A vanished musician whose disappearance is the game's central case. 'Find Eddie Velvet' is the official tagline of the store page, and the demo sends Walker after his dossier, his motel suite and, eventually, a performance at the Rabbit Hole Bar.

Does the Silver Pines story branch based on your choices?

No. The developers confirmed multiple endings that reward a thorough playstyle, but they do not branch on player choice, and every ending can be completed on a single save file.

What Is Silver Pines About? Story, Premise and Mystery

Q: What is Silver Pines about?

It is about private investigator Red Walker, who arrives in a half-abandoned small town to look for a missing musician named Eddie Velvet. A mysterious phone call hands him the case, the investigation uncovers the town's dark past, and Walker slips into a nightmarish descent beyond his control.

Q: Who is Red Walker?

The playable character: a private detective, not an action hero. He wakes in an empty diner with no memory of how he got there, and the developers describe him as vulnerable and often on the back foot.

Q: Where is Silver Pines set?

In a small American town that is half-abandoned and half-forgotten. Official material only says 'small town America', while coverage of the game places it in Washington state; one outlet describes it as midwestern. The residents have largely left by ferry under an evacuation order.

What is Silver Pines about?

Silver Pines is about private detective Red Walker, who arrives in a half-abandoned small town to investigate the disappearance of a musician named Eddie Velvet. A mysterious phone call hands him the case in three words — find Eddie Velvet — and the investigation uncovers the town’s dark past and drags Walker into a nightmarish descent he cannot control.

That is the official premise, and it is phrased almost identically across the store page, the official site and Team17’s announcement: “Private investigator Red Walker finds himself in Silver Pines, a place half-abandoned, half-forgotten, in the middle of nowhere on a job to track down Eddie Velvet. A musician who has vanished. As the case begins to reveal a dark past, Walker soon slips into a strange and nightmarish descent beyond his control.”

Official source: Silver Pines on Steam

The longer synopsis the studio supplied to press fills in how the job arrives: a mysterious phone call makes his next move clear, “Find Eddie Velvet”. Gematsu’s launch report quotes that version in full, and it matches the store page line for line.

The frame around that premise is a 2.5D side-scrolling survival horror metroidvania from Wych Elm, a five-person Swedish studio, published by Team17 and launched on 8 October 2026 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and Switch 2. Puzzles, scarce resources and locked doors are the machinery; the case against the town is the point. Store tags list it as noir, mystery, story rich and psychological horror, and the marketing line the studio keeps returning to is a simple directive: Find Eddie Velvet.

Everything below about playable story beats comes from the free demo and from official statements, so nothing here leans on guesses about scenes nobody outside the studio has written about.

Who is Red Walker?

Red Walker is the private investigator you play, a man in a heavy coat who wakes up in an empty diner with no memory of how he got there. CGMagazine’s hands-on describes him as starting with nothing but the knowledge that he has to find Eddie Velvet, and the answers to the mystery are revealed to Walker and the player at the same time.

The developers are explicit that he is not a power fantasy. Co-founder Mattias Snygg put it this way: “Red Walker is not an action hero; he is vulnerable, and he’s often on the back foot.” The studio account on Steam made the same point about the shooting: “Walker isn’t an action hero, missing shots and having to commit to your aim are part of what creates that tension.” That design intent runs all the way through the combat system, where there is no crosshair and every swing locks you in place.

IGN’s preview adds the narrative twist that explains the amnesia: players solve the mystery “through the eyes of an unreliable narrator”. Linus Larsson, the studio’s co-founder, described the opening as a protagonist who “wakes up in a haze and, with a dreamlike acceptance, just follows the story forward, unsure of what’s going on” — and added that the player is left in that same state during the early game. Confusion at hour one is the design, not a failure of the tutorial.

Who is Eddie Velvet?

Eddie Velvet is a musician who has vanished, and his disappearance is the case that starts the game. He is the reason Walker is in town, the reason the store page leads with the line Find Eddie Velvet, and the thread the demo keeps pulling until it stops.

He is never someone you talk the case through with. What you get instead is paperwork and places: an Eddie Velvet dossier you carry through the demo, the keyed suite at the Crimson Bear Motel where a revolver sits waiting, and a late sequence in which he appears on stage at the Rabbit Hole Bar and performs. Our Crimson Bear Motel page maps out where those pieces sit inside the demo.

What is not settled is everything about him as a musician: his genre, his band, the titles of his songs and why he was in Silver Pines at all. None of that has been published in any official material, so treat fan theories about his lyrics as theories.

Where is Silver Pines set?

Silver Pines is set in a small American town that is half-abandoned and half-forgotten, emptied out by an evacuation order that most residents obeyed by ferry. Rain falls across much of the playable section, the streets are mostly silent, and the lighthouse on the coast is visible long before you can get anywhere near it.

The exact state is the one detail the sources disagree about. Official copy says only “small town America”. Gematsu places the town in Washington, and Shacknews describes a deserted Pacific Northwest setting. One demo review describes it as midwestern instead. The safe reading is the official one: a small American town, Pacific Northwest in feel, with the single-state claim attributed to the outlets that made it.

Story location	What it does in the plot
The diner	Where Walker wakes up; the payphone outside delivers the job
Town streets	The sheriff explains the evacuation order
Garth’s Pharmacy and Rodney’s General Store	The first clues and the paper trail of who left
Crimson Bear Motel	Eddie’s suite, his dossier, and the town’s absent guests
The Rabbit Hole Bar	Where Eddie Velvet reappears on stage
Ferry office and tunnel	The way out of town, and the demo’s last obstacle
The lighthouse	Visible on the skyline, unreachable in the demo

For the full list of what can and cannot be reached, our town areas and shortcuts page separates confirmed areas from the ones the developer says are cut off from the demo.

What happens in the Silver Pines demo story?

The demo covers the opening act of the case, from a blank memory to a cliffhanger, and it takes most players between about ninety minutes and two and a half hours.

Walker wakes in the empty diner, finds a note, a locked door, a coffee machine and a camera, and tunes a radio until the story moves.
Outside, a payphone rings. An ominous voice on the other end already seems to know Walker, and the instruction is short: find Eddie Velvet. The call ends with an autosave.
On the street, the sheriff explains the evacuation order, and the pharmacy key opens the underpass toward the rest of town.
Rodney’s General Store supplies the calendar puzzle that yields the meat locker code, and the basement below leads into the underpass tunnels.
The Crimson Bear Motel opens up: check-in key, Eddie’s suite, the pool, the game room, and the paperwork on Eddie Velvet himself.
A light switch flips Walker out of ordinary space — and into the Rabbit Hole Bar, where Eddie Velvet is playing.
The ferry key, the tunnel and the ferry office radio follow, and the demo stops on TO BE CONTINUED.

Each of those steps has its own page: our walkthrough Part 1 starts at the diner, and walkthrough Part 4 covers the Rabbit Hole sequence through the ferry ending.

[!note] Where the demo stops The demo shows no ending and resolves no case. It hands you the ferry call, the tunnel fight and a cliffhanger, which is why everything after that point on this page comes from official statements rather than from playable builds.

What is the mystery in Silver Pines?

The mystery is the town itself: a place that was evacuated in a hurry, keeps its records behind codes, and does not behave the way geography should. In an 80.lv interview, Larsson has said the game “isn’t so much a role-playing game as it is a detective story where you try to piece together what’s going on”, and that “much of it is left for the player to piece together and interpret. It’s a demanding story.”

Three threads run through the demo:

The case file. Notes, newspapers, dossiers and dialled numbers. The demo’s locked doors and phones are part of the narrative: you read the town’s answers out of calendars, phone books and guest codes rather than out of cutscenes. Our demo codes overview explains how those numbers work and which ones are recorded values rather than fixed solutions.
The disappearance. Why Eddie Velvet came to Silver Pines, who called Walker, and what the missing-person notice in the paper has to do with any of it.
The unreality. Previewers describe Walker phasing into places he could not be, and a sequence where switching off a lamp relocates him somewhere else entirely. The supernatural is not explained in any published material; it is presented as something Walker and the player experience together.

Supporting all of it is what the studio calls in-world storytelling, delivered through fully voiced, graphic novel style cutscenes, plus a cast the team describes as suspicious townsfolk who keep their mysteries from outsiders.

Who else appears in the story?

Beyond Walker and Eddie Velvet, the demo names a handful of people and implies more. Confidence varies, so the table separates official names from ones that come from a single playthrough.

Character	Role in the story	Status
Red Walker	Private investigator, protagonist	Official
Eddie Velvet	Missing musician, the case	Official
The client	Unknown voice on the payphone who already knows Walker	Official that the caller exists; identity unconfirmed
The sheriff	Explains the evacuation order in the street	Demo, name not given
The Burned Man	Figure at the lake muttering about burning smoke, predicts a “little man” will find you	Demo, community name
Alice Baker	Missing person listed in a newspaper	Demo
Holloway	Resident who left a note saying he went to the general store	Demo
Garth and Rodney	Names implied by the pharmacy and the general store	Demo
The woman in Room 3	Her door cannot be opened in the demo; one player reports you can talk to her another way	Demo, community report

No official cast list, character roster or voice actor credits have been published, and the studio has never promised a full list. The enemies are catalogued separately: the enemies and boss page lists what the developers have named officially.

Does the story branch based on your choices?

No. The endings exist, but they are not a choice tree. In a Game8 interview, Snygg explained the design directly: “There are multiple endings in the game that reward a very thorough playstyle. We have opted for an approach where you can complete all endings on a single save file,” and added that the structure “doesn’t branch depending on player choice”, which the team considered and rejected as the less metroidvania-like option.

The practical reading is that exploration depth is the branch. Thorough play reaches more of the ending material, a completionist run does not require a second save for the bulk of the game, and the studio account separately confirmed that New Game Plus exists for the content that falls outside the single-save promise. How many endings there are has never been stated — the studio says multiple and stops there, so any exact count you see is someone else’s tally.

What influences does the story draw from?

The team has been open about the shelf the game comes from, and the list explains a lot about why the story withholds so much.

Influence	Where it shows up
Twin Peaks	The town’s oddball residents; the studio says the cast is inspired by it
8MM, The X-Files, Jacob’s Ladder	The 1990s reference set named for the game’s tone
Lost Highway, The Ninth Gate	Lynchian and occult-paperwork textures added in interviews
Resident Evil and Silent Hill	The gameplay prototypes the systems were built from
Rotoscoped animation	Grounded movement for a protagonist who is deliberately not heroic

Journalists have consistently reached for David Lynch when describing it, and the store page’s own framing — neo-noir aesthetic, dynamic narration, a descent beyond control — sits in that same tradition. The studio has also said the earlier, heavier X-Files flavour was dialled back on purpose as the tone settled.

What is still unconfirmed about the story?

Plenty. The honest gaps are these:

The client’s name and motive — the caller exists, the identity does not.
The number of endings, and whether any post-game recap exists.
Eddie Velvet’s music, band history and reason for being in town.
An official character or voice cast list.
Whether the demo is formally the prologue. Players assume it is; nobody official has said so.
Any explanation of the monsters, the dreams or the rules behind the light-switch transitions.

[!warning] Treat unsourced story summaries with suspicion Detailed plot summaries for Silver Pines started circulating before release, and the game only reached storefronts on 8 October 2026. If a page describes scenes, endings or character fates without naming a source, it is reconstructing, not reporting. The developer’s own statements on Steam and the official channels are the reliable place to check.