Silly Polly Beast Review

Silly Polly Beast

For me, Silly Polly Beast was one of the most promising demos to come out of the most recent Steam Next Fest. The demo was positively dripping in style and promised a mix of top-down shooting and cinematic storytelling, all with a psychological horror narrative and setting. While those elements are present in the final game, the culmination of them is unfortunately very underwhelming and, at times, intensely frustrating.

Narrative

Silly Polly Beast follows a young orphan named Polly who is on the run from the police after being involved in an orchestrated burning down of her former orphanage. She begins her journey by looking for her friend Alice but meets an untimely demise after an encounter with the cops. After making a deal with the devil in return for becoming an Imp, a supernatural hellspawn, she is tasked with defeating demons infesting reality in return for her life so she can continue her journey to find Alice.

It’s fair to look at Silly Polly Beast’s narrative setup and get excited at the storytelling potential in a psychological horror setting, and I’d be lying if I said Silly Polly Beast fumbles entirely in this regard. The world of Silly Polly Beast is interesting, at one point she joins a resistance group fighting back against an entity called “The Fog”, which is left rather ambiguous but adds an air of apocalypse to the areas Polly explores. There are themes of childhood abuse, physical and sexual, and suicide, that all create a sense of dread, but Polly’s story itself never amounts to anything memorable and the mysteries it present fail to meet a middleground with the pacing of the game, ultimately losing impact by the time they reach their conclusion.

Gameplay

Where Silly Polly Beast stumbles most fatally however is in its gameplay, specifically its combat. While it is uplifted by excellent presentation, which I’ll speak more towards later, Silly Polly Beast’s combat is an unsatisfying mess. Enemy encounters take the form of top-down shooter arenas in the vein of Hotline Miami or even Metal Gear Solid, but with a survival horror inspired emphasis on limited resources and frantic reaction. When it works, it creates a genuine sense of tension akin to its influences. The problem is that it barely ever works.

Enemies are spongy and barely ever react to attacks, making them tanks that barrel towards the player without hesitation. Stealth is poorly implemented, as all enemies are alerted and react instantly as soon as the player is spotted. Polly can attack with a skateboard as a melee weapon, however enemy attacks are almost impossible to read as they all follow a pitch black, silhouette-like design language, meaning they can randomly attack mid-combo, and the game’s resource economy is so poorly optimized that I faced most encounters as a one-hit kill because the game was so stingy with health items, most of which were redundant anyways given how much damage all of the enemy types deal.

Even one of the game’s best moments, a classic survival horror inspired sequence where the player explores a single location looking for items to solve puzzles, is ruined hampered by frustrating design that randomly throws overpowered enemies with little to no resources to appropriately fight back, leading to annoying trial and error patterns of reloading and avoiding a one-hit kill. Bosses also suffer from their own design issues, but feel especially hampered by the lack of tangible impact from the player’s attacks and overall clunky controls.

Later in the game, Polly can make use of masks that allow for unique mechanics such as flying that is powered by shooting for propulsion, however these mechanics are used very sparingly amidst the vast amount of frustrating, poorly designed combat that the player will be engaging in, and could have offered more of a variety through puzzle solving to break up the monotony of the combat. Even then the main solution here would have just been tightening the feel of combat above all.

Visuals & Music

Credit does need to be given to Silly Polly Beast’s visuals. The game mixes the top-down gameplay segments with cinematic side-scrolling narrative sequences and is elevated by strong art direction, blending a dark crimson color palette with anime character designs to create something truly unique. My favorite segments in the game where when things slowed down and I was allowed to take in the excellent layered 3D and 2D art filling out each setting.

Admittedly, there are times where this hard aesthetic creates some functional frustrations, particularly in the previously mentioned sequence involving exploring a singular building, where the player is forced to explore the same rooms multiple times and at times there are items required for progression that blend too closely with the environment to the point that it took me delicately tip-toing around them awaiting a prompt before I realized I could interact with them. One boss also incorporates a very thin red platform held above a bottomless pit that results in an instant death if the player falls from it, however much of the arena is coated in this same shade of red making it very difficult to navigate, which resulted in more than a few cheap deaths for what would have otherwise been a rather engaging boss.

Finally, Silly Polly Beast does include some rather excellent music, a mix of industrial and heavy metal with some other electronic pieces mixed in. The music and visuals help create a dreary and intense atmosphere that does most of the heavy lifting even in the game’s weaker moments.

Verdict

While its visuals and music are superb and the narrative has some good ideas, Silly Polly Beast is heavily burdened by clunky, unresponsive combat that drags down what otherwise could have been a unique and interesting psychological survival horror game.