart it after < 1 hour because it was hitting performance hard. You don't lose any progress when you quit and re-enter, so that's not a big issue. All in all I'd say I recommend the game. I had great fun during first few hours, before it started feeling repetitive and limiting. I think it has great potential to be expanded into a bigger and more polished game.

A fresh look at the genre. A great genre that was a little bit spoiled by crooked copies of Slay The Spire. Combat is based on positioning (movement), turn order and most importantly a ton of all sorts of cool tricks and ways to interact with enemies, allies, environment and even interface. Everything that is in this game can be combined with each other, to get some interesting solutions. Everything in the game can be manipulated, one way or another. You don't notice it much at first (maybe if I was smarter, I would have noticed it all at once), but with every hour of play you start to open your sharingan, or 3rd eye if you follow the theme of the game. By the way, the game is tagged as a card game. But the cards here are not exactly cards. Basically, you don't have a deck, but you collect skills, which with few exceptions are always with you. You see what enemies are going to do. And in that sense, there's almost no randomization in the game (in this part of it). That said, every fight is not a problem with only one solution. Usually if you can't defeat your enemies with method 1, 2, 3. After thinking about it, you find a way 4, 5, 6, which work and at the same time these methods can play completely different from each other. And the cards are just, well, creatures on the battlefield. So in a way it's not a card game, but ideologically it's still a card game. I don't want to get your expectations too high, it's a game after all, not IV painkillers. But it's not a lame parody of StS, and it's not a game where they just threw everything in a pile and didn't do any work on it. There's an idea behind every skill. For fans of the genre – absolutely recommended. And I also recommend playing on the brightness of the monitor no higher than 80.

Quite an extensive review, because why not. Might be of use to someone. My thoughts about gameplay are down below. It is interesting, and honestly, its charm is difficult to describe, as well as the charm of games of this genre. Subjective: The game's visuals are interesting. A mixture of rocks, wires, gold, sacrifices, forests and cyberspace. Maybe not the most original theme, but certainly not the most hackneyed + good execution in terms of technique. You can feel the style. Beautiful illustrations. Music - ambient, a mixture of some cave sounds, and echoing voices from radio. From this description it sounds like nonsense, but in the game itself this combination works. On the bosses the music changes tonality a bit - guitars, vocals, some some kind of howling wind or voices appear. The game has a well-written lore, but I was more interested in the big picture, not in finding plot holes (I didn't find any obvious ones, and I didn't bother digging through every little thing). I'll explain why. In a nutshell, this is a story about a girl who is forever being forced by circumstances to run somewhere. Whatever the heroine can be as the story progresses - scared, brave, angry, tired, or full of energy... No matter how much she changes, she still has to run somewhere. «Running» is like a constant in her world. I found it metaphorical and beautiful. Things that are easier to measure: The controls. Quite comfortable. But I guess, in this type of games, you can't really screw up the controls. But here's my advice. Do not reach into the corner of the screen to click on the timer to finish your turn. It is much more convenient to click the right mouse button. Also, you can recharge your skills not by clicking on the «stone», but by pressing the spacebar. But this is not as important as the right mouse button shortcut. Roguelike. This is the central mode for the gameplay. A lot of classes, the ability to combine them all in one way or another. And it's really interesting to do that - classes and their combinations really change the way you play. Some you need to jump around the battlefield like a stunned man, in another combination, on the contrary, you move the enemies, while standing regally on the spot. Somewhere you fight on your own, and somewhere with the help of summons and stones and a clone. And all this is quite customizable. «Pure» classes have almost no random, and the most mixed ones unlock their full potential around the 2nd boss. Although maybe there's something I just haven't realized yet. But either way, the gameplay was very interesting at this point. Cons: Interface. The interface itself in the game is very well thought out. It is very easy to navigate in it, if you understand the «language» of the game. But for this you need to get used to it a little. Thank goodness in the campaign, in fact, you are doing exactly that. But the interface in the menu before the game, as soon as I entered, I was a little confused. I pressed everything correctly, but here, as they say, style won over comprehension. Not so terrible, because in the game itself comprehensibility and visuals do not conflict, and even complement each other. But the fact remains that the game meets you with that menu interface, perhaps they should have done something simpler, even if the style suffered. Staticity. Don't get me wrong. The characters here aren't just pictures, they move, they have idle and attack animations. There are all sorts of particles flying around, the illustrations move around a bit. Strike animations, poison animations, bleed animations, it's all there. But overall the game is still static. I don't have any particular problems with it, and most likely it's done to not turn the game into a visual frenzy by overloading the brain even more. But I wanted to mention it, since I know some people want flash fest in their games. I had a bug in the campaign once. Not critical. I had to restart the chapter, and go through 2 battles again (7 minutes lost in total). No bugs were noticed in the roguelike.

UPD №2: I didn't find any guides for the game in the community hub, so I decided to write one myself. The game is quite complex, so the guide will be expanded and supplemented over time. https://steamcommunity.com/app/2233220/guides/ At first I didn't expect anything special, I just liked the visuals - not the most cliched style. But in the end it turned out that the game is just gorgeous in terms of gameplay.[b]TLDR: The game is good, for all the fans of turn-based games like StS, MT, DD, ItB– I definitely recommend it. [/b] I started with the campaign. The campaign in this game is a sort of story+tutorial with a linear narrative and semi-linear battles. It's about 2 hours long. The story tells you about the world, there's some drama and stuff like that. I won't spoil anything, but I enjoyed it. It's not drawn out, but it's not done for the sake of the “plot” checkbox either. Although I'm generally a person not really into stories in games. But I got through the campaign, and I didn't regret it. After the campaign, I started the roguelike and that’s where the game started to shine! Turns out the campaign is just a veeery mild and even shy demonstration of what the game has to offer in terms of build variety. I was really pleasantly surprised. Before the full release, I got to play the demo at a festival for a bit, without really getting into details. In general it seemed interesting, but I repeat that I was not expecting anything. As it turns out, I should have. Gameplay here is the cherry on the cake. Conceptually the game is quite simple. You have 3 fields and 3 enemy fields. Move, dodge, wait for your turn and attack. But how well thought out it all turned out to be! I've played a lot of similar games, and this one is in the top 10 percent for sure. [b]There are 8 classes in the game.[/b] Each of them can be played both by themselves (and in several variations) and can be combined with the other classes. And to my surprise, it seems that the developer has done a tremendous job to think this through and balance it all out. I've yet to come across anything that couldn't be turned into one combination or another in the end. The game really has room for exploration and experimentation. -Damage yourself to resurrect with more hp. -Call allies on traps that enemies have set to disarm them. -Inflict an open wound to an enemy and then make them move so they deal damage to themselves. -Call up a projection clone to do damage for you, and then remember that you must not let him die, because if he dies, you die too. -Poison (debuff on healing) opponents, so that the healer does not heal his allies, but kills them. Or heal him to death instead. (and I thought that the rune of the earth is a hindrance) And I list only the most basic, you can say, ordinary situations, because I can’t describe more complex ones without video or understanding what I am even talking about. Because of the abundance of skills and the ability to combine them, apparently, you can play the game for a very long time. I've been playing for a while now and constantly stumbled upon different situations. As for the enemies, there are quite a few of them, they are different, and each one changes something on the battlefield, rather than just attacking forward. Bosses and elite enemies are in abundance either, meaning they change from run to run. Oh, and [b]about the randomization[/b]. I'm not one of those who always complain about it. But here an interesting system was made. You choose a set of classes, and you can kind of customize the randomness BEFORE the run. For example, by selecting the same class in all slots, you are guaranteed to get all the desired skills and very quickly. If you fill the slots with different classes, then there will be more options for builds and combinations, but it will be a little more difficult to get something specific. Okay, this came out too detailed. In general the game is good, for all the fans of turn-based games like StS, MT, DD, ItB, – I definitely recommend it. UPD: Played 30 more hours. The game still presents something new. I’ve become more familiar with the builds not within themselves, but with the game's artifacts in mind. Tips: -Consider that the top class you choose is sometimes very important. Sometimes it sets the tone for the whole build-class (vampire), sometimes it is important because it gives the right skills immediately (tarantula). But at the same time there are classes that don't need to be the first in the build, such as “phoenix”. -Take all available skills, even those that don’t seem necessary, when the game gives them to you. This helps you get the right ones in the end. -Don't take all the available chips, they can't be replaced, and it's only worth it to take everything if you're just starting to play, or if you're not sure you can do without them (critically low hp).