If you were a moron, you could say the Silent Hill wheel has come full circle. The American games neatly wrapped the Japanese ones in a Zero-to-Five envelope. They dug their teeth into the original Silent Hill 1 magic, redefining and reshaping things their way, while at the other end they wrapped the series into chains and pulled it into the cinema near you. Is it right or wrong? Does it even matter?
Naturally, that full-circe, envelope thing is a load of bullshit. Origins and Homecoming were made by two different companies, with different ideas, goals and attitudes. In fact, they are two completely different games, having only two things in common: the title - or at least a part of it - and that they both carry a neat tag "Made In The U.S.A." Before I tell you that I think it's just wrong and explain that by "into the cinema near you" I meant Homecoming would make a great Silent Hill movie, but not necessarily a great game, let me ask you this: what do we actually expect from every incoming Silent Hill installment? The answer is - another Silent Hill 2. We want sheer perfection - impeccable atmosphere, truly disturbing monsters, filthy and disgusting and yet strangely charming locations and a set of characters thrown in a heartbreaking story, skillfully delivered into our hungry brains. And of course a perfect blend of action and mind-rattling puzzles, while we're at it.
Yet, at this point, it's obvious that this is not going to happen. Ever. Every later Silent Sequel did have some of the above features, but there was always something wrong. We felt disappointed with SH3's lack of innovation. We felt angry about SH4's tedious "do it again with Eileen" repeatedness. We weren't content with SH0's SH1-but-not-nearly-that-cool taste. So we waited in fear, watching teaser after teaser, interview after interview, beta version after beta version marked only by Alex's changing hairstyle. And now the wait is over. What about Silent Hill 5? Did the Double Helix Team Silent Next's anticipated child called Homecoming surpass all its imperfect predecessors and is ready to be called THE NEXT GREAT SILENT HILL GAME and A NEW HOPE FOR SILENT HILL FRANCHISE?
No.
Sorry.
That just didn't happen.
What should a game reviewer begin with while dealing with a Silent Hill game? The plot. And the story, once you actually get to uncover it, is good. Dare I say, it's one of the best things in Homecoming, saving it from the depths of games hell and the "total disaster" label. Sure, there are a little too many characters involved and the last stage of the game smells suspiciously of the dreaded Saw series, but I think that, no matter who you are, you'll agree with me that they could have fucked this up in an even worse way. The protagonist, one Alex Shepherd, is actually very likeable and if you manage to forget about his strange hairstyle being the result of years of wicked experiments, you may find controlling him a very enjoyable experience. Most of other characters are unfortunately not that likeable, especially his seemingly retarded brother Josh, but, well, you can't have everything. As you can see, I'm not going to spoil a single little fact from the story, but I will say that the plot is well-constructed and even manages to throw some unexpected turns at you. I liked that. Sometimes it made me forget about all the things I'm about to write about.
Straying away from the main plot and exploring the ominous town of Shepherd's Glen which apparently has misteriously found itself on the east coast of Toluca Lake somewhere after SH2 but before SH5, we'll come across some strange things like ash laying aroung in Silent Hill itself, of Pyramid Head's triangular pyramid head. At one point, I asked myself "is it actually a part of the games or the movie timeline?" To this day, the answer eludes me. I'm not sure whether asking if this or that is a part of the official Silent Hill timeline makes a lot of sense, because with all those multiple endings and the very surreal nature of the world presented make space for an awful lot of loose ends (like Frank Sunderland's son and daughter-in-law mentioned to have gone missing in Silent Hill in The Room - no matter how hard I try to make that work with SH2's possible endings, I fail miserably), but I suppose one would be right to ask "what is this smoke coming from the asphalt, when the town itself has never been deserted as there was no underground fire". These are just some of Homecoming's factual inconsistencies, which I believe are obvious effects of trying to combine the Silent Hill The Game and Silent Hill The Movie universes.
Coming to the more practical aspect of Homecoming, I have to say that playing this game can be a real emotional roller-coaster, but for all the wrong reasons. It is terribly unbalanced, unforgiving and cruel. The already famous fighting system with dodging and rolling on the ground does make a lot of sense in theory, although its execution is just... so very bad. Most enemies have means to reach and hurt you, even when you lie on the floor gathering your guts together, and knock you right down again. And again. And again. Until you die. And after you've respawned, you find yourself miles back, more often than not right next to glowing Halo of the Sun signifying a savepoint. There are checkpoints, but too few and too far between - the phenomena more than perfectly commented by FallingStickman: there are some places where it gets so hard, you wish to stop playing and take a break; you cannot however, because quitting the game means canelling the checkpoints and starting from the last save which happened so long ago, you think you've made it back on your PS2.
Controls are Homecoming's greatest misery. The inventory is split into two sections: one for items and one for supplies. Entering it with L1 and L2, while L2 and R2 are used for aiming and shooting (as you can see I own the PS3 version) is unintuitive. Choosing the desired item by carefully pointing at it with your stick is even more unintuitive. Using a healing object with pre-assigned buttons is just reckless. God knows how many times I wasted a health drink by pressing L1 and square, while all I wanted to do was to perform a force attack. If that's not wrong, I don't know what is.
The enemies design can be summed up in just three words: NO MASAHIRO ITO. Nurses straight from the movie. Skinned dogs which are just skinned... dogs. Schisms looking like sharks. Sharks? Godawful needlers which you might call disturbing because their heads dangle from their crotches. Siams which look like overgrown siamese twins, only with SH3's Closer's arms. Piramid Head... or actually Boogeyman or whatever the fuck they insist to call him... and the most idiotic thing of all: smogs - once you defeat one of them, please take a second to look down at its decaying corpse, with all of its pink and yellow-glowing bulges (I might have seen a similar thing in one of Electric Six music videos) and ask yourself "is this how a Silent Hill monster should look like?" If your answer is "yes", I loathe you.
There is no structure, no similar traits, no common theme. Just like in Silent Hill Origins, the monster design is just one big melting pot of ideas, some of which look promising and some of which are so ridiculously bad you feel like weeping watching them. I think the bosses are somewhat better - each of them neatly manifesting what they are supposed to (I can't tell you more, it would spoil the plot), yet even here - the common factor between them and the regular enemies is extremely elusive, maybe even it's just not there at all.
Moreover, the difficulty curve is actually non-existent. Instead, the level leaps and drops with each encountered monster, which leads to some very awkward, dismaying situations. Let's take the already mentioned needlers. These creatures are easily the biggest menace of Homecoming - with their ability to walk on walls and ceilings and effectively block your attacks with their long and sharp limbs. Every time you run into one of them - or more, which is usually the case - you pray. Or utilise some of the game's bugs to your advantage. Fortunately, the needlers disappear at about three quarters of the game, only to be replaced with actual human opponents: evil cultists dressed like town dwellers from the movie. You'd think that they would pose some considerable challenge, after all, they are real, thinking people, not mindless beasts. But no, once they see you they just dash in your direction, only to die having experienced some rapid yet violent encounters with Alex's dagger. In other words, you just have to tap X until they drop. Is it just me, or is there something wrong here as well? It is actually possible to learn how to play this game *right* and once you finish it - it gets quite easy on the next playthrough. But should honing your combat skills be the most important thing in a story-driven survival horror? Would adding an "easy" difficulty mode really hurt that much?
Thankfully, there are puzzles. Some of them are just laughably simple, some aren't - again, having SH2 puzzle difficulty selection would be a blessing - but after SH4 and SH0 I guess we should be just glad they're there. We have standard button-pressing, plate-moving, cable-switching ones, we have put-the-correct-item-in-the-correct-place ones and... Oh my God... There are also some riddle-decyphering ones, which I couldn't be happier about. I've missed them terribly since 2001.
The environments could be divided into two groups - differing significantly in quality. The "normal" world, if that expression may indeed be used, seems rather mundane. You can hardly see anything, even with the flashlight illuminating only the most immediate walls and the two colors seen most often are dark gray and darker gray. There is no trace of that "abominable but charming at the same time" quality, but it's not so bad either. Just, well, an empty town and a whole lot of fog. Still, the game makes up for that emptiness with the nightmare world. Blood and rust, rust and blood, ever so delightful. Let me tell you, that the only times I smiled while playing Homecoming was during the nightmare sequences. They are detailed, disturbing, reflecting SH1's environments and in a proper way. I might even say, that it's worth buying and playing the game just for them. (and the story, to some extent)
The music is Akira Yamaoka all over again and that's the only thing I have to say about it, because - honestly - I just didn't seem to hear much of it. Sure, I remember some stingers here and there, nothing really special, I remember the sad tune accompanying the second boss fight, which was good enough and I remember that McGlynn woman's voice singing another Yamaoka song during the credits. As I've said somewhere before, your standard Silent Hill music, nothing more and nothing less. I must admit I've grown tired of this same set of sounds game after game, over and over again, but maybe it's just me. On the other hand, I would be scared if they were to change it to something else. I've used the word "wrong" too many times already.
Before I end this review and let my dear friend FallingStickman post some of his thoughts, which he may be having, I would like to mention one more thing wrong with Silent Hill Homecoming. Something far less substantial than bad controls and awful monster design, yet not of a lesser importance. I namely think, that handing the series over to an American team was a bad decision. Silent Hill has lost its Japanese soul. Again, before you ask me what the hell I am talking about, let me ask you to try and imagine how it would be like if Rockstar let some Japanese game developer make the next Grand Theft Auto. Think about it. I dare you to visualise how this game would actually look like, let alone FEEL like.
The first step towards this dreadful nationality shift was the Silent Hill movie. You may love it or hate it, but the thing is - you can just ignore it, because this is just an adaptation. An unofficial spin-off. The second one was Origins - which painfully tried to mimic the atmosphere of SH1 and nearly succeeded, were it not for it's simplicity and weird alterations of SH1's characters. But then again - it was originally a PSP installment. You know, just like MGS Portable Ops. Your average PSP series compliment, which you might have ignored just as well, like SH Play Novel on Game Boy Advance. Yet, this time it's number 5. Another "big" installment and the first on the next-gen consoles, to make things worse. So while Homecoming gained something from this radical nationality switch - most notably better dialogues and more natural voice acting, it also lost the trademark Japanese polish, the evidence of which I've explained above and the trademark Japanese sense of strangeness, or more adequately: foreigness. If you don't know what this is about, try and compare Siren 3 with the most recent trailer of the everupcoming Alan Wake. Resident Evil with Nocturne. You'll immediately see what I mean.
That being said, I think it's high time to shut down the series. Why oh why, you ask? Yes, I would really like to believe that everything's going to be okay and there are better Silent Hills in development, maybe even I'll get to play a true SH2's successor, before the series turns 10.
Yet, at this point, it's obvious that this is not going to happen. Ever. Every later Silent Sequel will have some of the SH2's features, but there will always be something wrong. We'll feel disappointed with SH6's something. We'll feel angry about SH7's something. We won't be content with SH8's something else. So, especially with Yamaoka's revelations and two next movie sequels already confirmed and in production, we'll wait in fear, watching teasers, interviews, beta versions... And each time we'll be asking this same old question: what about Silent Hill X? Did the Team Silent X's anticipated child called XY surpass all its imperfect predecessors and is ready to be called THE NEXT GREAT SILENT HILL GAME and A NEW HOPE FOR SILENT HILL FRANCHISE?
No.
Sorry.
That just won't happen.
This won't be long, because EXramp pretty much nailed it. To my surprise no less, because I was thinking our opinions about Silent Hill 5 were much more different.
But just to add my five cents as Silent Hill is, next to Resident Evil, my favourite gaming series.
From my confrontation with Homecoming I came out a bit bruised, but more importantly surprised that I have enjoyed the game so much. It is a good game. Not only that, it actually is a good Silent Hill. I finished the game twice so far and I must say that I have a bit of an issue with the difficulty - on my first playthrough I was cursing like a drunken fisherman who lost his left eye in a bar fight just ten minutes earlier. I was dying every few minutes - the game is unforgiving to newcomers - and the fact that checkpoints and savepoints are scattered by the developers completely randomly doesn't help at all. However on the second playthrough the game became simply too easy. Before the last boss Alex's inventory was bursting with health drinks and first aid kits. Once you realize that unlike with other Silent Hill games
a bigger weapon is not always the better weapon the game becomes easier than picking your nose.
Another gripe that I have with SH5 is that there is just too much of the movie in it. I don't know, maybe Yamaoka just loves his bastard child so much that he decided to clone it, but since the first one was a girl and this one was supposed to be a boy he ended up with a violent hermaphrodite with emotional problems. Not only that. Instead of finding a a woman who would have a kid with him he went to a sperm bank and paid the janitor to take make the child for him.
Last thing - a note to people in Double Helix.
Learn your fucking craft or stop making games and start growing cabbage. After having a game so long in development you shouldn't release it with some many bugs and mistakes - however small they may be.
The game is full of inconsistencies - like you need to cut power to half a block in the town so you can get into a prison. You do it and the town goes dark, but once you get into the prison there is power inside and what is even more baffling in certain rooms you see rays of light coming through the windows even though there is night outside and there is no power. So where is this light coming from? God?
In the same part of the game some of the locations outside are shown during the day while others (just one loading screen away) are shown during the night. Now come on! You can do better than that, can't you?
Still, all those things are just minor blemished on an overall pleasurable experience. If you like Silent Hill, or survival horror games in general get this one, you probably won't be disappointed.
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