Songs of Silence

Strategy games are, historically, ugly. Not incompetent — ugly. Grid-locked spreadsheets in fantasy drag, hex maps rendered in the visual language of a tax form. The genre has spent thirty years assuming that depth buys forgiveness for everything else, and mostly it’s been right.

Songs of Silence rejects that bargain outright. Munich’s Chimera Entertainment — a studio best known for mobile work, which matters more than it sounds — has produced something that looks like Alphonse Mucha was handed a Wacom tablet and a fantasy bible. Gold filigree, flowing linework, hand-painted regions that reward stopping and looking. Twenty-two locations, each one distinct. It is, without much competition, the best-looking turn-based strategy game on Steam, and its strong critical reception (a Metacritic of 81) is powered substantially by the art.

The pitch is a hybrid. On the world map, you’re playing a compact 4X: explore, claim towns and resource nodes, recruit heroes, push back the Silence, an entropic force eating two connected worlds. When armies collide, the game drops you into a short real-time skirmish where your units advance and fight on their own. You don’t micromanage. You command — timing deployments, firing hero abilities, and playing card-based Skills and Omens to tilt a fight you’re otherwise watching.

Market-wise, it lands in the same neighborhood as Songs of Conquest and the long shadow of Heroes of Might & Magic III, but it isn’t really competing with either. Those games are about mastery. This one is about presentation, pace, and the specific pleasure of watching a battle line you assembled do its job. Whether that’s worth $29.99 depends entirely on what you want out of a strategy campaign.

• Hands-off real-time battles: Units advance and fight autonomously. Your job is deployment timing, hero abilities, and a card hand of Skills and Omens. Battles are short, legible, and tense — the single most successful idea in the game.
• Art Nouveau presentation with a Sakimoto score: Hand-drawn regions across 22 locations, backed by original music from Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy Tactics, FFXII). The audiovisual package punches several tiers above the budget.
• A campaign plus real skirmish legs: Queen Lorelai’s eight-map story, side-quests, hidden treasures, and difficulty tiers from casual to challenging — then procedurally varied skirmish maps for up to six players, free-for-all or co-op, with a Friend’s Pass that lets non-owners join your game.
• Content on paper: Three factions, 13 hero classes across 37 variations, 113 deployable units, 38+ artifacts, 150+ skills. Read that list twice; we’ll come back to how much of it a run actually engages with.

The combat is the reason to buy this

Start here, because it’s where the game is strongest and where the design has an actual argument to make.

Autoresolve has always been strategy gaming’s dirty compromise. Total War players hammer it to skip fights they don’t want. Heroes players sit through tactical battles they solved on turn one. Chimera’s move is to build a battle system that lives permanently in the space between those two failures: you can’t move individual units, but you’re not watching a dice roll either.

What you get is a commander’s-eye view. Your formation matters because you set it. Your reserve matters because you choose when to feed it in. Your hero’s cooldown matters because a well-timed Omen can break a line that was about to break yours. Fights resolve in a couple of minutes and stay readable the whole way through — no unit-selection scramble, no camera fight. The best moments are the ones where you can see the loss coming and have exactly one card that might stop it.

It works. It’s the thing this game will be remembered for, and it’s the reason the “commanding general” framing fits it so well.

It also has a ceiling. Because you can’t intervene at the unit level, a fight that starts badly usually ends badly, and the counterplay vocabulary — a handful of cards, a couple of abilities — gets memorized faster than the campaign’s length demands. By map six you’re not solving battles. You’re confirming them.

The world map is where it thins out

Here’s the honest problem: the 4X layer is a delivery mechanism for battles, not a strategy game in its own right.

The economy is shallow. Town development doesn’t branch in ways that reshape a run. Resource nodes are checkboxes. The interesting decisions in a 4X — expand or consolidate, tech or rush, take the fight that can be won or the territory that’s needed — mostly aren’t posed here, because the map rarely puts you in a position where the answer isn’t obvious. You take the next thing. You take the thing after that.

And the AI does not push back. That compounds everything else: weak opposition on the world map means the strategic layer never has to be good, because nothing is testing it. Turn up the difficulty and you get bigger enemy stacks rather than better enemy decisions — a pressure increase, not a challenge upgrade.

The campaign ends before its story does

Eight maps, and they move. Lorelai’s arc is well-voiced and cleanly told, the Silence is a legitimately good central threat, and the two-worlds structure is more imaginative than the genre’s baseline. It’s also linear and short, and the supporting faction storylines stop rather than conclude — the endings read as abrupt. It reads like content that was scoped down, not resolved.

Then there’s the unlock structure, said plainly: gating hero classes behind achievements is bad design. It converts variety — the 13 classes and 37 variations on the feature list — into a chore list. You don’t experiment your way into a new hero. You grind a condition. That’s a mobile-economy instinct showing through in a premium PC product, and it’s the one place where the studio’s background is visible in a way that doesn’t flatter it.

Multiplayer, and the pass that makes it worth trying

Six-player skirmish across procedural maps, free-for-all or co-op, plus a Friend’s Pass that lets people who don’t own the game join yours. That last part is a real, unglamorous kindness — the kind of feature that actually gets a strategy game played instead of wishlisted.

The catch is turn resolution latency. A design that queues six players’ moves before resolving them carries a structural tax that grows with the player count, and in a six-player free-for-all that tax lands on the whole mode. Co-op is the safer configuration, because the downtime feels shared instead of imposed. Play it with two or three people, not five.

The art direction isn’t a coat of paint — it’s the thesis. Everything is drawn in a cohesive Art Nouveau register: ornamental frames, sinuous linework, a palette that stays warm without going saccharine. Unit cards look like illuminated manuscript plates. The world map looks like something you’d frame. This is the rare strategy game where the UI participates in the aesthetic rather than apologizing for it — the card hand, the hero panels, the menus all belong to the same world as the battlefield.

Sakimoto’s score does the rest. It’s recognizably his — layered, melancholy, orchestrally dense — and it papers over more mechanical thinness than the design deserves.

Where the presentation strains is information density. Beauty costs legibility. Hero stats, unit counters, and army composition are readable but not fast, and in a genre where players want to parse a board at a glance, ornamentation occasionally wins a fight it shouldn’t. Hardware demands are modest by design: a 2D-forward game of this scope is light on even unremarkable machines.

Steam-exclusive, mouse-and-keyboard-native, and it feels built for that — the card hand in particular wants a cursor and quick clicks, and battles are short enough that you’re never fighting fatigue.

The Steam Deck story is more conditional than the art style suggests. Small text and dense hero panels are the usual enemies of a 7-inch screen; the game’s card-and-cursor interaction model translates to trackpad better than to sticks. Treat handheld as workable rather than ideal, and use the refund window to check it.

The platform integration that actually shapes play is the achievement system doubling as your progression unlock — Steam’s meta-layer determining in-game content availability. It’s a design choice, not a technical one, and it’s the wrong one. Cloud saves are supported. There’s no Workshop support, which stings for a game whose skirmish mode would benefit enormously from community maps.

Songs of Silence is a beautiful game with one very good idea and not enough surrounding it. The battle system earns its place in the genre conversation — Chimera found a real seam between micromanagement and autoresolve, and the commanding-general feel is authentically satisfying. The presentation is the best in the category by a wide margin, and Sakimoto’s involvement isn’t a marquee name bolted on; the music is load-bearing.

But strategy games are judged on the decisions they ask you to make, and this one asks too few. A world map that doesn’t branch, an AI that doesn’t push, a campaign that ends mid-sentence, and hero variety locked behind achievement chores — those aren’t small complaints stacked against a great foundation. They’re the core of the game, and they don’t hold.

The case for buying anyway is narrow but real: the combat and the craft. Go in expecting a gorgeous, well-scored, mechanically light campaign and there’s genuine pleasure here. Go in expecting the next great 4X and the disappointment is built into the design. For most people, that’s a pass — for presentation-first players and co-op pairs, a cautious maybe.