• Price: $39.99 USD (digital, currently on sale for $35.99 until October 10th), $49.99 (physical)
• Developer: Marvelous
• Publisher: XSEED Games
• Release Date: October 3, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by ONE PR Studio on behalf of Marvelous and XSEED Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I’ve had a soft spot for silent protagonists ever since I played the Golden Sun series. So when I heard that Silent Hope would involve an entire world without words, I was interested to see how they’d manage to convey the story. In this world, tragedy struck a kingdom, and everyone turned on each other. Stricken with grief, the King sealed away his people’s ability to speak, and then he threw himself into the Abyss.

The Princess then sealed herself inside of a crystal made of her own tears. Time passed, and these events were forgotten, but now seven “rays of hope” have arrived to help the Princess. You will play as these heroes and enter the Abyss to find the answers she seeks.

Exploring the Abyss will be no easy task, and a base camp is set up around the cliff you must jump off of to enter the dungeon. Each character uses a different type of weapon and abilities. It doesn’t really matter which character you use, although there are some quests connected to each character/class.

You can take each of them for a test run if you’d like and then decide which one to use as your main character. I preferred to use the Archer character, although the Farmer also worked well for me. In some ways I’m glad that you don’t have to use each character since I’m better with long range units, but it could have been interesting to require specific characters or abilities in some areas.

Gaze into the Abyss

When you enter the Abyss, you’ll confront monsters in action-based combat, harvest materials and drops, and find cooking and crafting recipes. Your character starts with 3 learnable abilities in their base class, with an additional 6 abilities across their other 2 classes. Each ability – and the dodge function – has a cooldown period. It’s important to use these abilities strategically by taking the timing into consideration, given that hordes of enemies will often chase after you.

Earlier sections of the Abyss are shorter and less dangerous, although you’ll occasionally run into some challenges early on. Some floors will offer experience and money for completing Trials that ask you to do things like defeat a certain number of enemies or reach the gate to the next floor without healing.

There are also Memory Rifts, which contain a large group of monsters and treasure at the end. Sometimes you’ll reach a Monster Rush floor, where you must battle a mob of monsters in an enclosed space. And at the end of each section you’ll fight a boss. It seemed like there were a lot of the same monsters but with swapped color palettes or slightly different features. They still looked cute and/or cool though, and I especially loved the Wooly monster borrowed from Rune Factory. It’s too bad that there’s no monster taming in this game.

Besides the monsters, there are environmental hazards and traps to contend with. Barrels of explosives, giant snowballs, and lasers await you – but sometimes you can use these traps to your advantage to damage enemies instead. The Abyss can be quite dangerous if you’re not careful; you don’t have any healing abilities and you only get 2 potions per entry into the dungeon. Thankfully, healing animals randomly appear to restore your HP and restock your potion supply.

If you are defeated, you’ll lose some progress into the Abyss and drop some items, but you don’t lose all of the items you found and you get to keep all of your experience points. The Princess will teleport you back to the base. Her tear fragments in the Abyss also allow you to change out your character or teleport back to base. You may lose your progress in that section of the Abyss if you didn’t reach a Signal Fire checkpoint before returning to the surface. It’s up to you to weigh the benefits and risks of continuing your current run if you found some nice items.

I really appreciated having checkpoints after every couple of floors – especially because there isn’t an option to manually save, and the game auto saves for you. Whether I was defeated or chose to return to the surface, each run generally took about 30 minutes. There are 6 main sections in the Abyss, ranging from 10-20 floors each, with an additional section that appears later. In total there are about 100 floors.

All About That Base

Once you reach the next section of the Abyss, it’s best to retreat and prepare yourself for the tougher enemies. The Base Camp includes a forge, woodworking and metalworking stations, livestock and crop fields, and a kitchen. When you choose which character you want to control, the other six will complete tasks while you’re in the Abyss. The Princess also hangs out in the camp area; she appraises unknown items, enables you to change classes, and offers quests and rewards to you.

While there is farming in the game, you do not actually do any of it yourself. Transforming materials, growing crops, and getting byproducts from livestock are all automatic processes. (The Story of Seasons tie-in is nice, though!) Cooking and forging are the only stations where you have more of an active role.

Monsters will sometimes drop “memories,” or recipes for equipment. Each memory can only be used once to make a weapon or defensive gear. The 7 heroes all have a single weapon type that they use, but they can use the same defensive items. If you want to equip the other 6 characters, you need to find more memories.

You can customize and upgrade your equipment to strengthen your character(s). Items called Magistones have elemental affinities and bonus effects such as increased attack/defense, experience gain, or faster skill cooldowns. Magistones can be swapped out as needed without losing them. Upgrading your equipment seems to only increase their attack and defense stats but not their effects. I liked managing my equipment, although it was inconvenient to only be able to change it at the base’s storehouse.

Cooking is the only other instantaneous function at the base (you can use special items or money to make the other functions instantly finish, though). Use the ingredients from the farming stations to cook meals, and you can choose up to 3 meals to equip before returning to the Abyss. Meals offer effects such as increased strength, defense, HP, status ailment resistance, money gain, etc. for that entry into the Abyss.

Silence isn’t Golden

You’ll find yourself going back and forth between the Abyss and the Base. When you return to the dungeons and continue descending into the Abyss, the Princess will sometimes talk about what happened to her father and their kingdom. For me, it felt too minimalistic, and I wasn’t really engaged with the story.

The story seems to be the same regardless of which character you play as, and there are no additional details if you change which hero you control. I realize that the heroes have all lost the ability to speak, but the game does manage to include plot details that are relevant to an important character by having players read stone slabs at the end of each section of the Abyss. I was expecting to learn more about the heroes too, possibly in the form of flashbacks. But that didn’t happen.

They did say that they “intentionally left many aspects of this game’s story and characters left unsaid” on the game’s website. But they also gave each hero a background story with likes, dislikes, hobbies, and family info on the site. I wish they would have integrated it into the game somehow. Perhaps they could have done something like wordless flashback scenes showing parts of their past?

The heroes are doing all the work for the Princess, but they don’t get any of the attention. Instead, the game focuses on the Princess’ story. There aren’t any real character interactions besides the Princess telling you her story (and there’s no romance in the game, for those wondering).

When you beat the main portion of the game and experience the creative credits, you unlock the post-game as well as Hard and Master modes, which offer stronger monsters and equipment. You can switch between modes when selecting which part of the Abyss you want to enter. The post-game does include more plot, although I was kind of confused as to the relevance and connection to the main storyline. After beating the post-game boss, you can continue to play through the dungeons.

Overall Thoughts

I don’t think Silent Hope is a bad game – it just didn’t really “click” with me. I did like the character art and models, as they’re super cute. The action combat is nice enough, although not overly deep in my opinion. It gets repetitive after a while because you redo floors if you are defeated and the enemies (and their abilities) felt overly similar. I also think that a lot of the focus was on the combat and not so much on the plot.

If a game is going to include a story, I need it to be really engaging, and what story this does have was bland. I think another reason this didn’t work for me is that I’m used to doing things like the farming tasks myself, and having the other characters do it for me felt really impersonal. Between that and a lack of story or character development, it feels kind of “bare bones” to me despite having a decent amount of content. Personally, I needed Silent Hope to “speak up” more.

That being said, I can definitely see how this could be an addictive game for some; dedicated players can put a lot of time into leveling up all of the characters one by one, unlocking every class and ability, continuing to improve their equipment, and clearing each section of the Abyss in each mode with each character. Your enjoyment of the game will depend on your personal preferences when it comes to story, as well as your patience for training one character at a time and repeating dungeons. Be sure to check out the demo to see what you think.

7.5/10