Songs Of Silence, man, where has this game been hiding? Last week I had never even heard of it. For the week since I have been doing nothing but playing this game.
It's a strategy game I've seen billed as everything from a 4X to an auto battler, and many other things in between (I'll take my own swing at what it is in a second). Set in a fantasy world where two races of ancient humans have battled so long they've literally split the world in two, you can play skirmish maps or fight your way through a narrative singleplayer campaign that features both sides caught in a war that threatens to destroy them both.
For all the tags and descriptors being thrown around about this game--it comes slightly out of left field, so it's difficult to precisely pin down--I'd say the overall experience is closest to playing a Total War campaign if you'd given the Total War series to an engineer and said "trim as much of this as you can while still keeping the overall vibes". Your objective in every Songs of Silence game, whether in the campaign or a skirmish map, is broadly the same: take and hold settlements on a strategic map, which accrue resources you then spend on upgrades, unique buildings or new units.
Leading your armies are hero units, which in RPG style are unique and can be levelled up, and who also have special abilities they can employ on the battlefield. The armies themselves, meanwhile, are made up of a wild variety of fantasy units ranging from cheap infantry through to expensive, gargantuan behemoths. See what I mean? I'm basically describing the outline of Total War: Warhammer.
Only Songs of Silence does away with so much of Total War's faff. Diplomacy? Boring, so it's gone. Trade? Little more than tick-a-box, so it's gone too. All that's left is the heartbeat of Creative Assembly's series: the elastic to-and-fro of armies manoeuvring about a map that's always just slightly too big for them to hold down, and settling things on the battlefield in real-time when two of those armies clash.
Which is the point where Songs of Silence starts to get really interesting, because it's an auto battler. You're the one building the armies, deciding on their composition and arranging them into formation, but once a battle starts every unit will (mostly) run off and do its own thing, with the player left as a bystander. The only direct input you have on proceedings is to play cards, which is a lot more important than it sounds, because they're the lifeblood of Songs of Silence.
On the battlefield, each leader gets their own deck of cards with special abilities they can play, and as you progress through a game and level your generals up you'll earn both more and better cards. Defensive abilities, offensive abilities, spawning new units on the battlefield, slowing your opponent down–there's a ton of ways you can influence the battle, even if you're not micromanaging each unit individually.
As a serial auto-resolver in long Total War campaigns, this is great. Look, I appreciate all the work that goes into Total War's real-time battles, and in decisive moments I'll usually always take control of them and have a blast, but over the course of a sprawling campaign that could feature dozens or even hundreds of engagements, I just can't be bothered taking charge of all of them. Songs of Silence's brevity is a great middle ground here, as I get some involvement, but can then kick back and watch a battle unfold in what is sometimes just a matter of seconds.
Cards can also be played on the strategic map, replacing much of what other games would build into an interface full of buttons (Songs of Silence's screen is beautifully uncluttered as a result.). These can buff armies or, more commonly, allow you to build structures and improvements on your settlements. Wherever you play these cards, on the battlefield or the map, the act is immensely satisfying; there's a flashy animation and feel to dragging a card onto the map and seeing a big stone tower come roaring out of the ground.
This all comes together to create an intoxicating pace. You just glide through Songs of Silence, frictionless, from one task to the next, never stopping or needing to pause, dancing in rhythm between moving an army on the map, upgrading something then having a little fight. Management is brief, battles are short, it's like strategic tapas in a genre that's normally only interested in huge steaks.
Helping drive all this is the fact I could not ever take my eyes away from the screen. Just look at this game. Songs of Silence is stunning. The splash art, the character design, the illustrations punctuating the end of every battle, the card art, the animation of all your little armies zooming around, the unit design, the little sensory thrill of playing a card, it's all wonderful.
The old cliche isn't as robust as it once was--stuff like Endless Legend and even recent Fire Emblem games have helped--but strategic fantasy in video games is still too often a generic, nondescript thing, one series' elf blurring into another series' stout human infantry. Not here! This game looks like nothing else out there (well, maybe a little like Banner Saga if you squint), and the story it's telling, complete with fantastic voice-acting, is also one that's well-told. This game's got a world, and it is an interesting place to spend some time in.
I have no idea how this game flew under my radar for so long--I mean I do, games media is broken and Steam's discovery is almost useless because simply too many games are coming out--but hey, whatever, I found it eventually. Songs of Silence is one of the most refreshing strategy games I've played in a very long time, and an unexpected artistic triumph at that. It's ironic that it's an auto battler, a genre often derided for being so hands-off, because I've been glued to this all week long.
