Rally Point: Oh phew, Songs of Silence is only pretending to be a card game

Clambering deep out of the Contemplation Pit, where reading reviews or opinions or, god help you, Takes, is forbidden, I am curious to learn how people have been categorising Songs of Silence. Its structure most resembles Songs of Conquest or Heroes of Might and/or Magic, but with little RPG emphasis or base building, and minimal tactical fighting.

Taxonomy is arbitrary and often unimportant at the end of the day, but I am very glad to firmly rule it out of one category: It’s not a bloody card game. It looks like one, sure. You do most things with cards, and characters acquire more cards over time. But even if you absolutely, utterly, and correctly loathe card-based systems, this game has none.

It’s about warlords towing armies around a strikingly pretty top down map, in turns, with gridless movement, to bash neutral armies and capture towns for XP and riches. Excellently, gold and army-boosting artifacts come as treasure trains that must be escorted home cash in, lest the enemy capture them after a fight. Units can’t be levelled, so losing them isn’t painful beyond the cost to replace them.

So how do you recruit more units? Cards. How do you upgrade your settlements, or use a hero’s powers to install a special building in them? Cards. How do you fight battles? Cards! A month ago I would have read this, and then needed the next fifteen minutes to inhale deeply enough for a suitably expressive sigh.

But it’s not a card game. Genuinely.

There’s been a trend in recent years, not just of dedicated deckbuilders (roguelike with crafting and survival and-), but of shoving card games into the square hole of things I’d otherwise enjoy. The former is fine. They’re Not My Thing. I can hate them all I want without doing any harm to an entirely valid thing that people clearly enjoy. I’ve even recommended a few, and only partly to use as a shield when calling you all terrible. The latter, despite my whingeing, is also fine and valid. It’s how we get new and weirder things.

There’s a third manifestation of The Card, though: a means to present information. I interpreted Shadow Empire’s stratagem cards as a way to represent your advisors’ proposals – as though each was a file on your desk that someone had helpfully drawn a little picture on, because that’s the kind of thing Dictator Sin would probably appreciate. Star Traders Colon Frontiers presented activities like spying and exploration as cards – each a possible outcome, which many character skills remove or replace to simulate your crew affecting events. You didn’t gather cards, and they didn’t do anything. Whether to count these as “card games” is debatable. Whether I don’t because I don’t want them to be is an even less compelling debate.

With Songs of Silence though, I’m going further: the cards are a mere affectation. With the pedantic exception of levelling up heroes (a “pick one of 3 skills” roguelike model), at no point are cards drawn, shuffled, replaced, or discarded. They are merely a UI. You could replace them with buttons or MMO action bars and the design would be identical. Marginally better, even, because the cards literally get in the way, obscuring each other from sight, with pretty illustrations that make it difficult to tell which is which. To level a hero, a card appears on the map, and you must drag it onto the hero’s model, which is quite possibly the most trivial amount of pointless labour I will ever complain about. I am devoting far, far too much attention to this fairly petty criticism, but I don’t care. Cards must be stopped.

But I enjoy Songs of Silence. It has a refreshing pace, thanks to doing away with HoMM’s building sites and constant resource hoovering. Most intriguingly though, it replaces turn-based tactics with an auto battler. “Battles run themselves with little player direction” isn’t new of course – a moment’s thought traces it as far back as the Settlers – but I’d never paid it much attention as a subgenre until SoS opened my mind somewhat to its potential.

Hostile armies run at each other and exchange tense emails until one side dies or leaves to get a life. It takes at most a few minutes of simply watching, and periodically (hnngh) dragging a card to fire off constantly-recharging spells/powers. There are none of Eagarlnia’s showstoppers, but there’s some spectacle (notably the Void faction’s many sinister orbs), and a tonne of detail as every stablad runs around autonomously, magic artillery literally throw ammunition with massive hands, and lancers penetrate targets without slowing, and leave melee to wheel around for another charge.

Some spells are disappointing, some upgrades the dull “+2 instead of +1”, and of course your anti-demon troops target one squirrel while demons eat your archers. But that’s why you examined the enemy in advance, and arranged your troops to account for their simple brains. The benefit is dropping the chore of telling everyone what to do. Big encounters don’t mean having to make 80 decisions back to back, or lose the war because you misclicked seven turns ago. Beyond periodically aiming and timing a spell, your strategising is done, and it’s time to relax and see how you did.

There’s no building to dawdle over either. Settlements grow automatically, ticking up at level thresholds if you spend material. That increases production, and sometimes utility like healing or recruitment options. Each has space for one special building, summoned by a hero with no prerequisites or research.

Armies are small, restricted to seven reserves, and recover very slowly even with healers. Units can’t be merged, and most are comprised of several little guys/ghosts/gubbinses who take damage individually, reducing their damage output proportionally. Consequently, replenishing troops is everything. But recruitment is very slow, so you’ll regularly tour your lands with heroes, or dedicate one to ferrying reinforcements. Cycling forces around is a regular task, made complicated by the importance of formations, stacking bonuses, and enemy composition.

Every unit has multiple qualities (what it is), and abilities on top (what it does) like flight, negating magic defence, or extra damage to foes with specific qualities. Some lend bonuses to similar allies: A Hearthguard is pretty weak, but three of them reinforce each other, more than doubling their strength. Add a unit and artifact that buffs their qualities (Starborn, Infantry, Guardian), and they become a significant threat.

But wait. The enemy have anti-infantry and area attackers. I should switch the hearthguards for cavalry, and space them out. But my other hero will lose movement if I saddle her with the infantry, the city’s another turn away, and if I hit him now his backup will hit back, and I could lose that artifact….

All those decisions are the meat of the game but take more work than they should, especially with so many unit types. There’s no way to tell what bonuses are affecting a unit (and morale is opaque – several powers improve morale, but I have little idea what else affects it), finding information on enemies is fiddly, some tooltips name a power but don’t explain it. There’s too much cross-referencing, not helped by all the unorthodox names (I was hours in before being sure the Firstborn were the Primordials from the very slick introduction), and the need to zoom into every town each turn to recruit and check if it can level yet.

I’m straining against my loathing of the Notifications Plague to say it, because SoS is such a welcome contrast to the current fashion of drowning the screen in UI bullshit and notifications (who gave the machines permission to badger us all the time? Why do you leap across the room to obey their corporate orders the instant they Notify you? Have some goddamn self respect). But it could really use some clear indicators over towns and in battles. Its unit panels are gorgeous and stylishly arranged, but also a swirl of icons I have to repeatedly hover over one by one. I often can’t tell units apart, or whose soldiers just died because everyone’s damage indicators are yellow.

Despite a gorgeous and rather slick introduction, the campaign is a dull story without a single memorable character. Skirmishes offer the option of playing on two maps at once, linked by portals. Some of these “purgatories” are also the capital of its most interesting faction, who move it from town to town, consuming them for economic bonuses, and summoning miniature ones in battle to turn bodies into monsters or resources. The other two are dull by comparison, with distinct rosters but nothing so dynamic.

Songs of Silence is almost fascinating. Tampering with an established design framework so much was a gamble that definitely worked, creating a pacier, less exhausting model of its own, and integrating auto battles solves some fatigue and repetition problems many strategy games with tactical combat fall into. But its excellent art and one interesting faction highlight its remaining quality of life limitations, bland story, and two relatively pedestrian rivals. This design has legs, there’s some strategy fun to be had here, and I hope a sequel or major expansion is within the studio’s reach. But I certainly don’t hope it’s on the cards.