Stake Through the Heart: ‘Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire’ is Out Now on Meta Quest

For immortal beings, vampires sure are foolish. Every day they retreat to their coffin to hide from the sun—and then they just lie there, utterly defenseless and vulnerable to any person passing by with a sharp stick.

But not in Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire. Releasing today on Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro, Silent Slayer’s bone-chilling bloodsuckers have finally smartened up and started defending themselves. Tripwires, padlocks, crossbars, nails—these coffins are closed up tight. Worse, any noise will rouse the undead from their restless slumber and turn a vampire slayer into a tasty breakfast. A mystical talking book will help talk you through the correct steps, but it’s your hands that ultimately need to do the painstaking (and sometimes puzzling) work here.

We sat down with Schell Games’ Anna Nguyen, Lead Producer on Silent Slayer, and Matthew Moore, Design Director, to discuss favorite vampires, how a haunted doll came to life, developing with accessibility in mind, and how important it is to stay relaxed while vampire hunting.

Read the full interview below, or head on over to the Meta Quest Store (quietly) and pick up Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire.

Matthew Moore: That's a really interesting question because we spent a lot of time talking about, “What is horror? What types of horror are there? What type of horror are we? What kind of scariness are we going for in the game?”

Even after talking about it for a long time, it's still hard to use the exact right words to conjure for someone what kind of horror to expect. It's not a particularly bloody game.

Players can expect a tense experience. We really zeroed in on that feeling of tension—and not just through a fear of jump scares, but through a focus on precise movement and awareness of what's going on during their unpacking of the vampire's coffin. I think that's really the thing that players can expect the most is an intense focus and awareness that at any moment this could go wrong.

There was a conversation where we were like, “There should be a scare followed by laughter and a desire to try again.” So people shouldn't expect to be held in a suspended horror moment forever and ever. They shouldn't expect to be gored out.

Anna Nguyen: The other thing is you’re surrounded by things that are greater or larger than you. Silent Slayer is full of coffins and vampires that tower over you. The vampires have a lot of ways that they protect their coffins. And while you're face to face with the coffins, you're sitting in the vampire’s lair more or less—these very large ancient structures that are imbued with magic. So everything just feels very overwhelming and adds to that tension.

When I demoed the game at PAX East, people definitely reacted as you’d expect to the jump scare moments. Something is coming at you, lurching at you. But a surprising amount of players got really creeped out moment-to-moment. We really wanted to emphasize that you're in front of a dangerous creature, even though it's behind closed doors. So other sources of scares could be creepy noises or something moving in the edge of your vision that makes you go “What was that?” There are things that can still get to you even when the vampire isn’t visible.

AN: Schell Games has a studio-wide practice called Jam Week where we stop work on our usual projects, form groups, and work on new projects and prototypes just for fun. The original idea for Silent Slayer was put together in a week, and the reception was really great.

From there, we went through a few iterations. We asked ourselves: Are there other features? Is it more about the castle and the lore? Is it more about the traps? Then it evolved into exploring how the vampires relate to each other, and that’s where the idea of a clan came about. So you're working from the bottom of the clan to the top and we thought, “If we're going to introduce an interaction here, how might that look different for a future vampire?”

MM: Silent Slayer starts with a mysterious letter inviting you to come to the Castle Zar. It mentions previous slayers—and you play briefly as one of those slayers, experiencing a moment from the past.

Then you find out the letter was written by a magic book, which is even more mysterious than getting a letter! These details drip out steadily, unpacking the backstory of the player, the castle, the Book, and the ritual that players are now part of. The lore is deeper than I think people sometimes expect. I was watching one of the creator previews on YouTube, SteveKnows, and they were commenting on how they just sort-of expected that there would be different vampires and that was neat, but they got hooked into this idea that there are ranks and relationships between these different vampires.

Tim Sweeney, our Narrative Designer, did a really good job of situating this as not just a narrative for this game, but as a narrative within a larger story that has spanned centuries. This is not the first time these vampires have done the ritual. This is a refinement of the ritual. This is not the first time that a slayer has been recruited to attempt to stop the ritual. Slayers have been here before in the past and have met with varying levels of success. These are not the first vampires to be part of this order. Some of them have been kicked out or died before, or maneuvered themselves into the order of succession and pushed others out, or been demoted because of their past performance.

For people who seek out rich stories, there’s a lot for them to discover by reading (and listening to) the Book and piecing together the machinations and backstories of all these people. There’s a rich historical setting serving as backdrop for the vampire killing.

AN: My favorite actually changed throughout development, so I kept ping-ponging back and forth. My favorite ended up being the Queen. At first you're just like, “Oh, is it just a generic queen?” But then when you hear how the Book talks about the vampire, read through the relevant material, and even just visit the coffin, you’re like, “Oh, this isn't your stereotypical Queen.” She had a lot of influence and a lot of power in the clan. I think the Book has the best lines for the Queen in the game as well.

MM: My favorite is Scholar Fabricius. There's some interesting backstory about the tug of war between the Book and Fabricius in terms of the scholar being knowledgeable about keeping slayers out and the Book trying to help slayers in. In terms of visuals, I love Baron Radovan, the vampire from the first encounter. He’s kind of cute—he’s got such a cute, little, blue vampire face. Every time I see him, I'm like, “What's up buddy?”

And then I have to kill him.

MM: Players can get all of the essential information they need from the game’s voiceover, but the Book does explain things a bit more fully. You should consult the Book if you need a hint or if you think you didn’t catch something. If you want to explore the lore of the world, it’s much richer in the Book. It has full paragraph descriptions of the history of vampires that are a bit more compact in voiceover.

AN: We also tried to think through the player experience with the game as a whole. Some people might play a couple encounters and then stop, or play a couple encounters and then hand it off to a friend—but at that point the VO has already played because the Book is talking to you at very specific points. In this way, the Book serves as a reference.

The Book also offers a lot of very gorgeous illustrations of objects that aren't in the actual environments—so if you're a fan of concept art-esque pieces, it's in the Book.

AN: My favorite trap is the nails, and I don't know how much of that is because we went through a lot of iteration on it. We took something that was pretty classic in terms of what holds a coffin closed and made it our own, and it gets even better further down in the deeper encounters.

The interaction that gives me the most trouble is finding the right key. Some people on the team might say it's the doll, but the key begins as something that you're like, “Oh yeah, I'll just match it. I will just do the thing and I match it and twist.” But we do a lot of variations on the key throughout the different encounters. Sometimes we make it harder, sometimes we make it easier, and there's a lot of ways to weirdly do it wrong.

MM: It's funny, I was going to mention the nails as well! But drilling in on what Anna said, there was a lot of iteration with the nails. I think my favorite interactions are the ones where the team really surprised me or really delivered. As a Director, I don't make the things—I help the team make the things by defining what success looks like and by helping them to evaluate and choose which direction to go.

Nails started out as something pretty bland. It didn’t conform to actually removing nails in the real world or to something that made sense within our weird vampire fantasy. But it became something kind of exciting and beautiful, particularly in later levels. We designed the game using the concept of base-level interactions and then interaction variants, so each mechanic becomes more interesting or complicated over time, but the nails variant for me is especially surprising and challenging.

One of my other favorites is the Waking Idol. It started out in life as a bell, but a bell created too many player expectations in terms of affordances. Someone could just pick up a bell and hold the clapper to the side or tip it on its side and then it couldn't ring. There we go, bell solved. And we were like, yeah, none of this is working.

It was one of the artists who was working with the interaction team, Anran Gong, who came up with this idea for a haunted little doll inspired by teru teru bōzu from the real world. Suddenly everything clicked. It has awareness. It can be awake, it can be asleep.

That triggered the interaction team of Addie McFadden and Matt Kucic to pivot, so it's not about whether you move the doll and disturb it—it's about whether it's awake or it's asleep and sees the player move. It became “Red Light, Green Light.” The team took something that originally was just a real world analog of bells, and turned it into a creepily voiced, delightful interaction. I love things like that.

I am surprisingly bad at opening the coffin lid. I realize that's a thing I should not be bad at, because you open doors every day of your life and I should have practice doing this in my own house, but for some reason pulling it towards you messes me up. I'm the crossbar master! I can pull two crossbars at the same time—but they're moving at arm's length in an axis that's easy to move in. Pulling the lid towards me? I have to go slow the whole time, even if I recognize that there are parts that aren't creaky. Otherwise I'll just mess it up.

AN: I guess it's a riff of Dracula, but I really enjoy Castlevania. I heard about other vampires, but vampires in general didn't quite interest me. Castlevania really drew me into the idea that vampires are these ancient creatures and they have cultures and civilizations, and the idea that they live for a really long time. Funnily enough, I was introduced to What We Do in the Shadows when we started the project, because we watched it together as a team. It’s a really fun take on vampires.

MM: Yeah, this would have to be a podcast, not just an answer. There are so many fun pieces of vampire media and for so many different reasons. I really like the film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. It explores vampire hunting and vampire motivations within vampire/ human relationships and is also just a gory action film. I love What We Do in the Shadows, particularly the TV series.

One of the members of the team, Matt Kucic, was really into the original Dracula novel, and would do a reading of the letters within the book on the particular day that they happened over the course of production, and that was really delightful. Apparently his partner was involved in a production of a podcast of that.

I think, more than any single piece of vampire media, we all came to it with our different references. I like that the team was willing to share anything and everything regardless of their influences. We would talk about whether or not the staking moment was properly gory enough and then would look at Dracula: Dead and Loving It and say, “...but not this level of blood.” Is it okay to stake a vampire standing up like Buffy or should the vampires be lying down like those in The Fearless Vampire Killers?

It’s really lovely that we have the breadth of potential inspirations to draw from and so many fun things for us to share with each other—to say, “Have you watched this?” It was a real stew of ideas.

AN: We included several features to make players more comfortable. In Silent Slayer, there’s a blue grab-bar players can use to pull the coffin closer to them or adjust the height of the table/tools. We also made sure anything that is in the Book is also mentioned in voiceover, although in a more succinct fashion.

We have captioning for the voiceover and sound effects, and players can turn them on and off independently. We also have options to adjust the captions by making them bigger, closer, further away, et cetera, so it’s more comfortable in the space. And we have the ability to turn off spiders in the game, for those who have arachnophobia.

AN: I would say take it in. There's a lot of attention to detail everywhere, whether you're sitting in the main menu and just hanging out or you're getting introduced to the lore for the first time. I think the more that you absorb Silent Slayer, the more you'll discover certain details that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed if you were just focused on going from one vampire to the next.

The most surprising aspect of Silent Slayer is that it's pretty fun to play with other people, even though it's a single-player experience. We love having a couple people play and everybody else watching—it's a good time.

MM: I love that answer, and would add go with the flow. When Silent Slayer encourages you to stop and consider what you didn't do correctly so that you can try again, take a minute to pause in the hub and think about it. Listen to what the Book has to say. Review what you saw in the Book earlier.

When you finish one vampire and are on that emotional high and you're dumped into the hub to do the bindstone for the next encounter, listen to the backstory. Don't rush impatiently to get to the next vampire. Take the moment to come down and relax and listen to the story about who you just defeated and who’s coming up next.

And take the time to look at the bindstone. One of the Silent Slayer preview content creators, SteveKnows, looked at the stone and used their hand to practice the symbols they’d be drawing. And I was like, “Yes, that's correct.” Don't force it. Just go with the flow and try and enjoy the experience at the pace that is offered rather than trying to resist it.

Stakes? Check. Book? Check. Looks like you’re ready to take some vampires out of the world. Head on over to the Meta Quest Store and pick up Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire for $19.99 USD.