A couple of moths ago, the world-renowned game critic, Yahtzee Croshaw, was kind enough to say that Silent Hill 5 was apparently in the hands of total idiots. I knew it back then and was really sad, right now, I am suicidal.
Watch this. To think that this is the guy who wrote Promise...
Now, it might be a mistranslation, but I’m pretty sure he said that no other Silent Hill game started outside Silent Hill. Well, yeah, except Silent Hill 3 and 4. And what important elements from the previous games will we be treated with in Homecoming? The fucking UFO endings... Okay, the Dog ending from SH2 was funny, as was the UFO ending from SH1 because they both were original, but are these the important elements of the two games? Would you call the Dog ending the important element of Silent Hill 2 you would like to see in the next games?!? Thankfully, he mentions SH2 as the most memorable game of the series, but that’s because he simply put the most effort into its development (it shows...).
I saw this and thought: “My God, everything’s going to hell...” And nothing, I mean, NOTHING what I’ve been able to see from Silent Hill 5 makes things any better. The protagonist is an ugly crossbreed between Daniel Craig and Peter Weller with a stupid wig. The bathroom scene (please note that bathrooms were always important for the series – almost symbolical) is a total movie rip-off. Same thing about the nurse-monster-thing. Christ, did those guys actually PLAY the previous games? And even if they didn’t notice that every Silent Hill had its own set of distinctive monsters related to the plot, did they bother to watch the Making-of videos, which stated that loudly and clearly? The movie creator did insert numerous game references, but they were making an adaptation, an ADAPTATION of the game, so why would anyone do this the other way around? You guys have “We are so uncreative” tattooed on your foreheads.
The demise of Silent Hill... God, how unthinkable that seemed. But did it? I recently reviewed the soundtracks of SH1 and SH2, but can’t quite bring myself to review the rest. The truth is, the rest is just... soundtracks. Decent enough, but nowhere near as good as the previous ones. SH3 had a sense of novelty because it featured singing, but since then, very little has changed. SH3, SH4, SH0 are very different games, still they all feature similar songs with the “standard” voices of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and Joe Romersa accompanied by “standard” Yamaoka tunes – not very distinctive, not much truthful to the spirits of the games they were supposed to impersonate. What was originally meant as “not your average game music” became “your average Silent Hill music”.
Many were disappointed by Silent Hill 3 before it even came out. All the things essential for the series (the plot, the unchanged gameplay, the puzzles, the weirdness) were there but critics claimed the game seemed to follow Resident Evil’s footsteps in terms of the environments (closed spaces vs. open exploration) and combat (Uzi). I often wonder what they would say if they knew how Silent Hill was going to develop in the next few years – that SH3 was, in fact, a prelude of things to come. Take a look at the scene of monster dogs attacking Alex. If it doesn’t remind you of monster dogs attacking Chris Redfield, then, by God, nothing will.
Silent Hill 4 The Room was like a breath of fresh (?) air for the series and I admit - I like it. The game wasn’t even meant to be Silent Hill before Konami realized it could squeeze a little more money of of the game by making it a part of the franchise and I think that was a good decision. The series has hit the “reset” button, it started a brand new chapter. I liked Henry – the clueless loner living in his own world of the four walls (he looks a little like Colin Farrell in Phone Booth). You could walk around his apartment, check out the peep holes or windows and watch other people living their lives. This felt realistic and there’s nothing I enjoy more in a story than bizarre, scary things slowly invading the gray reality of one’s life. It starts with a hole in the bathroom wall... This was soooo not like Silent Hill, yet I liked it. However, I didn’t have to wait very long before the game’s flaws made themselves painfully clear. The hard combat, the lack of puzzles, the awful real-time inventory... The transition from horror-adventure theme to action-horror game was almost palpable. The monsters, although somehow related to the plot, were completely uninteresting with the sole exception of the Greedy Worm, simply because it didn’t do anything. Plus, my initial enthusiasm for the game’s characters quickly went to hell. Henry’s two-dimensionality started to get on my nerves after 2 hours of gameplay and I developed a complete and infinite hatred for Eileen, while I was forced to baby-sit her for the entire second half of the game which is much harder than the first one. To make things worse, her health is one of the factors which ending you will receive at the end. Sure, there are those two situations in which you may use candles to heal her, but to quote Egoraptor, “HOW THE FUCK WAS I SUPPOSED TO FIGURE THAT OUT?” There sure as hell wasn’t any colonel around to tell me. By the time the game ended, I simply didn’t even care if either of us would survive anyway.
I didn’t even play Silent Hill Origins, because PSP is one of this world’s contraptions which I could do perfectly without. I might be wrong, but playing the game on bus or in park, or at work/school, with all kinds of possible noises and random light sources obscuring the game’s dark imagery and music is not the best way of experiencing Silent Hill. Period. There is a PS2 version coming and I think I will get it, just to check it out, but please don’t expect me to review it. I’ll probably be too dead to type.
One last thing, the Silent Hill Arcade. God, is Konami THAT short of cash? What next? Silent Hill Real Time Strategy? Silent Sims? Silent Brawl? Silent Hill Racing: Bachman Road Drift? Mr. Yamaoka did mention something about Silent Hill evolving in different ways...
As you can see on the left, Silent Hill 5 is still within the ten most anticipated games of FallingStickman and myself. Yet, this is not a pleasant anticipation which a child might feel a couple of days before Christmas. It’s a fearful, dreaded anticipation, comparable only to what a hopeless drug addict may feel looking at his next dose, knowing it might very well kill him.
By the way, In his Silent Hill Origins review, Yahtzee stated that for him, the Silent Hill series was over and if... Nah, I’m not going to quote that further, it would spoil the grim mood, but let’s just say his ass is perfectly safe. With all due respect, Yahtzee, I would trade...
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