Alex Shepherd

Overview

Alex Shepherd is the player character in the game Silent Hill: Homecoming. The story follows Alex as he returns home from war only to find that his town is covered in fog. His mother tells him that it is up to him to find his missing brother, Joshua. As he looks through the terrifying town for his lost brother, he discovers the horrors of Silent Hill.

Alex is a much more skilled combatant than the average Silent Hill protagonist due to his military training.

He is voiced by Brian Bloom.

Personality

Despite his current situation, Alex is generally a rational and sane person.

He shows a certain sensitivity regarding his brother. The cold attitude of his parents towards him has definately left its mark, as he can be rather impatient and gruff and he curses a lot.

Though he has his own problems to attend to, this doesn't stop him from helping other's in need. Alex is able to kill a monster or an attacking human with little trouble, due to combat training received by his father.

Alex is very determined. He refuses to let anything keep him from reaching his goals, even when he learns the truth about what happened four years ago. He never stops struggling to survive and protect the ones he cares about. He also shows romantic feelings for Elle Hollaway.

Alex receives some sort of salvation before the death of his mother and father, as both tell him they loved him all the time. They were just reluctant to show it because they knew they had to sacrifice him one day.

Considering the church area and many other appearances of Christian imagery in otherworld areas (like crucifixes and crosses), it seems religion had a big influence on Alex's subconsciousness.

The dialog between Alex and his father hints at two reasons why he chose to believe he was a soldier. His whole life, he believed that his father hated him and thought that enlisting would make his father proud of him. He also wanted to become someone strong and capable of protecting people, most prominently his brother Josh.

Plot

In the beginning of Homecoming, Alex finds himself in an eerie hospital, where he is looking for his brother Joshua. But everytime time Alex gets close to him, Joshua runs away. There, Alex witnesses doctors committing vile acts on the patients, finds a combat knife and encounters the first monster of the game, a Nurse. Also, the Pyramid Head/Bogeyman makes his lingering presence known to Alex.

This sequence turns out to be a nightmare, as Alex eventually wakes up in the passenger seat of truck driver Travis Grady. He's giving Alex a ride to his hometown, Shepherd's Glen.

Upon arrival, Alex finds the town strangely changed. Covered in fog and with streets fallen apart, it's hardly a welcoming place.

After reaching his home and finding his mother in a near catatonic state, he takes a gun from her lap and promises her to find his younger brother Joshua.

Background

As the story unfolds, it turns out Alex has never been a soldier, but spent the last four years as a patient in a mental hospital.

He finally learns what really happened to his brother: One night, Alex and Joshua snuck out on a boat on Toluca Lake. In the boat, Alex was teasing Joshua to show him the family ring, both struggled, and Joshua hit his head on the boat. Falling unconscious into the lake, Joshua drowned.

After their father Adam secured Joshua's corpse, Alex went into a mental shock, which made his father send him to a mental hospital. The parents lied about their first-born's fate, telling everyone he joined the army.

Alex learns that the founding fathers from the four families, Fitch, Bartlett, Holloway, and Shepherd, were all from the town of Silent Hill. They were allowed to leave the town under one condition - they had to sacrifice one child from each family every fifty years. In doing so, they would protect Shepherd's Glen from the terrors that Silent Hill suffers from, due to the wrath of their deity through an appeasement of blood.

But the pact was broken. Alex had been chosen to be sacrificed, but with Joshua dying instead, the rules of the pact were no longer intact, and Shepherd's Glen was doomed.