Not once did I come across an obstacle with a confusing solution, and the only times I got stuck at all were when I forgot to use the game’s time travel mechanic. Puzzles here are simple and clear, with a limited inventory to use on logical barriers to progress. Plenty of adventure games have puzzles that require bewildering arrays of items assembled in sequences that only make sense to those who coded them, but that’s not the case in The Silent Age. The challenges that face Joe aren’t the toughest either, but that’s more of a blessing than a simple-minded protagonist. You really have to keep in mind that you’re the driving force here, not him, and start to brush off some of his dimmer observations.

I wish I could say it was refreshing to have such an obvious everyman dealing with temporal conundrums but really his dopey ways start to grate after just a few chapters. He picks up on absolutely no nuance, he cracks wise at the wrong things, and barely has the gumption to stand up to the crazy events that unfold around him. Joe is going to need a lot of help, because he’s probably one of the dumbest adventure protagonists I’ve ever seen. You’ll meet a few funky characters along the way, and find plenty of items to open doors, cross pits, and power things up with. It’s up to you to help him puzzle his way to some answers, following the story as it careens between the grooves of the 70s and the desolation of Obama’s America. A dying man leaves him cryptic instructions and a gizmo that propels him to 2012, a barren hellscape of abandoned cities and moldering skeletons. You play Joe, a simple janitor at looming megacorp Archon in the year 1972. It’s a very straight-forward adventure with straight-forward puzzles and a just-clever-enough story, It may err on the side of simplicity, but there’s enough going on to keep it from getting boring.

The Silent Age certainly doesn’t make it too complex, and in fact doesn’t make anything about itself too complex at all. It’s hard to do right, making it complex enough to be interesting but without completely borking causality between events. I’ve reached a point where I dread seeing time travel show up in games.

The silent age characters