Oh no, here I am again writing about another upcoming free-to-play RPG that’s sure to attract some sensible comments.
Well, look, I pressed pause on Silver Palace for over a week so you’ve had plenty of time to recover from my Ananta and Honkai: Nexus Anima reports.
Furthermore, the team was gracious enough to give me a hands-on at Gamescom; actually when I booked into the demo I did it out of personal interest, but fortuitously the title was announced for Sony’s console at Opening Night Live.
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Silver Palace has been attracting attention for its Victorian-style open world setting. It actually reminds me a lot of mobile game Reverse 1999’s art style, especially with all the high-end clobber the characters are wearing.
I’ve described this as a Chinese game in the past, but I have to set the record straight on that: it’s actually being published by Happy Elements, which is a Japan-based company with offices in Tokyo and Kyoto, as well as China.
The game itself is being developed by a subsidiary named Elementa, which is headquartered in Singapore.
So this is an international effort, then, but there’s no denying it’s got the “feel” of a Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves: proper nouns, questionable cleavage, and some really wild enemy designs are all on display.
I played for about 30-minutes on the PC, and didn’t get to see the new Resident Evil-style multiplayer mode which was inexplicably teased during Geoff Keighley’s recent livestream. I asked questions but I wasn’t really given much more information about what that is.
And I think that’s unfortunate because even I’m willing to admit Silver Palace does feel a bit long in the tooth. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just I’ve played this type of game before.
The demo focused on the core aspects of every modern gacha game: teams are made up of multiple units which can be toggled on the fly, each with their own skills and abilities. As in any of these games, you need to build squads that complement each other to deal max damage.
The boss fights I played, one against a giant Italian-style sculpture named ‘Vita et Mors’, were genuinely impressive from both an artistic and spectacle perspective – but the gameplay did feel quite samey to me.
The world looks amazing, though – it’s clearly inspired by a specific era of London, but it has that foreign, fantasy spin on it.
You can mount a horse and fly over the rows of buildings, which I think renders all of the artistry that’s gone into the sandbox a bit moot, but I assume it’ll be welcomed once you’re a few hours into the game.
I did happen upon some puzzles on the ground while I forced myself to explore, but I couldn’t figure out the controls on these so ended up skipping them and leaving them unsolved. I assume the final game will better explain the mechanics here.
Obviously there was nowhere near enough time in the demo to appreciate each character’s kit and understand the intricacies of the combat system at large, but purely on the pad it feels a lot like Wuthering Waves.
(The similarities to Genshin Impact are also there, but generally I feel like that game feels much more dated these days.)
I’ll be interested to see what else this title is bringing to the table, beyond its gothic fantasy art style.
The dev clearly felt it was important to tease the aforementioned Resident Evil mode, so I’ll be fascinated to see how that works and whether it’s able to give the title a bit more identity. Right now, I have no idea how it’s going to marry what it’s got with third-person survival horror shooting, but I’m intrigued nonetheless.
