The Silent Swan, a first-person mystery game with a huge Bloodborne-esque open world, is out now

If you’ve ever gazed out across a landscape of misty spires and vast machines and thought “ah, if only I could explore and savour all that without getting my head kicked in by walking skeletons every five minutes”, The Silent Swan from Basque Country, Spain-based developer Praenaris might be the game for you. Released today, it gives you a massive, gloomy map full of towering, greeny-black Gothic structures that are packed with backstory documents, but contain absolutely no enemies. The only thing separating you from all that winding, lore-drenched architecture is distance. Check out the trailer below.

Alice0 played The Silent Swan’s demo last year and was pretty keen, summarising it as “almost exhaustingly slow, but interesting” and comparing it to Kafka, Borges, Bloodborne and Dishonored.

“[Y]ou can, if you want, scale 34 floors of a spiral staircase up a spire rather than take the lift,” she wrote. “You can also run into the woods towards distant vast buildings that grow mere pixels taller as you hold W for minutes. At this point, I’ve seen no suggestion that the game rewards this in any way beyond the satisfaction of doing it. As a fan of walking simulators, I do find that freedom quite satisfying. But the pace and distance can get frustrating in a game that needs you to complete objectives to advance the plot.”

The plot in question sees your character, Mirov, searching for his wife Selene in the mysterious Land Beyond The Walls, after 17 years of absence. “Throughout the game Mirov will gradually near the bed of the calamity that struck his home, and get closer to the truths he is determined to unearth, while a strange uneasiness warns him he best walk back,” reads the blurb. “The Silent Swan is the story of two cities: Urzhum and Sernur; of two conflicts: past and future; and of two people; Selene and Mirov.”

I can’t say I’m fond of missing wife stories in games, particularly when the trailers feature mournful trickly piano and soulful strings, but the setting is appetising – Yharnam and Dunwall aside, it reminds me a little of the Shadow of the Colossus. There are a few puzzles to solve, like finding fuses for an elevator, but this isn’t The Talos Principle, by any means. Here’s the Steam link, and here’s our list of the best open world games.