Silent Hill: Homecoming

Are the Hills still alive?

It is easy to approach Silent Hill: Homecoming with trepidation. Konami have left a sour taste in the mouth of many ardent series fans by switching developers from Team Silent to Double Helix for this American-produced sequel-meets-franchise reboot. Whilst wearing their best pairs of rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, many fans of Alessa Gillespie's place of birth have written Homecoming off before it has even been released, declaring it an unworthy addition to their beloved franchise. But the truth of it is that people shouldn't necessarily be so innately negative with regard to Double Helix's effort. After all, Team Silent's track record isn't immaculate: they're responsible for the rather lukewarm Silent Hill 4: The Room, after all.

Homecoming isn't a perfect game by any means. It instantly feels old, and its graphical blemishes definitely don't help. The engine's facial animations look wooden, awkward and unrealistic. For every artistic triumph there's a failure, culminating in Homecoming's creative vision being as schizophrenic as Silent Hill itself. It clings on to gameplay elements that feel as if they were forgotten a generation ago, and its fixed adherence to save points and health packs lend it a sensation of age that it doesn't necessarily deserve. At least on this front Double Helix's hands are tied, with the developers opting to adhere to the series' heritage. Besides, if they'd given Alex Shepherd a recharging health meter and save points every thirty seconds it wouldn't be much of a creepy game.

Combat is where Double Helix have tried to shake the game up, introducing a control system more in-line with modern day gaming, granting the player precise aiming and the ability to dodge attacks. Holding down the left trigger causes the game to borrow much from Resident Evil 4, giving the player more accuracy and flexibility when trying to batter a monster's brains against the floor. Dodging, whilst feeling stiff, is gratifying when pulled off properly, although its success rate is too unpredictable to make it as much of a staple gameplay element as the tips on the loading screens would suggest. While I appreciate Double Helix's attempt to overhaul something in desperate need of a makeover, fighting in Silent Hill: Homecoming still isn't entirely successful, with the controls still managing to feel awkward at times. The developers have responded to this by simply littering the game with a huge amount of healing items, which is a relief but also sidesteps its core issues. While not as inherently broken as previous games, then, combat is still flawed, and even though it's progressed since the fixed-camera difficulties of the former games, it's still a bit ham-fisted.

Whilst I'm dwelling on the negative, the game is distressingly underexposed. Alex's flashlight fails to illuminate the scene properly, incapable as it is of casting light any further than his nose, and more often than not you'll simply be running across a world of blackness instead of one of darkness. If sensory deprivation was the primary intention, then mission accomplished, but, as a visual aproach, it really doesn't work as a game. The iconoclastic fog is overbearing, too, making outside areas a black, blurry mess. The scenery can be occasionally fantastic, and it's a shame to see it shrouded in so much murky darkness.

I must stress, though, that I consistently found myself compelled to paly Silent Hill: Homecoming throughout its duration. Its puzzles are simplistic instead of agonising, its combat is accessible without it ever becoming routine and its bleak geography is eminently engaging. In a nod to a thematic constant of the series, the game is obsessed with the idea of children and families, with Alex returning from the military to his town of Shepherd's Glen, a neighbour of Silent Hill's, to search for his missing brother Josh. The actual story of the Shepherd family is nicely and intelligently handed, and the game withholds and reveals information in a way that it never feels obtuse. It occasionally offers up concepts of choice and morality, and the only narrative problem with this is that the scenarios Double Helix put Alex into are fairly arbitrary and completely obvious. You'll be intermittently given a choice of two options, each recognisable as either 'good 'or 'bad'. They don't serve to do anything other than influence the ending, either. The basic pitch, though, of one son being passed over by the family in favour of the other is tactfully executed. It isn't a richly detailed narrative here, mind, but I offer the idea that it doesn't necessarily have to be. The simple stories are frequently the ones that endure, and Homecoming's narrative is a nicely executed, explicitly finite affair. In our age of blockbuster, cinematic, cliffhanger-laden finales, it's nice to actually play a game that gives a definite sense of closure in its denouement.

Zealous fans of the old Silent Hill games beware: Homecoming's storyline will not be being pruned over for a psychosexual analysis, and its use of metaphor is minimal. Some of its analytic aspects are obvious: the surname Shepherd, for instance, is imbibed with symbolism when considering both the word's etymological roots for a pastor and its more common interpretation which results in Josh being one of Alex's flock. Enemy design, instead of representing a masochistic, sexualized male psyche, is built around concepts of series iconography and whether or not the developers believed them to be all kinds of creepy. And they are, with monster designs being decidedly unsubtle, shocking, and often gross.

Ultimately, I enjoyed Silent Hill: Homecoming a great deal. Probably more than the game itself deserved. Its main problems are not related to any initial suspicions that the series would be weaker due to its westernization, and whilst its approach is clearly more striking and shocking than the tense subtleties of its forebears, its engaging storyline and well thought out settings help allay any frustrations towards games shortcomings. A good first attempt by Double Helix.

75%

By Martin Gaston