Credit where it’s due to Silent Sadie, whose Steam Next Fest demo is out now: even within the confines of a 2.5D platformer, I don’t think it could lean any harder into its love of pratfallin’, piano-tinklin’ 1920s comedy cinema.
As a pair of scratchy, black-and white intertitles explain, you are Sadie, an aspiring actress and stuntwoman denied a fair shot at making it in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Sadie’s solution, apparently, is just to peg it stage left, bounding through an entire weekend marathon’s worth of film sets and increasingly hazardous prop warehouses.
As a platformer, it’s functional and slickly animated, if only about as deep as Charlie Chaplin’s hat. Its dedication to the silent movie bit, however, is bound to raise a smile. Besides the black-and-white film look, and the fact that Sadie starts doing the Charleston if you set your controller down for a while, the big highlight is the use of sound. In place of realistic action noises, Sadie’s traversal moves are synced with little period-appropriate instrumental flourishes. Twiddly strings accompany rope grabs, their pitch playfully creeping higher with successive swings, and hard landings produce a bassy drum roll to emphasise the timeless slapstick quality of falling on one’s arse. It’s not a rhythm game but when you’re successfully stringing together jumps and slides, there is a keenly satisfying sense that you’re playing the lead in a twenties flick and composing the score at the same time.
There’s also an attention to detail that really helps breathe some life into these plywood gauntlets. Stagehands and set designers go to work around you, putting the finishing touches to their fake Western/pirate/farmyard scenes, while forklift drivers cart their crates through the studio backlots. Even the static environments have character, especially a series of background billboards through which their Prohibition-era renters struggle to make water sound interesting.
Later on, the platforming gives way to some stealthing, with mixed success. It seriously slows down the pace, completely abandoning that flowing musical platforming in favour of forcing you to hide in cupboards from lumbering patrols. Still, the introduction of a barrel disguise – like you’re a flapper Solid Snake – does reintroduce the comedy aspect, and there’s still a dash of dynamic audio cleverness, as going into sneak mode lowers the jaunty swing soundtrack to a simple, slinking piano melody.
There’s no release date for Silent Sadie as of yet, though I can recommend this Next Fest demo right now. Even if the actual platforming part isn’t all that groundbreaking, the strength of its presentation and the charm of its affectionate 1920s pastiche go a long way in giving it a unique and likeable character.