9W - 11W
Silent Hope was provided by XSEED Games for review. Thank you!
Silent Hope is a charming action RPG that, while it has an addicting gameplay loop and great aesthetic, falls a little short with its simplistic story. Even still, there is a lot to love about the game, thanks to its content and the unique abilities of each of the seven heroes. If you are looking more for a solid experience to just have fun in and not care much about a narrative, this is going to be the perfect game for you.
The gameplay is very similar to games like Diablo. You will run around different maps fighting enemies in real-time combat. You will have a button that will attack and 3 different skills you can utilize. As you defeat enemies, you will level up, which increases your health and gives you a skill point to unlock or improve one of your skills. You also have 2 other classes you can unlock for each character, which gives some stat boosts and access to 3 more skills. You will also pick up blueprints or "memories" of equipment that can be used to boost stats.
In between diving into the randomly generated Abyss, you will walk around your hub where you can interact with 6 different stands to forge weapons, create different materials, farm for food or get other food materials, or cook food to give passive buffs for your run.
I have a love-hate relationship with this mechanic. I like the overall gameplay loop and the hub, crafting stuff is very easy and streamlined, but I do wish the leveling up would increase stats too. The attack and defense increases are locked to the weapons and accessories, which do have randomly generated effects with them, but it means the only way to really improve those stats is to get to the next area of floors. This then requires some grinding, which I do like here, but the leveling system feels lacking.
Thankfully, Silent Hope plays extremely well on the Steam Deck.
At first, I was a little worried about how the game would perform, given that the recommended system requirements ask for a GTX 1060 graphics card, which is the same one that Returnal asks for, but the game plays extremely well! And it feels like a fantastic game to play in your hand.
The recommended settings for Silent Hope are actually quite simple: Don't change a thing! Just playing the game out-of-the-box will see a solid 60 FPS in almost every area and a battery drain around 11W - 13W. For whatever reason, going into the pause menu will shoot battery drain up to 15W - 16W, and some cutscenes can have some minor drops, but the actual core gameplay sticks to 60 with low battery drain.
I did want to find an alternative build that focused on conserving battery life without sacrificing the image quality too much. I ended up with a 40 FPS/Hz cap, as well as low graphical quality and keeping Anti-Aliasing on high. This allowed the game to run well with a TDP limit of 5. There were still some slowdowns with the menus, but this was negligible and didn't affect the game itself.
As for accessibility, you will have different HUD options to toggle on and off, different sound bars to change, remapping controls, choosing text and voice language, toggle subtitles, and choose popup settings for the items you pick up.
Silent Hope doesn't support 16:10 resolutions, so there are black bars, but if you use SteamOS 3.5 (which is on the Preview update build), you can stretch it to fill. There is also full cloud save and controller support!
Silent Hope is an interesting game that I ended up enjoying more than I thought I would. The gameplay loop is fantastic and addicting, continuing to rope me in as I learned what made each of the seven characters special, and the visuals keep everything looking great and crisp. It is a bit on the simple side, and the story feels very generic at times, but overall, it is a great action RPG I could get lost playing if I let myself.
It also runs swimmingly on the Steam Deck with no changes needed at all, making it a Best on Deck game! If you are a fan of Action RPGs and want something more low-key, simple, and just addicting, this is the way to go.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that will help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!
Silent Hope is a simple, yet addicting action RPG that runs beautifully on the Steam Deck with no compromises.
Limit
40
Refresh Rate
40
HRS
NO
TDP Limit
5
Scaling Filter
Linear
GPU Clock
Disabled
No Forced Compatibility
Anti-Aliasing: High
Image Quality: Low
9W - 11W
55c - 62c
~4 hours
I've noticed that in the screenshots, the CPU is always less than 50% in usage. What about limiting the CPU's clock speed to reduce power usage on that part of the chip?