Wych Elm Co-Founder on Creating the Survival Horror Metroidvania Silver Pines

Introduction

Hi, I'm Linus, and I'm the designer of the upcoming horror Metroidvania Silver Pines, being developed by Wych Elm. We're a five-person studio working remotely from Sweden and Norway. The team has previously worked in key roles on games like Helldivers 2, The Darkness, and Yoku's Island Express.

Silver Pines Idea

The original seed for the idea came about in 2021 when Mattias (Snygg) and I met up to discuss what project to do next. At the time, I was living next door to Skogskyrkogården (The Forest Graveyard), an absolutely massive graveyard and park in Stockholm, and it ended up being a nice, serene place to talk about projects.

We were both in the mood for something darker and more grounded (coming out of Helldivers and Yoku's) and, at the same time, really interested in exploring a kind of mood that was frequently seen in thrillers from the '90s. The '90s hadn't really come back in force yet at that point, and we were feeling very inspired by '90s cinema and TV shows (8MM, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Jacob's Ladder).

As for the setting, there's a certain mood in the cinematic way American small towns can be depicted that just makes them work so well for a thriller with an entire world and cast condensed into the limits of a small town.

Inspiration

We've taken a lot of gameplay inspiration from the survival horror giants of the early PlayStation days, which felt like a golden age for the genre: Resident Evil 1, 2 & 3 and Silent Hill. You'll find a lot of the slow, methodical gameplay, resource management, and tension-building dread from those titles present in Silver Pines.

But where the modern installments of those series often lean further into action and spectacle, we're deliberately staying grounded. We try to build tension by extracting as much immersion as we can from every action. Even something as simple as reloading your gun becomes tense when you have to put each bullet into the revolver chamber, especially when a creature is coming at you.

The game offers a very open world with a (generally) nonlinear structure. It's definitely a tricky beast. Some titles go for auto-balancing solutions, but we want to reward players who pay attention and explore thoroughly, allowing them to become more powerful that way.

Luckily, it often balances itself out. We've found that players who get really stacked tend to become less cautious with their resources, burn through them faster, and eventually end up back in saving mode.

Story of the Game

The protagonist wakes up in a haze and, with a dreamlike acceptance, just follows the story forward, unsure of what's going on. The player is left in that same state during the early game. Because of how the story works, we wanted to make sure players were able to quickly understand the fantasy of the setting. I think most people will see the interior of the initial diner and immediately get a feel for what kind of world they're stepping into.

The rest came very naturally. We worked from references of real places. That's been a guiding star throughout development: places you understand and believe in. For navigation, we've tried to work firmly around the idea of "if you can see it, you can go there," and because of how the world is layered, that's led to a huge number of playable areas.

Silver Pines isn't so much a role-playing game as it is a detective story where you try to piece together what's going on. The narrative blends a grounded story with a more abstract drama, and much of it is left for the player to piece together and interpret. It's a demanding story, but one we hope players will appreciate, one that opens with a very simple premise: "Find Eddie Velvet."

The Art Style

The art comes in two forms, I guess: character art and world art.

The character art uses an old-school method called rotoscoping, where animations are captured on film and then drawn over frame by frame. You'll find this style in a lot of things from the '80s, games like Another World and films like Fire & Ice. The benefit of this method is that you get a very unique and realistic look, where things like cloth and hair movement are naturally depicted.

The downside is that it's incredibly labor-intensive, and I think Mattias has lost more than a little sanity putting it together. He frequently has had to don different costumes, often homemade, sometimes elaborate clothes he's bought or crafted, occasionally walking around on his knees with toilet paper hanging off him. And the rest of us have also had to step in and model the entire team, and some of our friends appear as character models in the game.

The world art is achieved through a lot of photo textures captured by our world artist, Calle Schytt Winberg, who then modifies and paints over them before bringing them into the game. In-engine, this renders a lot of 2D sprites in a 3D simulation, creating a strong sense of depth.

Conclusion

Solving how to navigate a believable town in a side scroller was a challenge. Most games just cut a town in half and have you walk on a line, but we didn't want that. Early on, we were working with a lot of verticality and a game world stacked on itself, similar to what we did in Yoku's Island Express. But it just wasn't believable, and in a game without double jumps or freeze rays, it wasn't all that fun either.

Eventually, we started exploring traversal that moved into and out of scenes, something that, at least for me, has always been notorious for not working well in old-school games. After a lot of messing around, we found what we believe was the fix: making sure the game always shows where you're heading. A visual connection to your destination always exists, which really helps your brain translate the 2D spaces into a believable 3D world.

I hope players enjoy the exploration and tension of Silver Pines. If you're interested in the game, the best way to follow and support us is by wishlisting it on Steam. A demo will be out on June 1st, and you can follow us on X for more frequent updates.

Linus Larsson, Co-Founder of Wych Elm Games

Interview conducted by Emma Collins