Silk (PS4)

 Sometimes when you watch a particularly low budget horror movie or tokusatsu production, it's inspirational: these works stand as proof that it's possible to create interesting, entertaining works on modest budgets. Silk is kind of like that! Common wisdom would tell you that it's impossible to make a large scale RPG/trading sim/resource management game without a large team and the financial backing of a publisher. But here Silk is: claiming to boast the largest explorable world in videogame history, and it all appears to have been made by a solo developer (or at least, a very small team) on a shoestring budget.

 

Silk is an absurdly huge sandbox of a game. You start out by picking out a quest, though you really don't have to follow it if you don't want to, and you set off on your big adventure. THe name comes from the fact that you play as a trading caravan on the silk road, and as such, the aforementioned gigantic open world encompasses huge swathes of Europe, Asia, and Africa! The most basic mission is to get from the Roman empire, over to the Han empire in what is now China, and then back again. I've attempted this a couple of times now, and though I can just about manage the "getting there" part of the journey, my party always ends up starving to death in either the mountains or the desert on the way back. Or murdered by nomads, who for some reason are incredibly hostile to your little band of travellers. Even though technically, you're also nomads. 

 

You get across the world via dungeon crawler-style "blob" movement, being able to face eight directions, and move one big footstep at a time. Which is kind of how the game acieves its huge world claims: there's quite a bit of simplification and abstraction at play here. Distances are approximate, and there's a day/night cycle that goes round every few turns, and when you "enter" towns and other locations where trading is possible, it's all done via a menu. But somehow, this doesn't do anything diminish the sense of scale in the game! So much is done through clever game design that you might not even notice unless you're specifically thinking about it. For example, you start out in the Roman empire, in Europe. There's lots of water for fishing, forests for hunting, and friendly cities for trading, so you're never going to be short on food.

 

Your first big challenge coms when you get to the mountains: they're somewhat maze-like, there are no towns, and there's nowhere to hunt or fish. But unless you get really lost, this isn't a huge area, and once you get out, the Parthian towns on the other side are a little hostile, but they'll quickly warm up to you once you get in there and trade with them a few times. Later, though, you'll get to what the game calls the Sea of Death, which I think is supposed to be the real-life Taklamakan Desert. This place is huge, something like half as wide as all the ground you've covered before reaching it, and there's no woods, no water, and very few settlements. And a lot of the settlements that are there are surrounded and inhabited by the aforementioned very hostile nomads. So, to stand a chance of getting across here, you need to hire a bunch of guards, and also stock up on enough food to feed them for the several weeks it'll take you to get across. While you're in the desert, a little bit of flavour is also added by the unusually large amount of abandonded and ruined caravans you find, which will yield a small amount of silver, wool, and spices when you pass them. It really gets across how treacherous this terrain is, while also giving you something to trade for more food once you get to the other side and have to journey back again.

 

While the game successfully gets across what a grand undertaking a silk road journey is, it still has the low budget charm and appeal that I mentioned back at the start of the review. All the sprites representing locations and obstacles like mountains, sand dunes, and so on all look like they were drawn using felt tip pens, and they haven't been filtered or sharpened up in any way. It creates a look for the game that really makes it very clear that it's a passion project and a work of pure creativity, and not a capitalist product that's been through focus tests and an overly powerful marketing department. 

 

It might sound to some that I'm damning this game with faint praise, but honestly: I'd prefer it if all games were passion projects, and we never had to hear about crunch time or developers being traumatised by having to repeatedly watch real gore videos for reference or playing games that would obviously have been a thousand times better if some bean counter hadn't demanded more potential revenue streams or if some soulless animated corpse in a suit demanded less marketable elements be watered down or removed altogether. I'll be honest and say that Silk isn't really in one of my preferred genres, and it's definitely got its flaws, but it is an incredible achievement, the sense of scale is really awe-inspiring, and it represents a better way for videogames to be in the future. Furthermore, it often goes on sale for an absolute pittance, so if you want to give it a try yourself, it's not like it'll take a big investment to do so. And I definitely recommend that you do.