Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence - Switch Review

Following a successful Steam launch, Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence is a point-and-click adventure game from Devilish Games and, more specifically, developer Ayose Trujillo Boza, now releasing on consoles. I’ve reviewed a glut of adventure games in recent months (Shadows of the Afterland, Midnight Swamp and The Drifter) and as a relative newcomer to the genre, one thing I have learned is while they may all have the same premise, they are all vastly different games in how the progression and adventure elements work. Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence looks to be different again, and I’ll explain why!

The Good

In Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence, you play as William, a budding author who has travelled to a monastic abbey looking for a story. He soon finds one. The abbey has been overrun by a curse which has plunged all of the monks into silence, and no one is quite sure what is going on. The atmosphere is incredibly creepy, which is difficult to maintain in a pixel-art game, but the creepy, silent interactions and feeling of isolation make for an awesome backdrop to the pointing and clicking. You move William around by pointing the cursor as to where you want him to walk and then pressing the walk button. He can move freely around the environments and also collect, use and combine items/keys. So far, so standard.

However, where Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence differs from the aforementioned games in the intro is that the abbey and its surrounding areas are structured in a kind of metroidvania space. Think like the mansion in the original Resident Evil; at the start there are many areas accessible to you but lots of locked doors and desks that you initially can’t access. I personally really enjoyed this, as it made you take mental (and physical) notes of things that didn’t look quite right, and then the feeling of satisfaction when you solved a puzzle by revisiting one of these spaces was immense. This isn’t a wholly original approach to the genre but certainly made it feel less linear compared to its recent rivals.

The superb atmosphere and explorative gameplay are greatly supported by the score, which is haunting but really brings the abbey to life. The harpsichord soars at certain moments of reveal, making for many dramatic and terrifying story beats. It’s not often a soundtrack enhances a game’s story to the point of mentioning, but here in Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence, I think it certainly does.

TL;DR

• Atmospheric, dark story
• Metroidvania-lite structure is superb for exploration
• Score enhances the experience considerably

The Bad

One thing that isn’t different to some of the aforementioned games (excluding perhaps The Drifter) is that Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence is certainly a short experience. I probably invested about 2-3 hours into the story (which is actually what it suggests in the marketing, so they got that right) but I really wanted more because I was enjoying it so much. There are only really three different areas (all of which have a cluster of 6-10 rooms/spaces) and I felt that some other, more varied locations would have staked some ambition. That being said, it costs less than seven English pounds at the time of writing and therefore won’t hurt your wallet too much.

Lastly, I felt like I wanted a bit more in respect of William’s inventory in Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence. When you get a key piece of information – or a hint – an animation often plays of William writing it down in his book but… You can’t actually see what he writes down in the pause menu or anywhere, and there were occasions where a hint popped up once but I was unable to find it again. It felt like William’s note-taking was teasing us all because having some notes to review would have really enhanced the experience in my view. Furthermore, the items you collected didn’t have little descriptions, and I had to google what some of them were. So yeah, a minor groan, but it’s surely something that is included as quite standard in the genre but is for some reason missing here.

TL;DR

• A sadly quite brief game
• The absence of notes, hints and item descriptions is disappointing

Final Score: 9/10

Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence is quite short, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. The setting, story and level design make it a memorable experience that I couldn’t put down. The difficulty is perfectly pitched as well, and I would say it is more aimed towards the hardcore end of the spectrum when it comes to adventure games. The ending alludes to a sequel and I hope that, if there is one, it’s bigger, better and more ambitious!

Thank you for checking out our Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence Switch review, thank you to DevilishGames for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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