Silverworld
There’s an old saying: You can’t judge an interactive novel by its box art. (That is how the saying goes, right?) That said, everything you need to know about Kyle Marquis’s Silverworld is captured in Marcelo Gallegos’s artwork.
It doesn’t illustrate any particular scene; rather, it collects a bunch of plot and setting elements in a colorful collage: some kind of crash landing, a ziggurat, prehistoric animals, a jungle lush and untamed. It’s a perfect bruit of harmonies and contrasts and color and shape; dizzying, even Escheresque, in its perspective. It’s frenetic, even overstimulating, but strangely compelling: it’s hard to look away.
It looks the way playing Silverworld feels.
In Silverworld, you play as a soldier who has traveled to steampunk Byzantium to guard a time machine. The inventor invites you to step on board for a quick trip to the dawn of existence, but a rogue god causes the machine to crash into a time that never actually happened, leaving you stranded in a world of lush savagery alongside a querulous theologian, an opportunistic merchant, and a collective of robots.
That’s when things start to get really weird.
It is always a privilege to spend time in the overgrown bizarrerie of Marquis’s imagination, and Silverworld is no exception. It’s just as dense and rich as the forests the characters venture through to find what they need to repair their broken time machine, and as it hums along through surprising turns and fast-paced action sequences, it explores issues of power, justice, and civilization.
Silverworld was the second of the eight ChoiceScript games Marquis has written to date, and it doesn’t quite rise to the brilliance of his more recent work. Pon Para and the Great Southern Labyrinth and The Book of Hungry Names are better paced and feature more complex and interesting characters. But there are already hints here of the heights to which he would rise: a dynamic world full of characters pursuing their own goals, a trio of quests that can be tackled in any order and play out somewhat differently based on the order you choose, a peculiar convergence of the erudite and the bestial.
More importantly, Silverworld is a lot of fun.