Wych Elm developer Mattias Snygg discussed Silver Pines' development with us, covering everything from the game's approach to multiple endings, rotoscope animation style, and noir Metroidvania design to the challenges of making a realistic fictional town.
Silver Pines' Detective Noir World From the Ground Up
A Setting That Comes First
The foundation of Silver Pines isn't its genre but actually its world-building. Wych Elm started with the question of environment, building a fictional small town designed to feel like somewhere that genuinely exists before anything else was determined.
We asked, "A hard-boiled detective noir Metroidvania is certainly an inspired choice for the genre, and there are very few games like this out right now. What was the idea behind making a story-based, survival horror 2.5D Metroidvania?"
"We really like starting with the setting and building from there, to allow you to immerse yourself in a time and place," Snygg explained. "Then we exhaust all the ways to experience that space we've created. Even though Silver Pines is a completely fictional place, we've tried to make it feel believable, as a place that could exist somewhere."
Rather than fitting a world around Metroidvania conventions, the team did the opposite. The detective fantasy, Snygg noted, felt right at home in a game built around survival and puzzle mechanics.
The freedom of a Metroid-style structure seemed like a natural match for exploring a grounded, real-world space. "It felt exciting to us to allow the sort of freedom you experience in a Metroid-style game applied to a real-world setting," he added.
Rotoscope Animation and Early 90s Influences
Silver Pines draws its atmosphere from a very specific creative era. Snygg cited early 90s cinema and television, particularly David Lynch's Lost Highway, Jacob's Ladder, and The Ninth Gate, as the primary touchstones for the game's visual and tonal identity, alongside what he describes as a shared love of "old school video violence" among the team, a combination he noted that pairs "quite nicely with the more cerebral influences."
For a five-person studio, the cohesion of that shared preference matters significantly. "We're a small group of five people who are working on this, with a lot of similarities in taste, but also differences," Snygg said. "Working through ideas together like this is really what shapes the end result."
The decision to use rotoscope animation came directly from that period's influence, using live-action footage as a reference for characters and creatures throughout the game. Rather than the flat-color approach familiar from classic rotoscoped titles, Wych Elm uses shadows to create a sense of volume, giving Silver Pines a distinctly organic, slightly uncanny quality.
"I've wanted to try that since I first played Another World on the Amiga back in the early 90s, but instead of flat colors, use shadows to give a sense of volume," Snygg said. Another World (1991), an action-cinematic adventure, was innovative for its time thanks to rotoscoping polygons and vectors instead of traditional pixel sprites.
Rather than relying on new designs or starting from scratch, the five-person team looks toward themselves as physical references for the characters players will encounter. "It also means that we use ourselves as references for many of the characters you meet in the game," Snygg confirmed.
Storytelling Without Full Control Over Player Movement
Translating Metroidvania design into a grounded small-town setting presented challenges the team had to work through carefully, especially regarding narrative. In a genre where player order of exploration can't be fully controlled, maintaining story coherence requires a fundamentally different approach than a linear game.
Wych Elm's response was to define clearly what types of story moments could be delivered through the environment and character. A particular trap the team remained vigilant about was the pull toward creating cinematic moments that serve a larger narrative but don't fit naturally within what the player is actually doing at that point in time.
"We're always very conscious of the trap that exists where there's a tendency to create a cinematic moment that doesn't necessarily work with the mechanics or the player's own story of what they're doing, but that would serve only a larger narrative," Snygg said. Their guiding principle throughout was simple but demanding: "Ideally what you're doing as a player and the story that the game is telling you are one and the same, at all times."
Even the map system became a meaningful design challenge in this context. As Snygg put it, "finding the right balance of creating a sense of a real world, while providing just the right amount of information is quite a balancing act. Even small changes can alter your perception of the game completely."
Building Silver Pines From Real Places
The world of Silver Pines may be fictional, but much of its visual identity is rooted directly in real places. The team drew on locations across Washington state and British Columbia for reference material, while everyday surroundings from Sweden and Norway also found their way into the game's environments.
The game went through many rounds of redrafting before settling into its current form. "Silver Pines went through many redrafts where we pulled apart and reassembled the components many times over," Snygg said.
"The atmosphere, mood and style has stayed largely intact throughout the process, but the particulars changed as we worked to figure out how to integrate the puzzles, combat, survival mechanics, and so on, into an overarching framework." Notably, an early X-Files influence was present in those first drafts, which the team eventually moved away from in search of something more tonally focused.
Environment artist Carl Schytt, based in Oslo, has worked Norwegian mountain landscapes into the visual fabric of the game, while Snygg himself has contributed photographs from his summer cabin as prop references.
"This gives it a very specific character, because it's the result of both our inspirations as well as our everyday circumstances and lives," Snygg noted. The result is a setting shaped as much by the team's actual lives as by deliberate design decisions, giving it a specificity that purely invented locations rarely achieve.
Combat, Vulnerability, and What It Means to Be Red Walker
The game's protagonist is not built for combat, and that was entirely intentional. Snygg described the design philosophy behind Silver Pines' combat as being rooted in vulnerability, built to make players feel as ill-equipped as someone realistically would be if placed in the same situation. The team even used themselves as a frame of reference when calibrating that feeling.
"Red Walker is not an action hero; he is vulnerable, and he's often on the back foot," Snygg said. "A bit like how we're picturing ourselves if we were put in a similar situation. It creates tension and pressure on the player where finding two extra shotgun shells feels like you've won the lottery."
"We wanted the fighting to feel easy to understand and get into, and it plays an important role, but as a component to a larger set of things you do in our game," Snygg explained.
The combat system was designed to be easy to understand and accessible from the start, but that accessibility is in service of tension rather than comfort. That balance between approachability and genuine pressure is central to what makes the survival horror side of Silver Pines work on its own terms.
Multiple Endings and Metroidvania Philosophy
Multiple endings have long been a fixture of the survival horror genre. Silent Hill is perhaps the most well-known example, where player actions throughout the game quietly determine which of several endings plays out, ranging from hopeful to deeply unsettling.
Games like Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent have taken similar approaches, using endings as a way to reward or disturb players depending on how thoroughly they engaged with the game's systems. What ties most of these together is a common structural assumption: different playthroughs, different outcomes.
Silver Pines takes a different path entirely. Rather than asking players to replay with altered decisions, Snygg confirmed that all endings are accessible within a single save file, designed to reward thorough exploration above all else. "There are multiple endings in the game that reward a very thorough playstyle," Snygg said. "We have opted for an approach where you can complete all endings on a single save file."
The team did seriously consider a more traditional branching structure before arriving at this decision. "As such it doesn't branch depending on player choice, which we considered quite carefully at one point," Snygg noted, "but rather we want to offer the kind of experience that you can exhaust and be rewarded for your work."
He framed the two approaches as representing genuinely different philosophies and was clear about which one felt right for Silver Pines. "Two different philosophies, but I think the way we picked is more in tune with the metroidvania fundamentals of the game." Where branching narratives offer divergent outcomes based on accumulated choices, Silver Pines offers something closer to completionism: a world that fully reveals itself to players who take the time to look.
Silver Pines releases on October 8, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, and PC via Steam.
