Short Game Review: Silent Hill Homecoming
This game was kind of kicked around by reviewers, but, as others point out, it was for pretty silly or inconsistent reasons. Personally, I think the gameplay itself was fine, but the game overall felt like a big case of “close, but not quite.” Combat felt slow and dangerous, but in a way that usually felt appropriate and realistically horrifying (to the extent that fighting naked people with blades for heads has its own standards for realism). There were some nice environmental graphics and voice acting, but terrible facial modeling/animation, and a ridiculously retrograde saving system. The story started out leaving me wanting to know more, but the big reveals end up being bland and not very shocking. Having not played other Silent Hill games, I felt like I was missing something, like I was supposed to recognize the enemies, or realize that Silent Hill wasn’t in the protagonist’s mind, but the next town over. I suspect it would’ve been more interesting if the enemies were developed from scratch, the atmospheric mechanics were rethought for a generation of consoles that don’t need foggy streets due to technical limitations, and the whole thing took place in Shepherd’s Glen, a new town with its own creepy history … but then again, I guess that just means I didn’t really want to be playing Silent Hill after all.
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“I felt like I was missing something”
Silent Hill 1 was the same way. Even the “good” ending (which I youtubed last week) was a let down.
By Jordan on 06.02.09 5:45 pm
Well, Silent Hill 1 was just really weird and cryptic. By all accounts, this one (which was more in the tradition of American-style horror than cryptic Japanese-style horror, having been handed off to another studio) was actually pretty understandable. It’s not that I felt like I didn’t get what was going on so much as that I felt like I was supposed to know more about the history of the franchise. In one particular case, I saw something that made me go, “Aha! A plot twist!” that was never actually addressed again, and that I suspect was actually just revealing something that is common to the rest of the games in the series.
By Jason on 06.02.09 10:15 pm
The question remains, for me, “why did I bother playing Silent Hill if it was so frustrating”?
The answer: basically I thought it was cool that the radio played static when enemies were nearby.
By Jordan on 06.04.09 11:51 am
I think the radio thing was a really clever and original idea in the first Silent Hill game. It was creepy and worked well with the atmosphere (what with your visibility limited by fog, both an aesthetic choice and a technical limitation in terms of how much scenery could be shown at the time).
By now, though, it’s just a standard of the franchise. It’s not especially creepy or original anymore. I would have liked to have seen something new.
By Jason on 06.04.09 12:02 pm
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