Sound of Freedom, the 2023 pedo-hunter movie for QAnon freaks? Bad. Sound of Silence, the 1964 Simon and Garfunkel song? Much better. Songs of Silence, the 2024 fantasy TBS/autobattler? Now we’re cooking with gas!
In Songs of Silence, Lorelei has just become the queen of Ehrengard, one of the Thousand Kingdoms on the world of Sonnan. The occasion is less than happy: the previous monarchs – her parents – vacated the post because they fell defending Ehrengard from the Crusade. And Ehrengard itself was swallowed by the ghastly Silence that falls in the Crusade’s wake. And this is how our adventure begins!
Songs of Silence rocks from the intro-on. The world of Sonnan was born from the Hymn. From it came the animals, beasts, and lastly, humans. They were the Firstborn, the Old Race, the Eyeless. They worshipped the Primordial go-
…wait, humans without eyes? Yes, them’s the original version. The Hymn attracted the Celestial gods and they gave human eyes, creating the Starborn. This caused a war so big, the Eyeless split off a whole new world to retreat to, the dark Irdheim.
Though the darkness isn’t an issue for someone who doesn’t have eyes.
For lack of writing talent, I’ll say that it’s cool as fuck. Elves? Dwarves? Naw, we have eyeless humans. They came first!
This whole section is basically spoilers
The setting is really one of the coolest things about the Songs of Silence. I want to talk about it first, but I’m not sure if it’s not spoiler territory. So, just in case, if you want to discover things for yourself, don’t read anything between the spoiler warning and the next banner.
!!!SPOILER WARNING!!!
The Thousand Kingdoms of the Starborn worship the Celestial gods. They send them the Hymn of their fallen – in return, the gods bestow magical powers (and Divine Favor, the faction’s magical resource), up to and including sending the dead down to Sonnan to fight in glorious golden forms of the Luminark.
All tensions in Songs of Silence revolve around the Hymn, though it’s not explicit – it’s not like Spice in Dune. Hymn – the soul, the animating energy, the music of creation – and the attitudes to it define the three factions.
“True faith, which transcends everything, will gift you with bow and arrow, to protect your children and children’s children from here to eternity” says the flavor text for Luminark Archers. When war comes, Acolytes of Rites will summon your dead grandmother to put a golden arrow through the head of whatever threatens you.
What other default European Medieval Fantasy Human faction has such a direct connection to their gods? Castle of Heroes of Might and Magic? Humans in WarCraft? Definitely not Empire in Warhammer Fantasy.
The forms of the Celestial gods are unknown except through the intro footage. They’re humanoid, sure, but also golden, serene, and many-armed. Their messenger is a masked, four-armed snake, the ultimate unit the Thousand Kingdoms can muster – the Wordbringer.
And through it all, the touch of the Celestials is seen not just through healing spells or late-game units, but your most basic magical troops. They’re here, unblemished and golden, to fight for you – again.
Why the Celestials want the Hymn? Unknown, but it doesn’t seem like they’re eating it. Maybe they just like having all those vibrant souls around, like little buddies.
The Eyeless, however, did not like the idea of giving up their song to the Celestial Hymn. They believe that their Hymn has to return to the natural world. That’s why their magical resource is Hymn – in the form of Irdblut, it’s concentrated into a magical liquid.
Perhaps this manipulation of Hymn is what grants the Old Race their long lives. It certainly allows them to play god and create Konstructs – intelligent creatures of stone used for labor and war. Most of them are in the shape of three-legged cauldrons. Only the mightiest are humanoid – the massive Arkitekt and the destructive Woldscar. Most of the knowledge of their construction is gone.
If you want to be reductive, you can say that the Eyeless are the elves of the setting, closest to Eldar if they didn’t have to fear Slaanesh. After all, they make their weapons and armor out of stone – not exactly wraithbone, but you can see it from here.
Now, the Crusade takes in both Starborn and Old Race into its ranks. Trouble is, anyone who doesn’t want to join gets fed to Purgatories – massive, Hymn-devouring portals to the Void. They allow travel between Sonnan and Irdheim, sure, but primarily, they consume Hymn and spawn Void beasts.
The theology of the Crusade is hard to parse. They talk about the Great Wheel a lot, and believe that feeding the Hymn to the Void is good. Parsing through the unit descriptions, they may be thinking that the monsters spawned from the Void are the next step on the path of spiritual evolution.
Of course, those aren’t the only positions that exist in the world, but the last one I leave for you to discover yourself.
Fighting on two worlds
Right, let’s talk about the gameplay of Songs of Silence. It’s an auto battler, but not a pure-breed one. You still have your usual back of trick(s) – previewing the enemy army composition and arrangement and shifting your own troops around to counter it.
However, you also have cards, which are what the game uses for all sorts of hero and/or location abilities. In battles, cards can be used freely, limited only by the cooldown and, at times, whether the units they affect are still alive.
Cards heal, boost, debuff, deal AoE damage, summon temporary units and more. The king of this mountain has to be The Divine Spark that Lorelei (and, I guess, Realmbuilder class in general) has: it heals living members of any friendly unit you catch in the AoE, and has a chance of reviving dead ones. Considering that units heal slowly outside of battle, this is a big boost.
As for an example of a unit-dependent card, The Thousand Kingdoms have a card that makes all the friendly cavalry on the field instantly charge a location. Cavalry dead? The card goes inactive.
But if your bull-mounted knights are still alive, not only does the move deal charge damage, but it also lets you exert some control over what your troops do. See? Not very auto-battly, that. Several such abilities exist, and ordering all flying units to jump to a certain spot is the most common.
Except for Little Kuribo!
Those teleport attacks aren’t alpha-strikes by the way: cards are free to use, and then reuse after a cooldown, but you start the battle already on cooldown. This is very important with regards to the Retreat card. It does what you think it does, but not being able to pull out of the battle before 30s have passed means that you can’t attrit enemy armies with short, sharp fights. You have to commit.
Similarly, not being able to immediately send your best troops to the back of the enemy line means that you will have to eat some ranged and/or artillery fire.
In a very small sense, if you squint, Songs of Silence can be considered a real-time tactics game with order delays, like Armored Brigade II or Flashpoint Campaigns. And yes, I can imagine a Songs of Silence-derived Cold War game. As Mobius Front ’83 has shown us, anything is possible. We’re free from the usual constraints of the grog.
Right, back to the game that exists. Your army will consist of your hero fighting on the field (and providing all the cards) as well 3-13 other units (roughly). Notably, this isn’t Total War or Heroes: you can’t recruit a level 1 yokel and put him in command of 12 Superior Megannihilators. Heroes start being able to command 4 units – and they count as one!
You can keep spare units in the reserve, but unless you got the specific card to call in the reserves, they will not impact the battle in any way.
By fighting – especially against armies that the game considers to be really powerful – you gain experience, and leveling up raises the unit cap (though not at every level) as well as allowing you a choice of new and/or upgraded cards.
My magical empire can beat your magical empire
Here’s a fun kicker: the settlements in Songs of Silence only have one building slot per, and what you can build there depends on what buildings your heroes have access to (via leveling up). So if you’re only ever choosing Combat Cards, you’re hamstringing yourself strategically.
What’s more, you can only recruit as many units as a location has cards. So you may have the money to cram a level 10 hero’s army full of Hearthguard, but a single town is unlikely to offer more than a card of them. At most, a combination of town and special building will allow you to buy two copies of a unit.
A later-game economic trick is to recruit units into the location garrison in preparation of a hero arriving to reap the crop. However, the garrisons are much smaller than armies, so you can’t overstuff a town to make it passively unbeatable.
And that’s another smart decision, isn’t it? Your pool of heroes is limited (4 by default in Skirmish) and units won’t wander around without adult supervision. You can’t just flawlessly replace your losses in the field. Even if you take an enemy city, it will be useless for a turn unless you invest in a building to calm the locals down (everyone loves infrastructure).
So while you may have the economy to rebuy your army three-times over, you’ll still need to bring it together somehow. At the same time, any hero going on recruitment runs isn’t attacking – or defending a location (garrisons backed by hero armies are a lot tougher to crack).
Speaking of heroes faffing about: Songs of Silence will punish you for overextending. If an army spends more than half of its movement points, it assumes march formation, which means it can be ambushed by anyone – including neutral wandering mobs.
An ambushed army starts a battle stunned – and turned the other way around. Suddenly, your squishy makes and bowmen are holding the front!
Another way to get ambushed is to run into a hidden army in the woods. Any army can hide in the woods, provided they don’t spend more than half their movement points. It’s like ambushes in Total War, but a lot more satisfying.
Now, heroes have ways to mitigate such dangers. Cards like War Camp allow you (provided you have the money) to move full HP, return to combat formation, and heal. Maybe even gives you a smidge of power, too. Oh, and your troops regenerate as long as you don’t move.
As for hostile woodland, heroes may get cards that buff armies with a longer sight range as well as the ability to spot ambushes. It also boosts their power a little, so you’re getting something out of the buff even if you’re not running into any trouble.
Of course, if you don’t have those abilities, play slow!
I’m going to indulge myself
But wait, there are even more reasons to run the turn counter into the 50s. While certain scenario missions may have turn limits, the scenarios themselves often don’t. So you’re free to explore the map, hunting for whatever. Fantasy General II punished such idleness by depleting the treasure in un-looted locations as time goes by, but no such limitations exist in Songs of Silence.
And while artifacts and weird units (Songs of Silence has almost as many neutral units as the three factions combined) you hire won’t carry over between the missions, the experience and lore will. Finding weird locations (marked by a sort of glittery puddle) can bring you resources and other goodies. Some may count towards game achievements, most of which serve to unlock more stuff for skirmish.
And then there are the sidequests. Optional to the point you may have no idea that they’re even there, you may meet and befriend neutral characters that may have storylines extending through multiple scenarios. And when that friendship pays off, it can have major impact on your firepower.
I think I already impressed the importance of having a but single extra hero can have.
I am tempted to say that the maps maybe too big, but that’s because I tend to indulge in exploration while also playing the game on a tight schedule before the release. So spending hours making any last shred of fog of war go away on a map got old. For people with more relaxed schedules, that shouldn’t be an issue.
Now, while we’re on gameplay: the factions in a less-spoilery light! The Thousand Kingdoms represent the majority of Starborn humans in the game – you’re going to get to know them really well in the campaign.
They’re very straightforward to play: input money, get troops. Easy. Simple. They’re heavy on bull-riding cavalry and that is supposed to offset lack of really impressive infantry or huge monsters.
Probably the only real downside of The Thousand Kingdoms is that the Landwehr, their auto-spawning garrison unit, is somewhat lackluster.
In comparison, the Old Race feel fucked. They don’t recruit units like normal people. Most of their infantry are bought come from Civilians that are then upgraded to Warriors. That’s spending 130 gold to get a basic infantry unit when the Starborn are getting Hearthguard for 50 a pop. Warriors are supposed to be stone-armored elven badasses, but they’re not 2,5-units-of-Hearthguard good.
Plus, they’re the only slow basic infantry. And since the speed of army movement depends on their slowest unit, they immediately slow down your army.
To get more advanced infantry, you have to upgrade warriors, which is an even further investment. In case of Garants, the monster-slaying glass cannons, that investment didn’t pay-off once. In campaign and out of it, starting with Warriors is a pain.
Their other unit variety is Konstructs, which are mostly three-legged stone cauldrons. Those are ugly, but effective. The highest classes are monstrous humanoids, absolute beat sticks that are also cool artifacts from the times long gone.
The Old Race lacks The Divine Spark, but their AoE powers often combo with their healing/boosting circle card, making it detonate with the same effect.
Also, the Old Race has to connect their buildings into a network (for transporting Hymn, their magical resource). This means that your expansion is slower: basically only locations that are close to your existing locations will join the network. Bypass the enemy frontier to grab something in their depth, and congrats, you have a useless town.
Meanwhile, the Crusade gives no shit, just like you would expect from a faction that has a pulsing wound in reality for a capital. It’s a movable capital as well, since Purgatories don’t grow by themselves – they need to eat other towns.
They level up like heroes (regular towns just upgrade their level on a short, set upgrade path), so you can even customize YOUR Purgatory. The ruins left after it snacks on a location promptly become monster dens spawning angry purple ghosts.
The downside of the Purgatory is that bringing your capital with you is bringing your capital to the front line, where it can be easily taken despite having the toughest monstrosities for a garrison. The constant need to feed it also doesn’t bode well for your economy – you literally just ate your industrial heartland!
Like the Old Race, the Crusade makes their infantry mostly by upgrading Thralls. Unlike the Old Race, the Crusade has one or two ways to produce them for free and the upgrades cost in their magical resource, not gold.
The infantry, however, plays second fiddle to their array of Void Monsters, including the fairly-early Void Mares: they can jump around like flying creatures AND they heal when killing (eating) infantry. Guess what type of infantry is usually defenseless, tasty, and situated far from beatstick buddies?
The Crusade also has some of the most powerful destructive spells around to go with their destructive ranged heroes.
But that’s not all: the Songs of Silence has the largest array of neutral creatures and heroes since, I dunno, WarCraft 3? You’ll meet them in the campaign and hire them in skirmish.
Through their dwellings and heroes you’ll get access to Eyeless outcasts (Exodites to Old Race’s Eldar, if Exodites rode dogs), bandits that don’t care about how many eyes you, several varieties of monstrous plants, the local variety of Kobolds (they’re armadillo people), horrible primordial creatures and Gestalts, the purple fading ghosts that swarm wherever Silence falls.
Games are made of code, assets and love.
There’s a lot of variety to Songs of Silence, and having this sort of lavish dedication to single player campaigns is always both surprising and pleasing. I haven’t felt that good about the attention lavished on a single-player campaign experience in a multiplayer-enabled game since either StarCraft II or Fantasy General II.
But there’s another are where contemporaries are hard-pressed to match Songs of Silence, and that’s art. The Steam page calls it “Art Nuveau-inspired”. I call it lavish, opulent, brilliant, evocative, as inextricably tied to the experience as Hymn is to life.
Each unit portrait or location illustration is a tableau of the world, whether it’s an Eyeless mom commanding Eyless children, the glorious golden forms of Luminarks descending from the heavens to fight for their living kin, Kobolds appearing in the background to show that everyone’s cool with them, or the cyclopean Void monstrosities terrorizing the population.
But Songs of Silence shows more than an investment into quality art that few would expected of a studio with a history mostly of licensed mobile games. There’s also the writing: you can often tell when a game developer is ESL. Not here! 99% of dialogue is very natural, and the lore snippets in unit descriptions? Impeccable.
The only real relic of Chimera Entertainment’s German roots is a fondness for Germanic terms – Landwehr, Irdblut, and so on. And that just adds to uniqueness of the world far better than having plain old “militia” or “earthblood” would.
The devs didn’t stop there, either: fully voiced dialogue with competent voice actors. To me, neglecting the audio quality of the game is always a mark of a shit project. But Songs of Silence did more than get good voice actors: they got Hitoshi Sakimoto for the music (and included him as a bard NPC).
Look, the ways the developers and publishers of Songs of Silence decided to not cut corners, to not save money on things that aren’t directly tied to monetization, esports or other capitalist garbage that easily translates into spreadsheet data, is very endearing.
Also, it’s not a short game! The listed campaign length is 15 hours. I’m at 32 with only some skirmish experience under my belt.
Game Good
Songs of Silence had a good demo on a Steam Next Fest many moons ago. I’m glad to have played it and I have immensely enjoyed playing the finished product. I can only hope that the strong promise of other games (or DlCs) set in the world they have created is carried out with no less zeal!