Silently swimming through the unknown waters as you search for large creatures to power a foreboding ancient machine, Silt is a beautiful yet haunting voyage into the ocean depths. Let’s unravel its mysteries on another (not quite so ancient) machine; the Switch.

Silt starts on the ocean floor. A diver is chained down - who knows who, what or why. What you do discover quickly is your diver can reach out to living creatures with a soul tendril and take control of them. An early example is possessing a piranha so you can have it chomp through chains blocking your path. Further in you’ll be possessing fish that can warp over short distances or break through boulders. Your progress will depend upon possessing creatures to clear the obstacles in your way. Working your way to the next area involves finding the goliaths and absorbing their souls. As you feed more souls to the unknowable machine, it awakens once more to send you to the next soul the metal beast requires. 

Possessing creatures is straightforward. Each one has a specific ability and when they show up chances are you’re going to need them for something. Silt doesn’t add too many different creatures to the mix, but uses them in really interesting ways. Not everything can be possessed, and are often part of the obstacle you need to get past with the help of your possessable friends. 

Silt doesn’t give you dialogue or text to work out what’s going on. It’s an oppressive atmosphere as you’re surrounded by the crushing depths, it’s the mysterious, ominous and mostly hostile world around you. While there isn’t much in the way of plot, that atmosphere and eldritch imagery carry a lot of the game. The hand-drawn visuals look great and on the OLED screen, the glowing white environment really pops against the black. 

It would be difficult to talk about Silt without evoking Playdead’s Limbo. The black and white colour scheme plays a part in that, but it’s also the dark, constantly foreboding and threatening world. In Silt there are fewer out-of-nowhere deaths, however, you are safer to assume that everything can hurt you. It doesn’t mean there aren’t sudden deaths either, your diver is pretty fragile and it doesn’t take much to be taken back to a checkpoint. Luckily they are usually nearby where you were, although it can get real frustrating towards the end of the game with some of the multi-step puzzles. If you get killed at any part of these quite involved sequences you’ll be sent right back to the start of it. A few times I definitely swore and put the Switch down for a few minutes. They’re not insurmountable challenges, you’ll get past them, it’s just the time involved in redoing it all as you try and work out the right approach for the section you’re stuck on.

Silt isn’t a long experience, a few hours long. As a result, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Most of the time it won’t take you very long to work out the solution to a puzzle to move on, but there are a handful that drag out. There were very few occasions where I felt that I was getting lost in trying to find what I needed to do. There was a boss that caused a headache because I did most of what was needed to damage them, however, it wasn’t clearly communicated that there was still a step missing. 

Silt manages to keep a short delve into the mysterious ocean depths interesting as you feed the machine. Fans of games like Limbo and Little Nightmares will especially get something out of Silt. If you enjoy an atmospheric puzzler with some lovely art then you should check this game out.