I received a key to play Silverpine Creek, a microphone sensitive, first person, survival horror game developed and published by indie dev Phantom Toast. The game was released on Steam March 25, 2025 and costs $6.99 USD.

Here’s the backstory. Years ago, a woman named Korana was suspected of being a witch and the people in her village decided to execute her via a burning ritual. Something went wrong and Korana escaped death, but she remained in the village, killing everyone she found.

In the present day, four people decide it’s a good idea to go camping in the now abandoned village, and meet the fate you’d expect. An investigator sent to uncover what happened to them also disappears. Your job in the game is to take over the investigation, find the missing campers, and complete the ritual to finally kill the witch.

 


GAMEPLAY


In order to locate the campers and ritual items, you’ll need to spend a lot of time exploring the sprawling village. I didn’t mind this at all - there are lots of eerie things around like a less than holy church, cornfields with some interesting scarecrows, and a river I didn’t really want to go near because it looked like bad things lived in it.

While exploring, you need to keep a constant eye out for Korana. She hunts by sound so it’s critical to be as silent as possible. Searching the many village buildings is a must, but be warned - most are very efficient audio booby traps. Outside are animals that become annoyingly vocal when you approach, and everywhere are jumpscares designed to elicit an audible reaction. The game is meant to be played with a mic and will pick up any gasps, screams, heavy breathing or other noises you make. You could mute yourself, but what’s the fun in that?  

You’ve got one tool in the game - a camcorder. You use this to take photographs of each of the missing campers to prove you’ve found them. It's flash also serves the more interesting and extremely important function of witch deterrent as the light causes her to temporarily evaporate.

THE GOOD

I spent a good chunk of the early game (silently) complaining about a slow pace which I’ll get into later. But over time the game did a great job of upping the difficulty and making things more interesting. After you find a few of the ritual items, day changes into night making exploration and witch scouting much harder. Korana also starts to appear more frequently and even brings some witch friends along to help her hunt.

With more progression, she starts hunting by air as well as ground, requiring you to hide indoors. This should be easy given the many structures around, but a fog rolls in. It ebbs and flows through every corner of the village, indoors and out. Getting caught in it for too long causes a terrible clattering noise which draws Korana. Eventually, the fog also knocks you down, leaving you temporarily immobile and completely vulnerable. 

At this point I had a real sense that things were going down the crapper and it was time to wrap it up. I found the final ritual item, the skies turned red, and I saw the pyre light at the end of the tunnel, but again the game upped the difficulty. I won’t give anything away, but let’s just say you’ll need to wield your camcorder like a seasoned paparazzi.   

The village feels abandoned and scary, and other than the late game red skies has a bleak, monotone look that contributes to the feeling of emptiness. While some of the buildings have identical interiors, a lot of detail throughout made exploration fun. I didn’t love the VHS analog look of the screen (complete with static and moving horizontal lines) but it did add to the mood. What I did love were the various weather effects and the environmental changes that came with progression. The audio was good with lots of realistic sound effects produced when banging into furniture inside homes and some hair-raising screams from Korana.  

I really enjoyed the search for the ritual items. Some are hidden in plain sight, some require you to find prerequisite items, and for one you’ll need to do some resource gathering and crafting of sorts. You’ll also have several puzzles to solve. These aren’t particularly challenging, but are interesting. You can’t go wrong with a puzzle that involves exploding chickens.  

THE BAD


About the slow pace. Korana didn’t appear often early in the game, even when I was making noise, and you can only hold one ritual item at a time. It felt like I was trudging back and forth from all corners of the village to the peripherally located execution site with nothing particularly exciting happening. This inventory limit makes sense as a big part of the game is the stress that comes with avoiding the witch while moving around, and to be fair this was an early game issue only, but it was repetitive and annoying.   

The jumpscares could have made all that walking more interesting especially given the connected mic, but while I jumped at some none caused me to make an audible reaction. Part of this is because they occurred so frequently that they lost their impact. In addition, some locations in the village always triggered a scare and other spots were marked with a glow on the ground so I knew when to expect many of them.

THE UGLY


To find everything you need, you really have to explore all corners of the village. Unfortunately I got physically stuck in some tight spots between walls, rocks and other structures. I was able to get out of most of these situations with a combination of movements and persistence, but in one case I got wedged in some rocks, could not get myself free, and was forced to quit the game.  

Which brings me to the biggest issue I had. There’s no way to save your progress. If you need to close the game for whatever reason, you’re forced to start again from the beginning when you log back in.  

THE VERDICT


I found my first playthrough the most enjoyable. While subsequent runs were definitely still entertaining, they lacked the same level of shock factor and unpredictability. There’s level randomization which should keep it interesting, but items were always in the same one or two spots and the jumpscares locations didn’t seem to vary at all. I kept it interesting by using what I learned to change my strategy and the order in which I did things. 

My first attempt took about 2 hours. I was able to speed through all the rest in about 1 hour, and after several tries was finally successful. Was it a grind? Yes. But I really, really wanted to burn that witch and was driven to keep playing. The reward I felt in the end made the effort worth it.