The Moment of Silence is a game that has some solid ideas but is held back by sloppy game design.

The plot is a decent but run-on-the-mill conspiracy story loosely inspired by Orwille. Whatever plot twists it has are textbook. There is nothing special or groundbreaking about it except the world-building, used as commentary on the fear of surveillance of private communication. This aspect is actually kind of culturally relevant and even somewhat thought-provoking due to the information age we currently live in. The pacing is good, first letting you to know the area Peter Wright, the protagonist, lives in, and getting more tense and action-packed later on.

Puzzles are mostly solid, but some of them rely on typical cartoony adventure game logic (you put a live bird inside your pockets on two occasions) which clashes with the tone of the game. Furthermore, I felt that some of the puzzles were insufficiently hinted/signposted, leaving me confused about what my goals were. As the gameplay makes the game tedious to play (I'll get to that soon), I resorted to using hints a couple of times.

The dialogue trees. Oh the dialogue trees. Each time you meet a new character, you are faced with a laundry list of topics to click through. The dialogue is at times moderately witty but is also extremely long-winded. Once you've exhausted a topic and must backtrack in the dialogue tree, you have to select some variation of "There is something else I want to ask about", which will quickly become a phrase you will never again want to hear in your life. As a result, the conversations become utterly unbelievable and repetitive. The saving grace is that conversation options that have not been selected yet are highlighted, but on the other hand this is also a constant reminder of the checklist-of-questions nature of the discussions. Some of the NPCs are colourful enough, but fail to have any great chemistry with the protagonist due to his nature.

The main character has no personality. He's a very generic Anybody who randomly decides to embark on an adventure because the plot requires him to. You know, in my teens I drew a parody comic that poked fun at thriller/mystery plots, and one of the side characters I came up with was a guy who acted like a stereotypical point and click adventure game hero. He'd unnecessarily voice his thoughts aloud in a deadpan way that told nothing about himself, and engage in conversations in an awkward start-stop fashion as if he was navigating a dialogue tree. Peter Wright is exactly like that. Any traits he possesses are the bare minimum required: a sort-of-negative-opinion of the villainous forces or other obvious but shallow ones (e.g. basic sarcasm). He doesn't go through any meaningful change. And this is not helped by the monotonous performance of his voice actor. At one point you get to briefly control Mrs. Oswald, whose husband is kidnapped in the intro, and I thought she would have been a much better main character with a stronger motivation.

Then there's the backtracking. The game features large, beautifully rendered backgrounds, yes, but traversing through the long corridors and wide plazas quickly becomes tedious. Near the end of the game you have to go back and forth through a series of tunnels just to fetch a single item. Exits of screens are often unobvious and the camera angles sometimes change confusingly. Have the developers ever heard of the 180 degree rule? Combine these with the fact that the path-finding of this game is notoriously terrible - Wright will from time to time run several meters in the opposite direction before going where he was supposed to - and you will soon long for any other control scheme. Luckily, pressing and holding H reveals hotspots and exits, which reduces the pixelhunting.

None of these are absolutely game-breaking, but these do severely bring down a game that isn't really outstanding in the first place.