The Magical Silence
The Magical Silence is one of those surreal stream-of-consciousness games like Samorost or Windosill, where you click on bizarre landscapes with no idea what your clicks will provoke. As usual for this sort game, it’s very short. I guess a lack of coherent system means that content doesn’t stretch as far.
There are three things about it that I think are worth commenting on. First, it is highly vertical. The whole game, apart from its intro and outro, takes place in a single scrolling 2D space, and this space is much taller than it is wide. It’s an unusual choice, and one that I think could be taken better advantage of in other scenarios. This is a world that’s mostly sky, with water at the bottom, but I can easily imagine doing the same with a tall building, or a forest.
Second, it makes use of button-mashing. That is, sometimes you have to do more than just click on something, you have to click on it repeatedly and rapidly. In most cases, this was easy to figure out. When I click on a chameleon’s top hat, and it just wobbles slightly, I know that I’m after a stronger effect, like knocking it off completely, and that makes me try clicking it again and again. But down at the bottom of the world, there are a set of four squares that just flash and emit electronic tones when clicked, and you’re supposed to mash those as well. I had to look at the Steam forums to find this out, and there I learned that I wasn’t the only one to get stuck there.
Thirdly, it’s unusually morbid for a game of this sort. It starts with a cartoon dog sitting alone in a dark room with a bottle in front of him. He asks you to go through a door into his imagination to fix “something strange to my head”. (The author is apparently from Siberia, explaining both the grammar and the outlook.) When you finish, and re-emerge into the dark room, the dog has finished the bottle and is preparing to hang himself. “Now I am calm”, he says. “Now you must to finish the game!” You to finish the game by removing the chair he’s standing on. These games often have an air of menace, rooted in their utter unpredictability. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one take it as far as “Everything you did was to help a dog commit suicide”.
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