If you are one of those people who have an uncontrollable urge to become a modern day Sherlock Holmes then have I got a game for you. Grab your smartphone and let’s get detecting.
At EGX last year, I got the opportunity for a hands on with Funbakers’ new game, Silent Streets. It’s set in the victorian town of Snowport and the very first thing that struck me about it was the map screen, evoking memories of classic board game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective.
Silent Streets tasks you with solving a murder and it’s up to you to do exactly that, using a mix of beautiful hand-drawn art, augmented reality and good old fashioned having a walk around. Let’s say, for instance, that there’s a dodgy character by the name of James Donnellan at the pub, let’s walk to the pub then. The game tasks you with real world walking to get to the location, requiring you to take a number of physical steps in order to question that wrong ‘un.
While the walking aspect of Silent Streets isn’t new, it is well implemented and is a great impetus to get out of the house and into the sunlight. The script is well written and the voicework well performed, which helps to build the atmosphere of the game. It can be hard to be absorbed into a game which you largely play within the real world, but Silent Streets manages to keep one foot firmly rooted in its Victorian world.
The augmented reality part of this game is its most impressive feat. At the start of the 2010s, it seemed that AR was gaining traction but it soon declined, that is until Pokemon Go repopularied it, even if it wasn’t a necessary feature to play the game. Silent Streets uses Apple’s ARKit to implement the augmented reality part of their game, and to their credit, it’s one of the most impressive uses of AR to date.
The AR part of this game has you hunting for clues in the real world. This can take place as a sort of real world hidden object game (which I’m surprised hasn’t been invented yet!). The items will be dotted around your landscape and you are tasked with finding them. It’s not perfect, sometimes there are odd floating objects, but for the most part it’s a cool, well designed feature and it’s not as easy as you’d think to find them all. Another part of the game had me searching for clues on a virtual body that lay on a gurney, this felt not too dissimilar to L.A Noire’s corpse clue hunting, albeit in less detail.
It seems that AR could be on the rise again thanks to games like Silent Streets: Mockingbird, especially when you consider we are on the verge of another AR release in the form of Ghostbuster World, which is being released later this year. Silent Streets: Mockingbird is being released on iOS on March 1st and is currently available for pre-order at $2.99. The game is also expected to on Android.
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