Silent Hill: Homecoming
While the original Xbox was a hot-bed for Japanese horror games, the fright ‘em up genre has been sorely underrepresented on the 360 thus far. In February that’s set to change as the latest entry to Konami’s deeply disturbing Silent Hill series makes its debut on the system. This time the game centres around Shepherd’s Glen, a neighbouring community to the town of Silent Hill itself and another of the relentlessly haunted settlements that border Lake Toluca. The story focuses on one Alex Shepherd, a descendent of the founder of Shepherd’s Glen, who, having been wounded at war, has been discharged from the army and sent home to recover.
It turns out this homecoming is anything but conducive to recovery. At the start of the game you find yourself strapped to a hospital bed, being wheeled through a dimly lit infirmary by a surgeon wearing a bloodstained surgical mask. If this wasn’t distressing enough, the hospital’s dark halls resound with the sound of babies crying and patient’s screaming under the care of some freakish zombies nurses. It’s here that you learn the game’s basics: how to attack and defend yourself and how to use the items you find to solve puzzles. These are the tools that will see you through the game to one of its five conclusions.
Mercifully, it turns out that the hospital scene was just a bad dream (one that recurs throughout the game) and you awake to find yourself arriving back home in Shepherd’s Glen. Immediately it’s obvious that things aren’t quite right back home. For one, the town’s enshrouded by fog which, as any fan of Silent Hill will tell you, can only mean very, very bad things are about to happen. Also, it turns out your father and younger brother have gone missing and your mother, bless her dear soul, has entered some sort of catatonic state, making it impossible to get any sense from her.
So begins an adventure that promises to throw new light onto the Silent Hill mythology. The game’s been developed by an American studio for the first time, a change that seems to have shifted the style of the horror from the sense of creeping dread that defined the earlier games to a more mainstream brand of Hollywood jumpiness. With an overhauled battle system (Alex is, after all, an army man so can handle himself well in a fight) the emphasis also seems to have moved from cerebral puzzles onto more action-orientated gameplay. Nevertheless, from what we’ve played so far, Silent Hill Homecoming looks to be a solid and frightening entry to one of videogaming’s most terrifying series.
