Sylvio Trailer Unravels Some of the Mystery of its EVP-Based Gameplay

Humans have believed that the dead are trying to communicate with us for a long, long time.

Humans have believed that the dead are trying to communicate with us for a long, long time. One of the branches of that idea is Electronic Voice Phenomena ( EVP), wherein you can pick up ghostly voices in static and interference in recordings. Supposedly, if you strain your ear and fiddle around with how the recording plays, you can pick up full sentences coming from the other side. Whatever you think of this idea, finding hidden messages from ghosts is a neat idea for a game, which you can see in Niklas Swanberg’s Sylvio .

Juliette Waters has a fascination with ghost recordings, and has bought some new equipment to see what she can listen to in the world of Sylvio . In it, players can discover audio recordings and play around with them, playing them forwards, backwards, or adjusting the speed to look for hidden messages from the dead. That might be fun for a bit on its own, but players will also be doing this live while exploring a dangerous, haunted park. Using these messages and a microphone equipped with an oscillator (for detecting noises outside of hearing range), the player can figure out where to go and solve the mystery as to why the park is haunted.

I assumed that players would have to avoid danger while playing the game, but you are given a weapon to fight off the unknown creatures that haunt the wooded park. Players are armed with some sort of pneumatic shotgun which can be loaded with junk from the environment. It’s a strange idea that adds a little combat action to the game, but there’s something about firing apples at a ghost that seems at odds with the atmosphere of the game. Then again, Swanberg states that one of his inspirations is David Lynch, of Twin Peaks fame. Odd doesn’t even begin to describe Lynch’s work, so there may be some mad genius at play in the combat design.

If you’re interested in seeing where Swanberg is going with this mixture of ideas, give Sylvio a vote on Greenlightor follow the game on Facebookor Twitter. Even if I’m not sold on the combat, the ideas at work here and the gameplay teaser make this game look like a unique, interesting entry in the horror genre.