The Haunted Hoard: Silent Hill: Homecoming (PS3)
By the time of Silent Hill: Homecoming’s creation, the Silent Hill franchise had achieved monumental renown. The first few games in the series were often touted as some of the best horror video games available for balancing psychological horror with striking monster designs and powerful atmosphere. Elements like the thick fog hanging over the town of Silent Hill, the faceless Nurses, and the executioner with the rather indicative name of Pyramid Head had all sealed themselves as part of the series’s iconography even though the development teams were careful to keep innovating with each new title. However, the dissolution of the development team who made those first games lead to Konami experimenting with Western developers, and both Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Homecoming ended up struggling to work out how much they wanted to reference the older titles. Origins at least had the excuse of being a prequel to excuse retreading iconic designs and characters, but Silent Hill: Homecoming seems like it felt it had to include them, Pyramid Head’s appearance closer to a walk-on cameo than something of importance. Silent Hill: Homecoming does try to create new creatures and explore its own ideas though, but the specter of Silent Hill’s history does seem to hang over it with how often it falls back on whipping out recognizable content.
Silent Hill: Homecoming kicks off as Alex Shepherd is wheeled into a hospital believing he had suffered injuries while serving as a soldier, but very quickly it becomes clear he’s in a nightmare instead that serves mostly as an introduction to the game’s systems and Alex’s laser-focused devotion to trying to rescue his missing brother Joshua no matter what creatures get in his path or if Joshua even wants the help or not. Once Alex does awake from his nightmare though he finds himself back in his hometown of Shepherd’s Glen, the eerily empty town choked in fog and most of its citizens having disappeared under strange circumstances. While Alex does encounter a few friends in town like the incredibly helpful police officer Wheeler and his old friend Elle, most of the people still lingering in Shepherd’s Glen are either the members of his fractured family or disturbed individuals with ties to the truth about what is happening in this small American town.
Alex’s all-consuming desire to save his brother can feel almost overexaggerated at parts as everything he talks about reverts back to a brother who he didn’t seem to have the best relationship with, but the stories lying underneath the surface level story do start to justify why characters behave in certain ways and the build-up does do a good job of laying out bread crumbs that make it satisfying to see the pay offs for. However, the sometimes wooden vocal performances can make moments like one of the key dramatic moments feel corny, the multiple endings can easily funnel you into a joke ending even though you made serious moral choices to get to it, and once all the plot points fit together into a narrative you can look back on, it feels like it has a few limp twists and isn’t as personal as one might like. The progression in understanding is paced out well enough to be a decent through line, but it’s not really a riveting tale so much as a framework for the game to hang its combat and striking imagery on.
If there’s one thing that can be easily praised about Silent Hill: Homecoming, it’s the way it handles original elements like newly designed creatures and locations. While Shepherd’s Glen may be the normal host of the action, the player exploring abandoned foggy streets while strange monsters appear from the mist, there are two other locations you’ll find yourself visiting along the adventure. Silent Hill itself puts in a showing, mostly leaning on the same design concepts of Shepherd’s Glen overall but the unique locations between them vary. A maze-like graveyard can be intentionally confusing without frustrating the player due to a helpful map system that indicates which doors or paths you’ve checked so that you’re not constantly banging on the game’s many locked gates, but Silent Hill itself has a multi-tiered dilapidated prison where you never know how claustrophobic a monster encounter might be. The Otherworld is a third major location though, this area manifesting over the two towns as creatures become more common and the aesthetics switch away from eerie abandoned suburbia to grungy industrial locales. The rusty metal gives locations a sickening look here, but one of the Otherworld’s most effective moments is a long plunge deeper and deeper into a factory lit by its active fires, this dive into Hell offering the player no guidance and focusing solely on that downward navigation to make the player feel nervous about how there’s no clear sign they’re heading the right way.
Sometimes backtracking and unclear objectives can hamper exploration, and areas like the sewers feel surprisingly basic, but the puzzles in your path can swing in quality more wildly. Multiple slide puzzles pop up to obstruct your path, this simple challenge frustrating if you get a piece in the wrong place and not a particularly appropriate challenge in the first place. On the other hand, the end of the game whips out a few clever riddle puzzles that ask you to think metaphorically and interpret the history of the town properly, with one puzzle in the Otherworld version of your own home managing to flesh out your family a bit more through its solutions. Some puzzles are really just there to ensure you clear out monsters before attempting them or entered the right locations before unlocking a door, but the simple problem solving challenges and the moments the game’s puzzle design is really succeeding at least make the overall quality feel fine despite the presence of the rare annoying busywork.
Monster designs, when they are truly unique and not recycled ideas like the nurses or feral dogs, are another point where the game can seemingly swing from plain to stellar. The Needler, an upside-down human body with scythe limbs that moves like a spider, is surprisingly prone to glitchy behavior like hovering in the air after death or getting stuck in a falling loop that makes its otherwise decent design come back to bite it. The game can hit you with a design like Siam that just feels like a lumpy leather-bound juggernaut until the strange pair of sultry female legs pointing out the back make you realize there’s another body attached to the top, but the Smog are humans with big pustules to spray smoke out of that seem in line with plenty of familiar video game zombie tropes. None of these designs are entirely weak, and some basic enemies like the Schism’s scythe like split-head that is too heavy for it to lift stand out a bit, but the bosses really knock it out of the park conceptually. Not only do many of them have clear ties to important characters in a game where a lot of the imagery feels generic or without any importance, but they really manage some distinctive monsters when they are trying to make something meaningful. One of them manages to make a horrific human centipede almost a year before that idea took hold in an unrelated horror film, another has a tall gangly doll creature break apart to reveal an oddly organic interior, and the final boss has such a shockingly strong and disturbing design that it’s a shame the in-universe ties to it feel hollow or almost forced. For a game that can sometimes feel wanting with its horror imagery in favor of thick atmosphere these really are a sight to behold, but no matter the creature, they all must be handled through the game’s shockingly basic combat system.
Alex is a rather capable fighter, able to hold his own against most of the creatures he encounters while trying to find Joshua. The player gradually moves from a simple knife to a pipe to an axe, all of them swinging at different speeds but packing more power to compensate. There are times you might want to use the simpler weapon against a faster foe, but a lot of the combat encounters fall back on a very simple loop where you’re in little peril if you stick to it. Alex can use both fast attacks and strong attacks, the way the player chains these able to lead to quick damage followed by a stunning strike. Many enemies can be caught in this loop with ease with little danger of damage, and healing isn’t too rare even if they score a few hits before you can set up your basic combo. Some like the Needler can deflect strikes but they can be exploited with charged strong attacks and using level geometry against the glitchy enemy, and some human enemies found near the back part of the game literally have no answer for a specific pipe swing combo that isn’t hard to stumble across through normal play.
The fights are never so simple that they are completely mindless, but a lot of battles feel like you stand in place and swing without much thought and simply run if they have recourse. It is sometimes wiser to completely skip battles while dodge rolling so they don’t attack you as you escape. If a foe is giving you trouble though, you are given both a pistol and shotgun fairly early and a few other gun types later on. Gunshots can make quick work of certain foes, Siam going down to a few shotgun blasts despite almost being a miniboss if you try to fight him fair. There is an effort to limit your ammo so you can’t undermine certain battles so easily, but boss fights mostly require learning patterns and striking with melee weapons so the tougher regular monsters end up being the best way of using your firearms and some moments lose a lot of tension for it.
The fact Alex can hold his own in so many fights in general undermines a lot of the attempts to make things terrifying in general. The radio that lets you know a monster is near with increasingly loud static similar to the first Silent Hill doesn’t evoke much fear since you can usually handle them with your combat skills, and item conservation doesn’t seem to be too hard to manage either unless you are incredibly stubborn or overly liberal in using them. The fact the simple combat robs much of the game of its potential scares is definitely one reason Silent Hill: Homecoming on the whole feels like it struggles to whip up genuine horror despite so many effective elements trying to get it there. The fact the game warns you that you should turn off your flashlight to avoid triggering monsters but I never felt I had trouble avoiding them with an almost constantly active flashlight just goes to show how little the survival horror elements find purchase in this borderline action game.
THE VERDICT: Silent Hill: Homecoming has the atmospheric locations, it has some incredibly strong monster designs particularly in the bosses, and concocts some fairly clever riddles near the end of the adventure, but the combat in this Silent Hill title robs the game of quite a bit of its appeal. It’s hard to be terrified of creatures you can kill with a quick and easy weapon combo, the story doesn’t have too much depth despite how well it lay outs the plot points in the timeline, and throwing in slide puzzles feels like the game is deliberately wasting your time. Despite the damage some of its choices do to its overall tone, Silent Hill: Homecoming can still have some memorable moments and striking designs for its world and creatures, but its mostly average design is aching for more danger and meaning to push this towards true psychological horror.
And so, I give Silent Hill: Homecoming for PlayStation 3…
An OKAY rating. Pushing aside any comparisons to its predecessors despite how often it wants you to remember them with the elements it pinches from them for recognition’s sake alone, Silent Hill: Homecoming is mostly just a horror game that comes up short on a lot of important follow-throughs without completely breaking its core design. The fights definitely deserve the most retooling, the issue not being that you can fight back so well but that the enemies don’t have much recourse for your strategies. If you gave as good as you got a battle could be more tense and you’d need to weigh up whether a fight is worth it or try to find some way to make the fight easier for you, but too many monsters neatly funnel through doorways where you can wait with your weapon ready to knock them around and stun them until they’re down. Having these creatures and more of the imagery tie into the past of Alex’s family and Shepherd’s Glen would definitely help with a lot of the symbolism’s effectiveness, some creatures really feeling like they are on the cusp of being clever designs only for the player to learn the appearance’s deeper meaning comes from a not-so-important photograph you can easily miss. Bosses do come out much better because of their more obvious ties to important plot details and those puzzles that ask you to think about wordplay and the story so far really help the back half of the game shine more than the rather plain stretch near the middle that relies on simpler ideas. Silent Hill: Homecoming can often feel like an action horror game with the trappings of psychological horror, and that troubled intersection of genres means the fighting can’t be good enough to be fun to participate in and the meaningful horror loses its edge due to how it clashes with the gameplay. The mishmash isn’t totally sloppy though, allowing it to have some highlights despite the general plainness, but it certainly could have used a clearer vision for what it wanted to be.
Perhaps it would be easy to suggest that it should shed the Silent Hill name if its hero is going to be so capable in combat, but then you rob it of the design ethos behind its bosses and concepts like the Otherworld that lead to its greatest successes. Sure, the Silent Hill lineage leads to ideas like Pyramid Head showing up just for recognition rather than doing something more meaningful, but Silent Hill: Homecoming’s biggest shortcoming is it lacks the commitment to survival horror it would need to make those highlight moments as effective as they could be without the basic combat dragging them down to mediocrity.