Parents' Guide to Fade to Silence

The biggest decision you'll make in this game is whether to play on the normal or easy difficulty setting. Fade to Silence's regular mode is an extremely challenging survival simulation that will claim Ash's life in many ways, from lethal monsters to hypothermia. And once he's gone through his small stack of lives, that's it: game over. But you can take what you've learned about the world and how to survive in it and apply it to your next playthrough. You'll gradually learn how to manage your camp recruits better, how to deal with various types of enemies more efficiently, and what to do to keep all of your health stats at optimal levels. Switch to the easier Exploration mode, and you can die as often as you need without worrying about being forced to start over. It's significantly less frustrating, but it also removes the tension of needing to make smart decisions in order to survive. That said, it's nice that the easier option exists for players who haven't much patience.

Regardless of the level of challenge chosen, you may find yourself annoyed by other aspects of the experience. Managing resources is fun at first, but the combination of your needy group of survivors and the simplicity of survival tasks risks making the process of gathering food and firewood tedious. And while combat feels good and enemies can be very challenging, fighting mechanics are rudimentary enough that doing battle may also eventually grow dull for some players. The game's one incredible highlight is blizzards. They come crashing down on Ash with all the force of nature; a deadly impediment but a visual delight. Learning how to survive these snowstorms is the most rewarding part of the experience. But awe-inspiring blizzards do not a complete survival game make. Fade to Silence succeeds in delivering a lonely and foreboding world filled with death and danger, but it doesn't make working to survive most of these perils as compelling as one might hope.