Silver Pines Reviews Hit 87 on OpenCritic — the Little Horror Metroidvania Outscoring October's Big Swings

LAS VEGAS — Here's your October sleeper alert, because apparently we needed one more game fighting for our time. Silver Pines dropped yesterday — October 8, on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and the Nintendo Switch 2 — and the review scores are the kind you do a double take at. Particle.news reports the game is sitting at an 87 top-critic average on OpenCritic and a 91 Universal score on Metacritic from early reviews, per their roundup of the game's launch-day reception.

Those numbers put a debut survival-horror Metroidvania from developer Wych Elm — published by Team17, the folks behind Hell Let Loose and Blasphemous 2 — in the same October conversation as the month's biggest releases. Pure Xbox notes it's reviewing exceptionally well, positioning it as one of 2026's best games, alongside Gears of War: E-Day, Ace Combat 8, and Star Wars: Galactic Racer, all of which scored highly too. So this isn't a quiet indie doing well in a vacuum. This is a genuine contender crashing the big kids' table.

The premise is pure noir fever dream. You play Red Walker, a private investigator, pulled into a half-abandoned American town to figure out what happened to musician Eddie Velvet. What follows, according to the critics, is less a detective story and more a descent — part Metroidvania exploration, part survival horror, part something nobody's quite got a word for yet.

"a masterpiece"— CGMagazine, 10/10

Let's talk about the scores, because they're doing a lot of work here. CGMagazine went all the way — a full 10/10, and as the review itself wrote, Silver Pines is "a masterpiece," with praise stacked up for the animation, the mystery, and the exploration. Radio Times matched it with its own 10/10. And DualShockers landed at 9.5/10 with a review that reads like a valentine to unease: the site called the game a "cerebrally divine love letter to David Lynch," name-checking Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway — and Silent Hill — as the game's spiritual family tree. That is not a comparison a critic makes lightly.

What exactly is wowing people? It's the specifics, which is always the sign a game is doing something real. Critics keep circling the same handful of things: a visual blend of 2D and 3D that gives the whole town an uncanny, layered feel; character portraits that channel the energy of Dave McKean's illustration work — which, if you've seen The Sandman covers, tells you exactly how strange and gorgeous that looks; and a mapping system built around Polaroids, which is both a mechanic and a mood in one. Add in weapon-repair systems and collectible mementos that grant gameplay buffs, and you've got a Metroidvania that treats every system as an extension of its mystery rather than a checkbox.

It's not all uninterrupted raves. DualShockers flagged that the combat takes some getting used to — the one consistent wrinkle in an otherwise glowing reception. Which, honestly, is the kind of caveat that tells you the reviewers actually played the thing instead of mainlining the vibes. A game this stylized could easily have sailed on atmosphere alone; the combat learning curve is the cost of the depth underneath it.

Worth keeping in mind: these early aggregates lean heavily on PS5 and PC reviews, per the roundup, so the 87 and 91 could shift as more outlets and platform versions file in. The Switch 2 and Xbox coverage is still coming. But the shape of the reception — multiple perfect scores, consistent praise across outlets for the same specific systems — suggests this isn't a small-sample mirage. Critics are responding to the same things for the same reasons.

And the timing couldn't be sharper. October 9 is stacked — today's releases alone include the likes of Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen (see our Friday releases roundup), and the recent Triple-i Showcase just reminded everyone how crowded the indie space is right now. Even against Order of the Sinking Star (Jonathan Blow's latest, also out now), Silver Pines is the one getting the perfect scores. A Lynchian horror Metroidvania out-reviewing October's giants is exactly the kind of story we love to see — the little game that decided to swing at the fences anyway.

So if you're staring at your backlog and wondering what deserves your weekend, consider this your permission slip. A mystery worth solving, a town worth getting lost in, and critics reaching for the word "masterpiece" two days into release. That's the good stuff.