- ESCAPE or HUNT
In Silence is a four-versus-one Survival Horror Video Game by Ravenhood Games.
Four unlucky souls have found themselves in the woods late at night after their car breaks down. And in these woods lurks a vicious creature called the Rake that will eat them alive if it catches them. The humans have two options: they can either try and fix their car so they can get out of the monster's territory, or they can unlock the armory to get their hands on some guns they can use to take the creature down.
They have to be careful though, because as vicious as this creature is, it has poor eyesight. To compensate, it tracks its prey by sound, so the humans will need to be as quiet as possible... this also includes the actual players, as the game (in its default settings) recognizes any sound coming from the human players' microphones/headsets and lets the monster hear it.
The game was released on October 16th, 2020.
In Silence contains examples of:
- Always Night: The woods are shrouded in perpetual night.
- Asymmetric Multiplayer: Four people play humans trying to fix their car or kill the monster, and one person plays the monsters who's trying to hunt and kill them. The monster can also be controlled by the computer.
- Body Horror: The Rake resembles a giant rat with bone claws where its front paws should be. It has also been gruesomely mutilated, with a torn face and a gaping toothy maw where its neck and chest should be. To complete the horror, its face is vaguely human.
- Crazy Survivalist: The former owners of the ranch that the game takes place in are posthumous examples. They apparently lived in the middle of nowhere and had a considerable cache of rifles in an armored storage container... that can only be opened with a number code, parts of which are hidden throughout the ranch, and the cache is rigged with alarms even if you open it properly.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Should the humans decide to straight up kill the Eldritch Abomination hunting them, they can raid the nearby weapons cache left by survivalists and, if they succeed, shoot it to death.
- Don't Go in the Woods: In this case, because a monster is lurking in them.
- Drama-Preserving Handicap: Rake can easily slaughter any human it runs across and the survivors are not equipped to handle it, but its eyes have been clawed by some other creature and rendered it mostly blind. This allows the humans to evade it via stealth and trick it with loud lures, but also leave them vulnerable if they happen to set off a loud noise.
- Eaten Alive: The fate of those caught by the Rake. If there's more than one human player, it will just eat its current victim's head and move on to hunt the others down.
- Eldritch Abomination: The creature is a grey-skinned monster with bladed arms, and a mouth so massive it looks like it doesn't have a jaw or front of its torso (not helped by the way that its tongue hangs out, and the lower teeth looks like exposed ribs).
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: If the human players manage to unlock the armory and get the guns inside, then the monster will quickly find itself the one being hunted down as its intended victims start fighting back.
- Jump Scare: All over the place and weaponized. Birds, unnerving Jack-in-the-boxes (in drawers and cupboards), squeaky doors, etc. all exist solely to spook the player and alert the monster to their location.
- P.O.V. Cam: All the players have this view.
- Sense-Impaired Monster: The Rake has hypersensitive hearing but poor eyesight due to damage to its eyes, and must hunt down other players on the survivors' team by sound. These traits are implemented by the game as actual gameplay mechanics; as the Rake, the player's vision is unreliably blurry, so they must track down victims through sounds that appear as blips on an in-game radar, which vary in size depending on the Rake's proximity to the source of the sound. The human players need to be quiet so that it doesn't find them.
- Ten-Second Flashlight: Exaggerated. Humans can carry flashlights, but they don't use it for anything but to temporarily blind the monster by turning it to max brightness for a second, and even that drains the battery by a fifth.
- Weakened by the Light: The Rake is mostly blind, but it can be temporarily chased off (if computer-controlled) or totally blinded (if player-controlled) by a flashlight. It's mainly to give the humans a chance to relocate and hide from the Rake if they're caught.
