GOG’s Summer Sale is winding down, but there’s one more freebie you can grab before it’s over. Silence, the 2016 point-and-click adventure from Daedalic, is yours for the taking until Friday.
I’ll be blunt: I did not care for Silence. I quite like Daedalic adventures in general, and Silence certainly looked the part, with lush hand-drawn graphics and the promise of a story worth paying attention to.
But the pieces just didn’t come together for me: I found the main character extremely unlikable, the supporting cast irrelevant and empty, and the story disjointed and utterly forgettable. Compared to, say, The Night of the Rabbit, Harvey’s New Eyes, Memoria, and even the original Deponia, which I maintain is a very funny game, Silence felt particularly weak.
I’m kind of an outlier on that, though. Silence was generally well-reviewed by sites I didn’t work for at the time, and holds a very respectable 75/100 aggregate rating on Metacritic. GOG users come in around the same mark, awarding a 3.9/5 overall score, but even that’s not bad, really—just not especially great.
The big but, though, which I do like, is a point I’ve already covered: It’s free. Just pop around to GOG, click the button, and have a nice day. If you don’t like it, well hey, it cost you nothing. And if you do like it? Still zero cost, and you got a good game out of it. That’s a win in my books.
The Silence giveaway, as noted, is part of GOG’s Summer Sale, which is also offering the Silence soundtrack for just 29 cents, 90% off the regular price. The music by composer Tilo Alpermann is actually quite good, so consider that a recommendation from me.
And since we’re on the topic, you can also score deep discounts on most of Daedalic’s other stuff in the sale, including The Night of the Rabbit, Memoria, Harvey’s New Eyes, Chains of Satinav, Deponia, and the Silence predecessor The Whispered World (Silence was initially subtitled The Whispered World 2, although that was dropped prior to release for some reason) for $2 each, 90% off the regular price. The GOG Summer Sale is on until July 9.
