It seemed like such a nice town. A gorgeous lake, an amusement park, a four star hotel. All the perks of a great vacation spot. It also had the added benefit of some good old fashioned small town businesses, a top hospital, and a great school system. Who wouldn’t want to visit?

Until the fog rolls in, anyway. At that point you best grab the nearest broken radio, a lead pipe, and a flashlight. Trust me, you’re going to need all of them. And while you wander blindly through the inky darkness, you’d best take note of that low, pulse-like throbbing coming from somewhere beneath you. It’s almost as if this town is alive. Clutch that radio tightly; it’s your only warning. Stumbling through the abandoned streets, you spot a wall splattered with what could be blood. Smeared through the plasma is an ominous message: “Welcome to Silent Hill.”

Silent Hill has long been a favorite of the fans of survival horrors. Its macabre setting and demented plots force an almost psychotic experience on the player. You feel your throat tighten when that radio begins to buzz. Palms sweaty, the analog slips beneath your thumb as you turn the camera, anxious to find the creature stalking from the darkness. Your flashlight is more of a liability than it is a benefit, as it effectively turns you into a homing beacon. And don’t you dare run. If you get out of breath, they can hear you. They’re listening.

So you turn it off and you stay still. The radio gets worse, almost as if you can hear the breathing of some demonic entity forcing its way through the airwaves. Panicked, you flip your flashlight back on. At this point you debate turning the lights in your room back on, it was a mistake to play this game in the dark. But you can’t move. You’re paralyzed. Just turn the camera ever so slightly–

–And there it is, facing you through those metal bars. It’s enormous and the same slick, fleshy color of all the monsters lurking in this town. What is that on its head? It’s almost like a pyramid-shaped mask; tinted red to the point where the blood splatter covering it is practically unnoticeable. Your gaze drops and you see that it carelessly holds a large cleaver in one hand. How could anyone lift that kind of weapon with only one hand? Not anyone. Anything.

Panic sets in and you start to wish you had waited for your friend to come over before you kept playing. The popcorn you were eating has spilled all over the couch from your jerky attempt to switch sitting positions in the hopes of lessening your anxiety.

But this pyramid thing, it’s behind those bars. It can’t get you. Sighing with relief, you turn to look down the other hallway. Turning back, you jump at least three feet in the air.

It’s not what you saw…

It’s what you didn’t see…

The blood-caked butcher is gone. Your radio crackles a bit longer, but then goes silent. The moldy ceramic floor is split with a deep gouge from the enormous sword as it was dragged away. Somewhere in the distance, you can hear the scraping of metal. This is only the beginning.

Fans love to be scared to the point of pee dribbling down their legs. Silent Hill offers that sense of jumpy scares along with plots that dive into the subconscious of the characters and by proxy, the player. As my best friend said when we first started playing through Silent Hill: “Wow, this is a serious mind fuck.”

While certain incarnations of the Silent Hill series have been, well, disappointing (thank you crazy mama apartment), the majority of the games are pretty high on the scale of ‘must have’ survival horror. A couple of them have even helped redefine the genre. The next game in the lineup is Silent Hill: Homecoming, made by Foundation 9 studio, The Collective. It is not being made by the original Team Silent, but music guru Akira Yamaoka returns to add his talent to the soundtrack.

The game stars an ex-soldier named Alex. In the tradition of all Silent Hill games, Alex ventures into the town to find his missing daughter. Wait, no. Father. Wait, I mean his wife. Um, no, sorry–his missing brother. Yeah, his brother. The game also uses a lot of elements from the Silent Hill movie. A distinct air raid siren plays in the distance and the room decomposes before Alex’s very eyes as he begins his descent into the dark world.

The combat system has been upgraded to match Alex’s experience as a war veteran. Gone are the days of clunky aiming, bad camera controls, and awkward character pathing. The new system is much more interactive, offering the player chances to dodge, grapple, and aim more carefully. It almost sounds kind of familiar. You know, the Resident Evil 4 kind of familiar. This writer hopes that the new developers didn’t directly piggyback off another game’s combat system. Yes, Silent Hill’s combat system was practically an antique and definitely needed a change, but not the kind that is immediately recognizable from another game series. But I digress. Thousands of RPGs have the same kind of turn-based combat, so it’s hard to say. Personally, I just hope that they’re building on this new system, and not just directly copying it into a new game.

Passing the reins of the SH franchise to an American company may have unseen repercussions. Or, it could prove to be a huge boost to an already successful series. Time will have to tell with this one. The art and character designs look pretty stunning, and they’ve chosen to go with the tried and true SH preface.

My only real complaint so far is the voice acting. As you can see in the trailer below, there is something seriously wrong with what I assume to be Alex’s voice. The voice acting in SH has never been Oscar worthy for sure, and most of the male leads have an oddly Keanu Reeves-like quality to their voices, but this guy just sounds like he’s reading directly off the script. First timer, maybe? Either way, no thanks.

Despite this small flaw, if the trailer is any indication of this game’s atmosphere, I think Silent Hill fans are in for another serious mind fuck.

And that is exactly what we want.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Previews, Game Design, Survival Horror, Character Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.