SILT
Wonder and terror from the deep
Developer Spiral Circus
Publisher Sold Out Software
Format PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series
Origin UK
Release Early 2022
Tom Mead has always confronted his fears by illustrating them. “I’m really scared of people wearing animal suits, so the majority of my career [was drawing] that,” the artist, one half of developer Spiral Circus, tells us. “But after about ten years, I realised that I wanted to move on and do something different, and that’s when I started doing a series of watercolour paintings based on thalassophobia, the phobia of the deep sea.”
And what beautifully menacing terrors Mead has conjured in Silt. Spiral Circus’s debut game casts you as a lone diver exploring a strikingly creepy, black-and-white ocean underworld, where horrible things with far too many teeth are hellbent on puncturing your fragile body. It provides an equal mix of wonder and horror as you poke around painstakingly etched caverns, only to retreat in panic when you swim across something ghastly lurking in the depths. The ‘fast swim’ button seems barely adequate to propel you away, evoking dreams in which you can’t quite outrun the beast in hot pursuit.