Silent Debuggers is one of the most unexpected and unusual games I’ve found on the Turbografx-16. It’s a sci-fi dungeon crawler disguised as a first person shooter. To anyone familiar with the platform that should sound pretty ambitious for the hardware. Unfortunately it isn’t half as cool as it is on paper. There’s a reason almost no one has heard of Silent Debuggers, and it isn’t a good one. Let’s dive in and take a look at this off-beat anime adventure.
One thing Silent Debuggers does have going for it is its presentation. From the opening scene I was blown away with the amount of work the artists put into it. The game starts with some backstory describing a future in which Earth has been destroyed by two warring nations, and most of mankind has now taken to outer space. You play the role of a debugger team with both you and a redhead guy named Leon. What is a debugger you may ask? They’re sort of like futuristic mercenaries for hire. The game begins as you’re tasked with infiltrating a space station but learn it’s been overrun by monsters. It’s up to you to defeat all the monsters before the self destruct sequence runs out.
There’s a surprising amount of dialogue in this game considering it’s not an RPG. Unfortunately Silent Debuggers suffers from an absolutely horrendous translation. It’s laughably bad at times, but it’s not completely unexpected. It’s sort of the platform norm. Either way it’s tough to knock it because the awkward never actually gets in the way of you playing, and it’s mostly story elements that suffer. There are however some pretty classic lines such as ‘be my buddy’ and ‘debuggers do the dirty work and I love it!’
As I’ve already touched upon, Silent Debuggers is a first person dungeon crawler/shooter hybrid of sorts. You view the action from a first person perspective (even behind the character’s visor which is something we wouldn’t see again until Metroid Prime). This isn’t just for looks; the developers incorporated the motion detector into the corners of your view which is a pretty cool touch if you ask me. These flash red and beep when an enemy is nearby. This makes the game significantly more user friendly than it might otherwise have been. In this game you wander the corridors of the space station tracking down and dispatching all monsters. You have a life bar (or battery as it’s called here) and when it runs out it’s game over.
With the way Silent Debuggers is set up you’d expect that you would need to take your time and be precise while exploring the space station. Unfortunately that’s not an option. The game throws a time limit at you soon into the adventure, and you basically ahve around one hundred real life minutes to complete it. It doesn’t help that each floor of the space station is set up like a maze. You have a map at the bottom of the screen to help guide you, but you can’t see walls/doors or even monsters. You can just see your position on the square map. It’s a life saver for sure, but a few quality of life enhancements could really bring Silent Debuggers up to snuff.
When I say that this game is a first person shooter I’m using the term pretty loosely. While you do view the action from that perspective you cannot freely move around. You can either walk forwards, backwards, or turn left/right. There’s no in between thanks to the grid set up, and pressing up or down moves a full block in that direction. It feels like the dungeons from the original Phantasy Star for anyone who has played that game. Enemies only appear on your four sides, and sometimes you’ll need to turn in order to face them. It’s surprisingly functional even today. I just wish you could aim your on-screen cursor because it’s static. Some enemies can move out of your aim.
For such an old game there are some pretty advanced features in place here. There are six different weapons, and you can choose two to use at once. These have limited ammunition but you can return to the armory to replenish ammunition. There’s also a specific room in which you can recharge your batteries which is lucky considering the energy meter for these is basically your life bar. What’s interesting is that you can also use this power to warp around to different areas of the floor you’re currently on. You need a particular item for this, but you get it pretty early on into the adventure.
By now I’m sure you’re thinking that Silent Debuggers sounds like a great game. I admit, on paper it should be a lot of fun to play. Unfortunately it just isn’t and this is because it’s frustrating. For one thing the corridors all look the same. You have letters which signify different areas of each floor, but unless you’re just passing through the door marked with it you’ll probably forget which one you’re on. Furthermore it’s frustrating that you can be attacked by multiple monsters from different sides at the same time. Finally, the time limits sap away quite a bit of the fun. You have an overarching clock ticking away constantly, but at specific intervals areas of a stage will be destroyed within a specific number of minutes. It’s annoying.
I was really surprised at just how good this game looks. The environments have a lot more detail than you would expect from your typical Turbografx-16 title. What’s more is that everything is crazy colorful, and as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing wrong with that. The monster designs are very unique as they sort of hover and without legs or feet. They stand out great against the drab backgrounds. The behind the visor view, as I mentioned earlier, is pretty inspired for something released back in the 1990s. My only complaint is that there isn’t enough frames of animation when moving about the environment. Nothing scales particularly well here. The soundtrack is action packed and really catchy. I like the music a lot and it blends well with the anime motif.
Silent Debuggers is one of those retro games that feels like a chore to play. I can appreciate how much effort went into the design process, and in many ways it’s ahead of its time. This feels like a game that would have been more at home on the Sega Saturn or Sony PlayStation, but with 3D graphics of course. I just wish the frustrating elements such as aiming as well as the time limits were either improved or replaced completely. Silent Debuggers is impressive, but it just isn’t that much fun.
