Sylvio: Black Waters Review – Head Towards The Light

Stroboskop’s Sylvio: Black Waters is the third instalment of the Sylvio series. While I haven’t played the first two games, there was no indication that I needed to in order to understand this story. Although Black Waters, an exploration horror game, continues with the same main character as the previous two instalments, this story can be understood as a standalone title.

When Juliette lands on a strange, deserted planet known as The Lungs, she comes across a watch device that allows her to listen to echoes of the dead. Through the device, a man named Lee makes contact, claiming to be the sole survivor on the planet. With Lee guiding her over the comms, Juliette will gather clues from these echoes and work out what happened to this place and how to leave.

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Using the watch device she finds, Juliette can pick up echoes from the dead.

The Lungs is a labyrinth of intertwining areas, mimicking nature, places and structures from Earth. The rules of physics don’t apply here, with gravity-defying ladders allowing Juliette to switch up what surface she is walking on, flipping the room upside down.

Inhabiting The Lungs are the crystalised corpses of those who once lived there, which can break apart and unleash the vengeful spirit inside when approached, which Juliette must use her precious resources to fight off. Although Black Waters is an exploration horror game first and foremost, it does include survival horror mechanics. We must gather weapons and ammo lying around each area to break apart the statues before they can ambush us, or fight off the spirits when they do escape their casing. Strangely enough, there isn’t really a downside to death as you will simply respawn a few feet away with the statue now gone. Luckily, the game’s settings allow you to disable enemies which I ended up doing as I found the survival horror elements to be pretty unrewarding and much preferred treating Black Waters as a walking sim.

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Dead bodies become crystalised on this planet and we must shoot them before the spirit inside breaks free and attacks us.

Last year I thought Bleak Faith: Forsaken had the worst keybindings menu I had ever seen. Black Waters has now taken that spot. I’ve played five hours of this game and still can’t work out how to remap my keys or even what half of them mean; I mostly just stuck to pressing keys randomly to see what each one did. I also found that all the tutorials, action prompts and certain dialogues (story progression ones) would repeat if I did the same action again, such as a tutorial for combat continuously appearing each time I walked through the prompt area, and lists that were supposed to be marked off once I gathered further items would re-add these items if I clicked on them again. Oddly enough what doesn’t stick around are objectives which will come up only briefly on screen. Thankfully our objective doesn’t change often enough for this to become a real issue.

While I did get the hang of most things towards the end of the game (besides the keybinding menu), I did feel like Black Waters doesn’t do a good job at explaining certain mechanics to the players. The ammo system for one was confusing as we have two types for the same gun – one for the statues and one for the spirits – as well as several different guns to pick up as we progress but the combat never really changes enough to make this beneficial. To travel to a new level, we also have to go back the way we first came to enter the main hub area and travel through a black void on a bike for a couple of minutes, following the light in the distance, until we arrive at the correct entrance. This was another aspect of Black Waters which was incredibly confusing, for one it wasn’t clear that this is how we travel from the hub area to the next level, and I only took this route when I had ran out of any other options after completing the first ‘lungs’ (level). Because we appear to be travelling in the same direction we came in (it’s all a black void), it doesn’t make sense that this is where we would need to go next. Another thing that isn’t explained well is the fast travel system, which comes in the form of these strange mechanical portal devices which will take us to the end of the last lung where we can interact with the ladder we took to leave that lung to replay it. I have no qualms with these mechanics as they still fit neatly into this strange world, but just a little more direction pointing would be handy.

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This is truly the worst keybinding menu I have ever seen.

But why would we need to replay an area? That’s where another, actually the most frustrating, unexplained mechanic comes in. As we traverse The Lungs, we’re able to collect three types of clues to help Juliette piece together the story. The first is the echoes, which are fragments of a conversation which we will pick up in parts and piece together once we have the full sentence. Each subsection of The Lungs needs to be lit up by a camera-like device, which we can also watch a jumbled up recording on, each of which also have fragments of a song. We must fast forward and rewind this recording to pick up what’s being said, also slowing down or speeding it up if the audio’s speed is also jumbled. At the end of each level, we can piece together the song and match it with drawings we have also collected around the area. The latter two types of clue are optional.

The echoes are not optional, we must collect them all while exploring each area in order to get to the end of the game. But the game doesn’t tell you this. In fact, I didn’t know until I got to the very end and realised I couldn’t actually finish the story unless I went back through every single level to pick up the echoes that I had missed. There’s also no way to tell if you’ve picked up every echo in each level unless you get to the end of the game and see that you have some missing. There’s 18 sentences in total to piece together that are scattered across all the levels. We only need to complete five to finish the game, but we also don’t know where these are, so you still end up having to go through every level to look for what’s missing if the first five aren’t complete. Had I known that I needed to pick up every single echo in the game I would have taken better care to look for them in each level. Instead, I got right to the end and was ready for the story’s conclusion, only to find I had to trail back and do the whole thing again to pick up what I had missed. It’s very rare to like a game so much that you want to repeat the whole thing again straight away.

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One of the collectables in Black Waters are fragments of a song that can be decoded by fast-forwarding, rewinding, speeding up or slowing down the recording. 

While the gameplay mostly consisting of picking up echoes and piecing together the sentences did grow repetitive towards the end of Black Waters, what kept me going was the absolutely tremendous atmosphere. Black Waters isn’t scary in the way of jumpscares, gore or disturbing scenes; the atmosphere is what utterly nails a sense of uneasiness as we traverse through The Lungs. Niklas Swanberg has crafted a masterful soundtrack and sound design that absolutely brings this beautiful, desolate world to life.

The soundtrack is a strong mix of ambient tunes which are soothing yet unsettling at the same time. It’s bleak, and perfectly captures the devastation of this bleak world. Not once did this soundtrack grow repetitive and it’s actually the main thing that kept me going, even when the gameplay started to lose its touch. The soundtrack is definitely something that I’ll be going back to listen to on its own when I need something to help me focus.

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Black Waters is brought to life through its visual and sound design.

The audio design was also stellar, capturing the weirdness of The Lungs well. The echoes perfectly replicated the fragmented sound of an EVP recording, making them sound more realistic. Similarly, when riding the bike to the next area, the radio clips that play during these trips are seriously creepy and make what would otherwise be a boring bike ride into a void actually really daunting.

The performances from our two leads, Maia Hansson Bergqvist as Juliette and Abe Goldfarb as Lee, are also brilliant. Maia has a much softer tone of voice, never raising it, always remaining calm yet piqued with curiosity at this world and Lee’s story. Juxtaposing this is Lee, who has a sweet tone of voice, almost like a British children’s television presenter, but it has this disturbing twinge of insanity which is utterly captivating. The two performances bounce of each other really well and pulled me into every conversation.

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This world defies gravity. 

Accompanying the audio are stunning visuals that also encapsulate the surreal barrenness of this world. Everything is topsy-turvy with trees on the ceiling and pathways spiraling around the room. The Lungs really does look like an assortment of things from Earth in an attempt to resemble Earth but it’s not quite there, it’s filled with dinosaurs, pyramids and strange statues in an attempt to take on that image. I will say one negative thing about the visuals in that they are a bit dark. Although there is a trail of lights for us to follow to find our way across each lung, these can often get lost around corners or up ledges and the darkness of Black Waters makes it really difficult to see where we can go next and we often end up bumping into invisible walls. Unfortunately, all turning up the brightness does it turn the darker shades a lighter grey. 

In terms of the story, Black Waters pulled me into this mysterious world, especially told from Lee’s perspective. As an unreliable witness, it was fascinating to hear his side of the story and then collect clues which contradicted things. I loved Juliette as a character too, being sharp witted she’s quick to pick up on Lee’s contradictions but is also intelligent enough to know that she also needs him to get off this planet so can’t make an enemy of him. While I loved the journey of piecing together the story behind The Lungs, I was a little disappointed in the final reveal as the story felt a little far fetched to feel like a satisfying explanation for the information we had been given up until that point.

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Looks familiar…

Sylvio: Black Waters perfectly encapsulates the term ‘desolate beauty’ with its masterfully disturbing audio, visuals and storytelling. Unfortunately, its shortfalls are in its gameplay, which has its flaws but stopped being fun entirely the moment I realised I would have to replay each level again to reach an ending, which is never fun.

Jess played Sylvio: Black Waters on PC with a review code.

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