In Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire, you become a vampire slayer on a mythic quest to eliminate powerful sleeping monsters — an endeavor undertaken by only the bravest souls. This horror-puzzle game requires you to destroy a clan of ancient vampires by carefully disarming their coffins’ defenses with the help of your guide — a mystical book.
As the game begins, you’re tasked with becoming a vampire slayer, put into a castle that houses 9 vampires, and told that many before you have failed. You’re guided by a mysterious mentor, who tells you about the history of the vampires you’re trying to dust as they slumber and teaches you how to get past their defenses. A pry bar, clippers, and a hook made from a finger bone are among the many tools within reach, but a stake through the heart is the only way to end it.
The game relies on a spooky atmosphere and requires a good deal of patience as any sound you make risks waking up the vampire whose defenses you’re trying to get past. Tension builds as you cautiously lift bars, remove nails, and clip wires to find the vampire’s heart. Your silence and precision are key as you avoid awakening the beasts who will drain your life instantly.
COFFIN UP THE MECHANICS
As the game begins, you’re given a short but effective tutorial level. After that, the pattern is fairly consistent: solve a 3-dimensional puzzle that shows you the shapes you’ll have to make to penetrate the final defensive layer of each vampire, teleport to the vampire’s coffin, and then slowly unlock the coffin and make your way, as stealthily as possible, past their defenses.
The defenses do pile on, starting with bars that need to be slowly and carefully removed, to nails that must slowly be pried loose, to wires pulsing with electricity that you need to cut, to little voodoo watchers that’ll awaken every now and then and sound an alert if they sense any movement.
It all fosters a careful exercise in patience and slow, purposeful movement, all while in a slightly spooky atmosphere that VR veterans will find entertaining but the less adept might feel terrifying.
If you’re worried about jump scares, well, they’re tempered. In fact, Pete and I have slightly different views on the scares. I don’t consider the jump scares true jump scares since they occur only when you fail, so I consider them a death screen, and because they’re predictable (you can always tell when you’ve messed up), I don’t find them particularly scary and they don’t startle me. I love Pete, but he has the fortitude of a little baby and still thinks they’re jump scares. Clearly, your horror mileage may vary.
Overall, the game is slick and well-made, a testament to Schell Games, and honestly, after their work on the I Expect You to Die series, we expected no less than a classy execution. See what I did there?
FANG-TASTIC VISUALS
Graphically speaking, Schell Games are as sharp as they’ve always been. The castle environments are cool, well-stylized, and look great. The game’s visual presentation effectively captures the eerie, gothic atmosphere of a vampire’s lair, with dimly lit corridors, ancient stone walls, and ominous coffins.
The attention to detail in the various tools and traps you encounter adds to the immersion, making each interaction feel tactile and real. While the overall aesthetic leans more towards a cartoonish, Transylvania-inspired style rather than photorealism, it works well for the game’s tone and gameplay. Nice and spooky, in a fun, approachable way.
SOUNDS LIKE A SCREAM
The sound is equally great, with the voice acting by your mentor being quite sinister and superb, and the ambient audio of the castle environments lending everything a creepy atmosphere. You can hear spiders crawling, you can hear the occasional bat fly by, startling you a little, you can feel echoing footsteps in the distance making you look around in concern while you’re trying to slowly, carefully pry a nail loose while worrying that another nail is sympathetically coming out of the coffin with it, and might drop to the floor and wake up a damn bloodsucker.
BLOODY NITPICKS
There’s not much to complain about with Silent Slayer, but you know us better than that. We’re the nitpicking reviewers, so here it goes. The game might feel a little short; there are less than a dozen vampires to kill, and once you get past the first five, the rest just build on the first, without really adding any more game mechanics. On the other hand, it’s priced at $19.99, so you can’t really complain about the longevity you get. Still – it would have been great to keep adding on more mechanics as the game reached its conclusion rather than just piling on mechanics that have already been introduced.
The 3D puzzles are also somewhat useless. I mean, some are more challenging than others to assemble, but the conceit that solving them reveals the shapes you need to cast to defeat the vampires is rendered useless by the fact that you’re guided through the shapes by arrows that show up before the kill, so the actual utility of the puzzles is nullified.
Another issue is that once you’ve gotten used to the fact that you only get caught if you fail twice in a row, the game becomes a bit too easy. As long as you’re patient, it’s hard to fail.
But again, like I said, I’m nitpicking. At the end of the day, this is a unique game, with great graphics, great audio, an interesting conceit, and cool mechanics. It’s well-priced and knows not to wear out its welcome.
FANGS FOR THE MEMORIES
Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire is a solid new title from Schell Games. While not as deep as their I Expect You to Die installments, it’s fun and offers a nicely spooky and tactile VR experience well-suited to both VR veterans and VR newbies since the player doesn’t really move around the environment and there’s no cause for motion sickness. It’s Operation in VR, and that’s not a bad thing at all, so long as you know what you’re getting into.
