The Slaughtering Grounds: The Silent Protagonist Review
Despite repeat requests, Digital Homicide refused to provide Silent Protagonist with an advance review copy of The Slaughtering Grounds. Given Digital Homicide’s tendency to sue those whose coverage they disagree with, Silent Protagonist has decided that three years later, now is a perfectly good time to provide positive coverage.
Released way back in 2014, The Slaughtering Grounds is an absolute success — so much so that it is a contender for the best game of 2017. Yes, 2017 is still young and we have over ten months to see a better game release this year, but I can unreservedly tell you that this isn’t going to happen. How can I be so certain? As you well know, Silent Protagonist is a professional publication that cannot be bought. However, in offering our services to you, our dear reader, free of charge, Silent Protagonist does not have $10 million in the likely event that Digital Homicide decides to sue us for a negative review. We will also say here and now, on record, that not only is The Slaughtering Grounds 2017’s game of the year, it is the best game ever.
If you think that this is high praise for a game that I have never played, you would be correct. I deliberately opted out of playing The Slaughtering Grounds, because I would feel the need to provide an honest assessment, and if the game is as shit as it is supposed to be I’d rather not be $10 million in debt (ten fucking million dollars. Really?).
To try and give an informed opinion I turned to Metacritic, but the game is so successful that critics largely haven’t reviewed it (any hint that the game has been removed at the behest of Digital Homicide will get us sued, so that is categorically not the case). However, 17 user reviews exist on the site: 2 of which give it a perfect 10; while the remainder give a score of 0 because Metacritic doesn’t know how to list a score of infinity out of ten.
After turning to Wikipedia, however, I can tell you that The Slaughtering Grounds is a first person shooter / survival horror hybrid. The game offers amazing controls, stunning graphics, and a variety of glitches that add a sense of wonder to the game. The music loops are short, providing bite-sized ear worms for your listening pleasure. And in a genius masterstroke, the textures and models were not developed by Digital Homicide, enabling them to invest in the important things, like attempting to sue critics who don’t like their games.
The Slaughtering Grounds is nothing short of a must-play, which makes the game’s unavailability all the more disappointing. You can make your displeasure about missing out on such an iconic experience known to Valve, who “stopped doing business with Digital Homicide for being hostile to Steam customers.”
∞/10
A note about our review scores: Normally we play and evaluate the almost innumerable technical and narrative elements of a game, trying to distill those factors into a final figure that represents the entirety of our thoughts and feelings on the title. We then look up the user average on Metacritic, crowdsourcing a much wider audience that may have insights or loves or grudges that in no way are related to the written portion of our review, and use that number as our final score. As Silent Protagonist does not want to be sued, or even dragged through the courts in what will eventually be an unsuccessful lawsuit for $10 million in damages, we awarded it the highest score possible.
