Item management in the face of scarcity of resources - that key component of any survival narrative - is part of this game's spine. In a first for the series, the protagonist is one of your own creations, dressed and coiffed to your taste at the start of the game.ĭig a little deeper and you find that WayForward has kept some of the earlier Silent Hill ingredients, albeit mixed and baked in novel ways. There is, in its place, Diablo-thwacking, chest-looting and a range of character statistics to invest in and improve with the steady stream of experience points you beat from monsters' honeycombed skulls. There is no cold and brooding in these blood-flecked halls and alleyways, none of that interminable tension that comes from anticipating an injury yet to be delivered. The shift is disorientating - and the series' staunchest fans, those who revisit game after game in the hope of finding horror keen enough to match Silent Hill's earliest frights, may never recover. WayForward's extension of the Silent Hill myth departs more than just its stomping ground, also abandoning the survival horror execution in favour of a quick-paced, top-down exploration game that, for the first time in the series, allows four players to co-operate online. The game instead takes place in a series of esoteric rooms joined by interlocking corridors in six abstract worlds drawn from the psyche of the player character. Tentatively at first, with Silent Hill 3, and then more urgently with the fourth game.įor this Vita-exclusive spin-off, Silent Hill the town has been almost completely abandoned. So the Silent Hill series departed its home town.
A town that reflects its visitors' sins back at them - and, therefore, a town few can stand to roam for long. In its close draw distance hid many of gaming's most striking horrors: faceless, stabbing nurses in short skirts and clicking heels, Dobermans gagging entrails from rabid mouths, pyramid-head executioners - and, very often, an absence of action.įew game series are named after their locations, but then few locations are so memorable as Silent Hill: a town twisted into grotesquely personal shapes by the grief, guilt and lust of its viewer. Who can blame Konami's long-running horror series for fleeing its beginnings? Silent Hill was a fearful town of fog and bereavement, of radios incessantly crackling with cautionary static: stay away, stay away.
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