The Silent Swan

the silent swan?? should be titled THE UNFINISHED GAME!! avoid this one.. DO NOT waste your money.. :(

The Silent Swan clearly pulls significant inspiration from games like those from the Chinese Room, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and What Remains of Edith Finch - A story-driven walking simulator. Now, what made those titles work was excellent writing, music, voice acting, and craftsmanship all of which The Silent Swan lacks. Well, that's a problem, right, because it doesn't have any real gameplay? Yes. It's a big problem. In The Silent Swan you will walk around buggy, poorly crafted, confusing, nonsensical, messy environments with poor graphics but enchanting art direction - I bought the game based on the haunting atmosphere in the images, after all. There is no voice acting, so the only audio is highly repetitive footsteps and generic 'sad piano' music and you're constantly pulled out of the experience to read lines and lines of, frankly, complete gibberish dialogue. The game also has no respect for your time as it has large, open ended environments with no directions given, but doesn't reward exploration whatsoever. There is no point to look off the beaten path and doing so is a big waste of your time - you will find nothing anywhere, then have to walk back. If you arrive at …

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dpmAY059TTY&pp=ygUWZXN0cmFuZ2VkIGd1bnMgbiByb3Nlcw%3D%3D

I really enjoy walking simulators, but this one actually had me tired in real life. The environment is beautiful and thoughtfully designed, and I love the overall atmosphere. However, everything is so spaced out that the world ends up feeling empty and unfinished. Some games use that emptiness intentionally to create a sense of loneliness or surrealism, but here it just feels like the game isn’t complete. The painfully slow walking and cycling speed in such a large environment doesn’t help either. You spend what feels like half an hour walking in one direction just to interact with a single object, then another half hour walking somewhere else to trigger the next story event. For such a large map, the lack of an in-game map or compass makes navigation frustrating. It’s easy to get lost, especially near the many highways, and you might wander aimlessly before realising you’ve been going the wrong way - only to turn back and walk even more. The story itself seems intriguing, but the absence of voice narration makes it hard to stay engaged. Normally, text-only dialogue in games can work fine, but in this case, there’s so much of it that keeping up feels like a chore, especially whi…

The Silent Swan, developed by Praenaris and published by Gammera Nest, is a first-person narrative exploration game that embraces the quiet melancholy of isolation and the weight of forgotten history. It tells the story of Mirov Kavrazyma, a man who awakens in a strange, desolate future where towering, decayed cities loom on the horizon and his once-familiar world has slipped into silence. The premise is simple, yet the execution is deeply meditative: follow the trail of paper swans left behind by his wife Selene, and uncover the fractured truth behind a world that has seemingly collapsed. What unfolds is less a traditional story and more a poetic unraveling of memory, grief, and consequences, where architecture and silence speak louder than any dialogue. Rather than leaning into conventional game mechanics like combat or puzzle-solving, The Silent Swan builds its entire identity around atmospheric immersion and large-scale environmental storytelling. Players are encouraged to wander vast, interconnected cityscapes—monolithic ruins that echo with the absence of life. These spaces are not filled with distractions or mechanical objectives; they are sparse by design, intended to evok…

Very nice game that is basically a walking simulator with a couple of light puzzle elements. The story is very poetic and a bit obscure but comes to a satisfying conclusion. Sometimes there is some lack of direction and some jank. The most impressive element is definitely the large city with its structures, roads, bridges, and staircases. There is a big chance that if you like the screenshots of the store page, you will also enjoy the game. Just be prepared to do some reading of dialogues (no voice acting), but the experience is definitely worth it.