Silver Pines Review: Who It's For and Who Should Wait

What Silver Pines is

Wych Elm's game, published by Team17, came out on October 8. You play Red Walker, a private investigator sent to Silver Pines to find Eddie Velvet, a musician who has vanished. The store page calls it "a survival horror metroidvania set in small town America," and that's accurate: side-on 2.5D rooms, locked doors that open only once you find the right item, puzzles, scarce ammo, and monsters you can fight or run past.

The look is the first thing people mention. Every character is rotoscoped. The studio's own dev blog explains how: "We made costumes, filmed ourselves performing animations and then drew over the footage frame-by-frame." Mattias, the artist and co-founder, did a lot of that filming himself. It's a five-person team, and the game passed 100,000 copies sold across all platforms one week after launch.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Wych Elm / Team17)

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What the launch trailer shows

Team17's launch trailer is under two minutes and mostly mood. At 0:27 a phone booth glows under red rain. At 0:33 we get the inventory: a W-500 shotgun and a boxcutter equipped, with the Rabbit Hole bar's neon sign behind Red's photo. At 0:51 a man sits in a rowboat at a foggy dock, and at 1:15 Red fires a shotgun into something huge and fleshy in a red-lit room. The end card at 1:39 lists Switch, Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series, Steam and Epic.

What works: the town, the dread, the notebook

The comparisons in Steam reviews are almost always the same three: Twin Peaks, Silent Hill, Resident Evil. One fan calls it "a love letter to everything Lynch has created." That's the vibe the store page and trailer are selling, and it lands for most players.

The best compliment we found is a practical one. A reviewer says it's "the first game in a long while that made me bust out the pen and paper from my drawer." If you liked the puzzle side of The Sinking City 2, that's the sentence to pay attention to.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Wych Elm / Team17)

The survival side is tight. One player describes carrying "only a few rounds of ammo and a damaged melee weapon," which turns every hallway into a fight-or-run call. That's classic survival horror, and it's why the inventory screen in the trailer matters more than the monsters do. For more first-person and retro horror we've covered this year, our Saint of Chains review and Luna Abyss review sit at the faster, louder end.

What doesn't: combat, backtracking, the ending

Even the fans say the fighting is the weak part. A player four hours in flags "super sluggy combat," and wishes for fast travel. A negative review is blunter: "Combat is borderline awful to the point that its almost hilarious," with "a dodge mechanic that trivializes most encounters."

Difficulty is the other early wall. One reviewer turned it down from the Survival Horror setting because "the first boss just wouldn't die and took all of my resources," and wished for a step between Tense and Survival Horror. Hotfix 2 on October 16 eased the early game on Nightmare a little, and made the boxcutter hit 50% harder once it's broken. Small mercies.

The metroidvania structure cuts both ways. The negative review we read most closely says "the sheer amount of backtracking eventually becomes exhausting," and that "the conclusion left me feeling surprisingly flat." If you need a strong payoff to forgive the walking, that's worth knowing before you buy.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Wych Elm / Team17)

Performance and patches

Launch week had rough edges, and the studio moved fast. Hotfix 1, the day after release, added a DirectX 11 launch option for players with performance problems, "especially on Steam Deck," and fixed some softlocks. Hotfix 2 fixed more softlocks, patched a bug that could stall the Sheriff Department boss fight, raised the photo limit from 30 to 100, and tidied up collisions. The game was Steam Deck Verified a month before launch, and the minimum PC spec is modest.

There's no co-op and no multiplayer: this is a single-player game, start to finish. If you want more horror after the credits, our October Next Fest horror demos round up five free demos, the Security 51 review and Halloween: The Game cover two very different scares, and Besmirch is another small horror game we've followed. Our essay on uncanny faces in horror games makes a good companion read.

Verdict

Play it now if you like survival horror where the map, the inventory and your own notes do the heavy lifting. The town, the art and the dread are why it was still in Steam's top 100 sellers two weeks after launch, and four thousand players mostly agree.

Wait for a sale if stiff combat or a lot of backtracking has made you quit games before. If you buy it anyway, consider the Tense difficulty: the player who dropped down from Survival Horror says it starves you early. And if a mystery lives or dies on its last hour for you, read a spoiler-free take on the ending first.

How we checked this

We haven't played Silver Pines, so this Silver Pines review is built from public evidence. On October 22, 2026 we read the Steam store page and every Steam news post from the 300,000-wishlist update to Hotfix 2, the studio's rotoscoping dev blog and the official site, pulled review totals and the 40 most helpful English reviews from Steam, and stepped through Team17's launch trailer frame by frame for the timestamps above.

References

1. Silver Pines on Steam, Steam
2. Silver Pines Hotfix 2 patch notes, Wych Elm on Steam
3. Behind the Pines Dev Blog 1: Animation and Rotoscoping, Wych Elm on Steam
4. Silver Pines launch trailer, Team17 on YouTube
5. Official site, Wych Elm and Team17