If there are any two video game genres in need of a major facelift, it’s horror games and first-person shooters. Both have gotten quite stale over the years, and while battle royales have helped pump some much-needed innovation into the FPS genre, few horror games have convinced me to try the genre again. That is, until recently.
Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire
This week, Schell Games launched its latest VR game, Silent Slayer. In it, players are tasked with de-arming traps that protect a vampire’s coffin in order to gain access to its inhabitants and slay them for the good of humankind. It’s a brilliant marriage of puzzler and horror game with the team’s trademark humor thrown in for good measure.
Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire, the newest title from veteran VR developer Schell Games, who has been behind some of the best Meta Quest games like Among Us VR and the I Expect You to Die series. As you might expect from the studio’s other titles, Silent Slayer mixes in plenty of clever puzzles with its horror-themed gameplay.
Silent Slayer is a bit like the classic board game Operation…except you’re tasked with somehow killing the patient, a supposed immortal vampire.
Silent Slayer can be thought of as the classic board game Operation with its core philosophy turned on its head. Instead of trying to perform surgery to save the patient — one mistake can kill said person — Silent Slayer tasks players with killing the patient, instead. That patient, of course, is a deadly vampire that’ll drain your blood as soon as look at you. Each level begins with a task to reassemble a shattered relic, each relic containing runes that you’ll later have to trace to bind the vampire. The first few levels’ relics are simple enough but become increasingly more difficult as the pieces get smaller and more chaotically shattered.
As you assemble the relics, you’ll be given the history of the vampire you’re about to face. The castle you visit is filled with vampires on every floor who come out every so often to feed but are capable of being slain just before they emerge.
As you might expect, the older and more formidable the vampire, the more complex and dangerous the traps will be to potential slayers. Each vampire slumbers in a stereotypical upright coffin, and each has skillfully prepared its coffin with traps that you’ll need to remove and disarm. The final blow to a vampire is, of course, a stake through the heart, but that, too, has been turned on its head a bit. You’ll need to perform quite a bit of magic to reveal the vampire’s vulnerable spot and none of these tricks can be done while making too much noise or getting too close to the vampire. One false move will end up in the player’s death.
While Schell Games could have easily just made a vampire-themed puzzle game, the company worked hard to inject a palpable sense of fear and tension into each level that’ll keep you moving as slowly and carefully as you physically can, taxing your senses and keeping your heart racing.
If I had any one complaint, it’s that replaying each level after multiple failures can be a bit annoying, as I found myself growing impatient the more I failed. It’s human nature, of course, but it also means that less skilled players might find themselves taking a few breaks and coming back to finish the game’s 4-6 hour-long campaign.
These are fully realized rooms in an ancient castle, sometimes filled with casks of alcohol, and other times you’ll be disarming traps as glowing red eyes stare at you from paintings on the walls.