Silent Hope

All the way back in 2003, there was a little game for the Gameboy Advance known as Shining Soul, itself a spinoff of the greater Shining series of RPGs. Unlike the other games, which were either strategy RPGs or dungeon crawlers (and a mediocre Zelda clone we don't talk about), it was an action RPG with a big focus on multiplayer and a handful of roguelike elements - basically, it was a Japanese take on Diablo for handhelds. Why am I bringing up all these brands in a review for a game that's completely unrelated? Because, for better or for worse, Hakama's Silent Hope is very much reminiscent of Shining Soul, except blessed with hindsight and modern design sensibilities - for the most part.

A few words about the actual game: it is a spinoff of the Rune Factory series, itself a spinoff of the Story of Seasons series, but it was popular enough to become its own franchise, and despite having been dormant for a few years, it made a (semi) triumphant return in 2019 and has been back on track. What sets Rune Factory apart from its parent series is the medieval fantasy setting and the addition of action RPG combat against monsters. While initially somewhat stiff, the combat went on to become more and more involving and actually fun - and Silent Hope is more or less what happens when you transplant the series' combat into a game without the farming elements. And if you want a final "inception" moment on top of the first paragraph, Hakama is the successor to Neverland, who also developed a different action RPG spinoff of the Shining series, Shining Force EXA, just to bring this full circle.

The game's plot is... both bizarre and somewhat threadbare. Basically, a long time ago the kingdom the game is set in was besieged by a calamity that caused the inhabitants to fight amongst each other and wage wars. As a last resort, the king took away everyone's ability to speak and plunged himself into the conveniently close by abyss, never to be seen again. His daughter, distraught, was also encased in a crystal, left static, but remaining the only one who is still capable of communicating, if only be telepathy. A hundred years later, a bunch of random people, seemingly chosen by the abyss itself, appear before the princess and take it upon themselves to travel to its bottom and restore words to the world, as well as unraveling what exactly happened.

And this opening cutscene is, for a long time, the most you'll ever get out of the game. While exploring the abyss, every couple floors you will be provided with a little bit of lore about the kingdom gone, such as the festivals they used to celebrate and how their harvests gradually diminished over the years. However, given the game's background story, there is no dialogue from the playable characters, with only the princess speaking, and beyond the random lore bits, you won't get anything until you're almost at the end of the game. While this does mean the pacing is pretty fast and you aren't constantly interrupted by cutscenes, it does make for an oddly "lonely" experience as you go along. In truth, storytelling has never been the company's strong suite, but it's really at its lowest here, to the point I had to start a new file since I forgot what actually happened in the beginning. In any event, it's not a game you play for the plot, and that's perfectly okay.

The gameplay itself consists of two parts: prepping in the hub area and actually exploring the abyss. Naturally, both of these aspects complement each other. In the hub, you can order whatever characters you're not controlling to perform certain tasks, such as raising crops, taking care of animals, refining materials and cooking dishes or crafting weapons. As you might've guessed, the sundries go into creating dishes, which bestow various buffs upon you while exploring the abyss, while the materials are used to craft equipment - there are no traditional shops where you can buy things from. The buffs and especially the crafting system are essential for survival, as individual level ups do not account for much, as such you are very dependent on reliable equipment. The processing itself is nothing much to write home about: the character assigned to the chore will take a predetermined amount of time to fulfill it while you go spelunking, and you can pick them up afterwards, rinse and repeat. Thankfully, making medicine, equipment and food is instantaneous. And that is pretty much all there is to do in the hub, safe for using a practice dummy to test your potential damage output.

The core of the game naturally lies in the (fairly literal) dungeon diving. The abyss is divided into several strata, all with an increasing number of floors and capped off by a boss fight at the end. The floors are semi-random; the game has various premade templates for a given strata, but the enemies and loot contained therein are randomized. While this does keep things fresh initially, the more often you jump in, the quicker you'll realize there isn't much variety at all. Since I tried leveling my characters evenly, I ended up going through the same maps way too many times.

Combat itself is relatively simple: you got your basic combo attack, a dodge roll and a bunch of skills mapped to the face buttons, three of which can be equipped at a time. The type of weapon you get to use as well as the skills available is naturally dependent on the chosen character. They follow the typical RPG archetypes: the swordsman naturally uses a sword and is a jack-of-all-trades, the archer keeps their distance with their bow and arrows, but has less defense, the mage has great area of effect spells but likewise can't take hits and so on and so forth. It's really nothing special, save maybe for the farmer, who is a little girl that fights with a pitchfork and has a rather gimmicky skillset that requires some patience and knowledge to master, but is a fun character to use regardless. When facing enemies, it's a natural process of knowing when to strike and when to roll to safety, getting cornered being pretty much the worst thing that can happen, so it's best to either lure enemies into the open or to sneak up and pick them off one by one - both are valid approaches. As expected, the enemies also sport all sorts of different strategies. It starts off simple enough, but you'll soon encounter monsters that explode upon death, which will also damage you if you don't get out of the way in time, or magic users that can also hit you from a distance. As such, mastering the dodge is pretty much essential for survival, as opportunities for healing are limited - you get three potions per run, which you can either use on the spot to restore your health, or they will revive you with a small percentage of your health when you die. As such, using one of these should always be a calculated move. Thankfully, there are healing crystals that will restore all your health once when approached, but these become fewer and fewer as you go along.

A central mechanic, and one that unfortunately ends up falling flat due to various reasons, is the character crystals you find scattered around the abyss. Basically, these allow you to swap characters in the middle of exploration, the incentive being that the character chosen receives a generous status buff. This technically promotes making use of all available classes, but it is impractical for a multitude of reasons: one, leveling speed is fairly low and only the active character receives experience points at all, and they of course have their own equipment slots to keep updated, as even the status buff provided by the crystals isn't good enough to keep them going for long if underleveled or underequipped. I ended up abandoning the "keep your party levels even" approach after the second stratum, and I never felt like missing out on anything, and if my research is anything to go by, a lot of other players did the same.

One cool thing is that when you level up, your health is fully restored and you trigger a shockwave that kills all enemies close to you at that moment, which means you can strategically time level ups to help you out in a pinch, although this shouldn't be relied on. The other good thing about the character crystals is that they also allow you to leave the dungeon with all loot intact, as losing otherwise subtracts a great deal of the stuff you collected. There are also checkpoints you can resume your adventure from every couple floors, which is useful and means you won't have to start over from scratch. Also, certain floors provide a challenge you can accept at the start, such as using a skill to defeat a certain amount of enemies, dealing with waves of enemies within a time limit, using traps against enemies and so on. When passed, you are rewarded with additional experience and crystals and there's no penalty for failing, so there's no reason not to accept these challenges when they pop up.

Moreover, certain floors also feature an ominous mirror you can enter. Should you do so, you will find yourself in a separate part of the floor, facing monsters far stronger than anything else within the current stratum. As expected, however, the rewards are much greater and, should you survive, will allow you to craft far better equipment, and you're also likely to gain a level or two along the way, but you cannot leave the mirror dimension before completing it, and are penalized for dying the same way as in the regular abyss, so it's up to you to decide whether the rewards are worth the risk here. Also, several milestones and achievements, such as reaching a certain point of the abyss, reward you with a generous helping of crystals each time, and the list of achievements is a long one, which helps keep your crystal supply up on the long run - I never had any issues running out.

The final challenge of each stratum is, quite naturally, a boss fight against a huge creator. These always involve some sort of gimmick to make the boss expose its weak point, whether it's avoiding a certain amount of attacks until an opening appears, or just defeating a wave of their own flunkies. These boss battles are rather tough, and ample preparation should be taken before facing them - and you should also expect to die at least once before figuring out the boss's patterns, as its highly reliant on trial and error. Which leads us to another point of criticism: the game is pretty unbalanced. Ranged characters, like the archer and the mage, are plain and simply overpowered compared to the rest, not because of their stats, but because being able to attack from a distance is an absolute blessing in a game like this, where you want to keep enemies as far away from yourself as possible - there's really no need to worry about enemies when you can kill them before they can even reach you. Yes, it does take some crafting and leveling up, but by the end of the game, ranged characters dominate the battlefield. 

Then there's the fact that, apart from battling monsters and picking up loot, the dungeon doesn't have much else to offer. There are gimmicks within each stratum, such as exploding barrels, snowballs that follow you but can be redirected at enemies, and a bunch of moles who take you to different parts of the current floor, none of these can be considered true puzzles. It's a hack and slash first and foremost, and that is fine by itself, but it can get rather repetitive. This is not to say the core gameplay loop is unrewarding or bad - everything that is here falls into place perfectly fine, but it isn't anything beyond just "competent". It always feels like the game is missing that little "ooomph" to make it truly outstanding. The overall simplicity does make it an excellent Diablolike for beginners, however.

Graphics-wise, the game goes for a highly stylized, chibi approach. This is not a bad thing, though, as Hakama's latest entry in the Rune Factory series notoriously suffered from terrible performance issues, much of which was due to the game simply not being properly optimized for the target hardware. Thankfully, this is not at all the case here, as the simplified graphics don't put much of a strain on the hardware, meaning even the Switch version runs buttery-smooth with no frame drops, even when there's a lot of stuff on-screen at the same time. And despite their simplicity, the character models are detailed enough to work and are a rather faithful translation of their official artwork. The environments, while repetitive by virtue of the limited amount of maps available, do look suitably good, with each stratum being unique, and the game making very good use of color, with the serene hub area consisting of gentle, bright colors, while the abyss continues to become moodier as you delve down deeper. The particle effects are also surprisingly decent for a low-budget game. One cute detail is that the item icons are actual pixel art, and they look lovely.

The sound design is more of a mixed bag, though. The soundtrack is pleasant to listen to and does its job, but nothing more. It's a rather forgettable score throughout, mostly consisting of mellow or subdued pieces that do help underscore the loneliness the game conveys, but it's unlikely to be something you'll be humming to yourself after shutting the game off - perhaps this is a good thing, given how many times you'll hear each track. The sound effects, meanwhile, are completely fine and fit their purpose - I especially enjoyed the menu beeps. However, for a game called Silent Hope, the chatter never quite stops. While you're in the hub and navigating any menus, the princess will positively never shut up stating obvious things or just talking about the minutiae of life, which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't happen constantly. This got bad enough that the developers eventually patched in an option to turn the princess's chatter off or at least reduce it, but the default setting gets old quickly, especially because the subtitles clutter the screen. You can also choose between Japanese and English voices, but neither is more or less annoying than the other.

The game also features some paid DLC in the form of weapons for your characters, one for each. However, this DLC is completely to all players who aren't just starting the game, as these weapons, while slightly above the starting gear, are outclassed as soon as you get access to more crafting materials, which is about an hour or two into the game, so don't waste your money on those. On a more positive note, the game has a demo available, and it lets you carry over your progress should you decide to buy it. It's also a fairly meaty one, allowing you to explore the entire first stratum, so if you've even mildly interested, give it a go.

To answer the inevitable question of which version of the game you should get: this is not a game that benefits much from being played on a monster PC. Since this is an affair that is mostly fun in short bursts, such as on a bus or train ride, I'd very much recommend the well-optimized Switch version, unless you own a Steam Deck (I don't!).

In the end, giving this game an actual score is quite hard. I enjoyed it despite its quirks, and I do want the Rune Factory developer to remain afloat, but it also cannot be denied that it's got plenty of flaws that prevent it from reaching true greatness - as it stands, it's more of a diamond in the rough that, while pretty to look at would do better with some refinement and polish. As such, I'm giving the game...

65% - an uncut gem

Pros:

• Enjoyable gameplay loop
• Clean and pretty presentation
• Different characters do offer replay value

Cons:

• Gets repetitive after a while
• Not much map variety
• The princess is annoying