Game Review: Silenced: The House (Xbox Series X)

A visual novel horror game with some ‘choice’ moments that provide multiple different endings. Silenced: The House comes from developers/publishers Graven Visual Novels and Sometimes You.

It all starts off innocently enough. You play a young woman named Ashley on a trip with some friends. A trip that has taken them deep into the woods in search of an abandoned house that they plan to spend the weekend in celebrating a birthday. It’s teenagers being teenagers; playful flirting, barbed comments, and unnecessary insults. A lot of which are aimed at Ashley in particular.

She doesn’t care though as she had an ulterior motive for getting the group to the house. She has convinced them to take part in a ritual that will summon the dead and allow then to talk to spirits. Unknown to them though, she actually plans to sacrifice them to demonic forces. Encouraged by someone and something simply called ‘Her’.

To say much more would spoil what is a surprisingly interesting story. One that gets darker and more horrific with every twist and turn. It’s not hyperbole to call Silenced: The House an extremely graphic game.

The sepia tone visuals, cartoonish character models (some oddly sexualised), and background imagery certainly doesn’t scream ‘horror’. Which does make its initial tone shift a bit jarring. Especially as this comes via the internal dialogue of Ashley. Revealing her plans to the player and across the game’s 1–2-hour length, her motivations. She’s not the most engaging of characters but that also applies to all of them. A group of unlikable teens being horrible to each other.

Even still, the level of violence dished out to them is quite something and the art style isn’t scared of showing the gory details off. There’s a lot of imagination here, and even when the story starts to drag and the cheesy dialogue gets a bit to much, the excitement of seeing some new horror intensity keeps things moving along.

The game features some decision-based moments that can affect the ending you get. These are minor and minuscule decisions though and even the ending you get encourages you to find the one true ending.

If you’ve played any number of visual novel games before, Silenced: The House isn’t doing anything new. In fact, its first few minutes are actually quite off putting because of the dialogue and characters. Yet, it does end up being fairly engaging, even if that’s just because of how bloody and brutal it gets.