Silent Hope Review (A Wasted Cow)
Not a bad game, but also just not good enough for your time & money
EDIT: Adding context because there seems to be confusion on my gear progression point and loot issue.
TL;DR, this game is fun if you REALLY like roguelikes. There are seven characters to choose from and each have different weapons and abilities which allows for different levels of customization. However, some elements of the game feel painfully repetitive and it saps away the fun. Despite the positives, parts of the game feel incredibly bland and feels like Marvelous made this game on a whim without a lot of devotion/effort. The price is pretty high for what you get, so you absolutely want to wait for a sale if you're interested.
This was one of the games that I was interested in from the previews at the Directs and other game shows. I love Marvelous because of Rune Factory and I loved how it was stated to draw elements from Rune Factory. It was portrayed as if Rune Factory meets roguelike dungeon crawler which had promise because of how complex Rune Factory is as an RPG/sim and making this a roguelike dungeon crawler was a fresh perspective. However, it fails to deliver, and the actual gameplay ends up feeling like a mobile game due to how restricted your skill sets were which was a huge red flag.
The Positives
1. Art - is chibi style but not overly chibi. It's just cute enough and it works because of how it references other Marvelous titles.
2. Music - sounds good, fits the areas they were composed for. It helps maintain your immersion which is great.
3. RPG level progression - most roguelikes don't have levels you keep so this game having that was a nice touch as it lessens the grind you would need if you wanted to play multiple different characters. This was the most prominent positive I could find as time is a very important topic that I'll go over in the following issues.
3. Gear progression - It's very linear and keeps itself simple which saves you a lot of time. No you don't need that one extremely rare material to make a legendary rarity weapon. They all share similar materials that you just need to farm which saves you headaches in the long run. Ex: The wood you find on floor X will be used for all equipment from floor X.
The Issues
1. Story - To be perfectly transparent, I genuinely feel like the story was crap. From the way its narrated, to how it proceeds, it sounds like it was a story that was a WIP (work-in-progress) for another game, but was scrapped. The setting and introduction was very blunt and wasn't interesting at all. By the time you get to the second area, you can predict the rest of the story incredibly easily because there's no depth or complexity involved.
2. Maps - the floor maps start out basic, but quickly devolve to annoying. You have limited movement options outside of your dashes to the movement speed stat, so at least 50-70% of the maps are a literal walking simulator. The devs didn't think to condense the maps or make it function as different rooms like how you may see games like Hades does. Ultimately, watching yourself run around to grab things 24/7 ruins your immersion and eats up way too much time. Now, normally this wouldn't be an issue for a RPG game, but this is also a roguelike, meaning you will have multiple runs. Multiple runs means experiencing the same maps over and over if you see where I'm going with this.
3. Loot - the way gear upgrades work goes by both rank and rarity. You start at rank 1 which has the lowest scaling and stats, and the rarities go from common through to legendary. However, that being said, most of your loot becomes obsolete the second you advance to the next area. This means every material you farmed for, every piece of gear you crafted are now essentially trash. To add context, there is no material conversion or alternative use for the materials you farmed in the previous floor. Wood from Floor 3 will forever be pointless for anything past Floor 3 and also cannot be used for anything from the previous floors. I suppose you can keep crafting it to farm station experience, but why bother when you would start crafting wood from the new floor you arrived at?
Combined with how expensive it is to level up gear later on, this makes for a toxic loop of grinding that shouldn't need to be in this game because you get forced to start from scratch. At least in a good chunk of other RPG's, they mix different materials you may have gotten at various points to craft something new. Personally, after getting the satisfaction of beating the boss of an area, finding out the gear I worked so hard to get is now going to be worth nothing feels incredibly disappointing.
4. Combat & Controls - you have three skill slots, one item slot, one dash, and normal attacks. Does this sound familiar at all? I hope it does because this is the same formula as a run-of-the-mill action mobile game. And yes, it is a "tried and true" formula, but this severely restricts your gameplay because when your skills are on cooldown (and they will be on cooldown), you just mash the normal attack mindlessly. And you'll do this for every run. Even if you choose to equip only low cooldown skills, you're still restricted to those three skills only and the only difference is that you have a shorter downtime in between rotations.
5. Combat & Enemy Scaling - I wanted to mention this separately, because this was what made me stop playing the game entirely. The combat is definitely fun once you find a character whose style works for you, but even that goes down the drain when the enemies grow progressively more annoying by having triple (or more) the HP from the previous map. For a frame of reference, by the time you reach the third area (after 5-6 hours of gameplay), you are fighting enemies that take half a minute to kill if you don't have certain specific setups for both your skills and weapon modifiers. To make matters worse, whenever you craft the next tier weapon, you only get a rough 20% damage boost which is nearly nothing compared to the massive HP pool the newer monsters have. So not only do your weapons feel like they have less value, you also have to spend more time mindlessly fighting regular mobs that sponge your attacks if you don't spam skills the second they're off cooldown. The cherry-on-top is that their damage reflects a similar scaling as well so you will likely die fast if you can't dodge every little thing or build tanky for some odd reason.
Conclusion
The game gets stale very fast, the upgrades you obtain feel less impactful than other roguelike games, and they chose both the wrong elements and too few elements to pull from Rune Factory. If they incorporated Rune Factory's whole stat system where you can level up different facets of gameplay by simply performing the action, this game would be a lot more rewarding to play, but they didn't. For example, continuously crafting weapons to get you blacksmithing levels which gives a STR boost or something. Instead the only real Rune Factory references are the names and pictures of the materials and food. Everything else is a subpar, low-budget experience you could get from a $10 game elsewhere.