Horror works best when it unsettles you before anything actually happens, and Silver Pines seems built around that idea. The game opens in a vacant diner with no one else in view, an ordinary setting made wrong by the simple fact of being empty. That opening is deliberate. A diner is a place that should be full of noise and people, so its silence reads as a warning. It is a classic horror technique, and it establishes the mood before the player has done anything at all. The atmosphere has been compared to Silent Hill, the long-running series known for fog, dread and psychological unease, with additional overtones of Alan Wake, the story about a writer whose fiction starts bleeding into reality. Blending those influences is a promising combination for anyone who likes their scares slow and strange. What sets Silver Pines apart on paper is its perspective. This is a 2D game, and...
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