AYASA: Shadows of Silence brings its wordless, Armenian-rooted horror fable to PS5 and Xbox

Some games explain themselves; others trust you to look. AYASA: Shadows of Silence belongs firmly to the second camp: a horror puzzle-platformer from the independent studio Aya Games, split between Armenia and the United States, in which not a single line is spoken and the story arrives through movement, imagery and music alone. Having found its first audience on PC, its young heroine now walks into the dark on Sony’s and Microsoft’s current consoles.

The premise is a fable with a bruise in it. The Inverted World once held light and shadow in balance under Tas, the Absolute. War broke that harmony, and six lands, named Faith, Hope, Love, Greed, Indifference and Betrayal, are sinking into a spreading darkness. Ayasa, a girl travelling alone, sets out to gather the scattered remnants of Tas’s light, and each land is shaped by the virtue or failing written on its sign. It is an old allegorical structure, closer to a morality play than to a dungeon crawl.

Light is the verb. You read a space, find its source and use it to expose routes that were not there and to wake ancient machines. The threats are too dangerous to confront, so survival is a matter of timing, observation and stealth rather than reflexes. The release adds a quieter promise: the mysteries Ayasa leaves unresolved can draw her toward the darkness and change the person she becomes, which turns curiosity itself into the moral mechanic.

A pig-masked figure hunches over a bowl of coins in the land of Greed in AYASA: Shadows of Silence — Image: Aya Games

What sets the project apart is its lineage. The soundtrack by Arman Msryan draws on the music of Komitas, the priest and musicologist who gathered and transcribed Armenian folk song, and the studio names Sergei Parajanov, Robert Sahakyants, René Laloux, Hayao Miyazaki and Tim Burton as the touchstones of its art direction. Parajanov’s tableau cinema and Sahakyants’s surreal Soviet-era animation are rare reference points for a console horror game, and they explain the screenshots: a pig-headed figure hunched over a bowl of coins in Greed, a child clinging to a dandelion above a city on fire.

Founder and CEO Edgar Janoyan frames that wordlessness as the whole point. “Ayasa was always meant to speak without words,” he said in the announcement. “We wanted players to feel the story rather than read it.” The console release is not a straight port, either: since the Steam launch the team has rolled out a run of major updates built on player feedback, and the studio calls this the best version of the game yet, on console and PC alike.

Ayasa raises a shield of blue light against a red beam from a giant eye in AYASA: Shadows of Silence — Image: Aya Games

AYASA: Shadows of Silence first launched on PC via Steam on November 28, 2025, self-published by a team of more than ten people. It is out now on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S for $19.99, and on Steam for $24.99, where the soundtrack and a digital artbook are sold separately. The PC version offers menus and interface text in 24 languages, which, for a game without dialogue, is nearly the whole script.

A wordless horror game is a bet that atmosphere can carry meaning on its own. Aya Games has placed that bet on a very specific inheritance, the songs of Komitas and the painterly frames of Parajanov, and it now puts that inheritance in front of a far larger audience.

Tags: indie games, Horror games, Aya Games, AYASA: Shadows of Silence, Edgar Janoyan, Komitas