Are We in Silent Hill? Silent Hill Downpour is a third person psychological horror game that graced our shelves back in 2012 and is the most recent entry in the Silent Hill franchise. This installment of Silent Hill has its ups and downs but in all honesty is the weakest of all the Silent Hill games. It has horror, creepy atmospheres and a story than is extremely slow in getting to its ultimate point. Is this a Silent Hill game, or a rushed entry that deserved better? More Side Quests Then Story: Silent Hill Downpour is an interesting entry in the Silent Hill franchise being that it doesn’t take a very tradition route that a lot of other Silent Hill games take. When you enter into the game, it has a rough start to the story; it’s very vague and undetermined in regard to what it wants to be and how it approaches itself to the player. The main thing this game does that makes me think this is the way it approaches side quests and the main storyline. The side quests blend right into what the main storyline is, so the player won’t know if it’s a side quest of something for the main story unless they look it up on IGN. The game was made up of more side quests than actual story for the main game, so when it comes down to it, the main game is maybe 3 hours, the extra content is what makes it 10 hours over all for completion. The side quests offer a lot of extra content that is valuable in their own right but add nothing to the story. The story overall once it gets into the meat of it is quite good and poses a lot of deep questions that pertain to Silent Hill Homecoming in as far as its endings and how the characters become their own pyramid head. The Bogyman: when I played the game nothing special popped out to me, nothing made it special until a bit before the end of the game. A child brought up the bogyman, in the context that Murphy our main protagonist/antagonist might be the bad guy. This is fascinating to me considering the fact that Pyramid Head is referred to as the bogyman in Silent Hill Homecoming. If Alex in that game got the bogyman ending, he would in a sense become the next bogyman aka Pyramid Head. So, the concept of Pyramid Head being the worst part of the person is still a theme and that is what gave me hope throughout this game. Being that this game is very slow to get to the point, it moved rather quickly in its story telling after that revelation hit and it all went uphill from there. From intriguing plot points of being stuck in your own hell and being unable to distinguish reality from a nightmare Silent Hill Downpour gives us an intriguing look into a man going from on prison to another.
The Silent Scream: With all things considered, this game wasn’t half bad in terms of the story, when it comes to controls it had a of wasted potential including but not limited to, the fact that controls are very poorly utilized. The controls were cumbersome to the point of almost archaic I expected better from a 2012 game. The healing system is also something that I had a lot of confusion with since there was nothing to tell you what your health was at any point unless you went to the menu. The weapons systems are also something that had to be some of the worst besides Fallout 3. If you drop a weapon near an item that you need, you’re screwed. You need to pick up the weapon, drop it far away from your key item then grab the key item. besides the questionable mechanics and overall quality of life in the game, the monsters aren’t that “Silent Hill” like a guy whose face is ripped back, and juggernaut who has everyone in the prison call him daddy, how riveting. The designs still are promising but don’t land the way that I had hoped. A lot of the art and the areas are beautiful, enchanting and create this sense of being lost, and a discomfort with the psyche is a great thing to achieve in a game that is very much nonlinear and felt like it was held together with bubblegum and a paperclip.
Become what you practice: This game teaches us (if there is any lesson to be had) is that you become what you practice. There are moments when Murphy creates his own hell because that’s what he believes he deserves, other times he creates illusions of the perfect world, but in Silent Hill having perfection isn’t attainable until you encounter yourself for who you truly are. Murphy, depending on the ending the player goes for can be a hateful murderer or a regretful man holding on to the past. While I thought this entry wasn’t as powerful as the other Silent Hill games, it holds its own and gives the series and its fans more content to theorize over.
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