The itsy-bitsy spider...
You are sitting in your room, watching television. Suddenly the channel you are watching changes to static and the paint peels off the walls, revealing an industrial network of pipes, barbed wire, and cogs around you.Awful noises pierce your ears and a blood-curdling scream is heard behind you. Welcome to Silent Hill. Welcome to the Otherworld.
The Silent Hill franchise has gone through some tough times in recent memory, and Downpour being delayed a couple times seemed like a bad sign. As it turns out, the game is great. Intense scares, a good story, and a memorable main character all help to bring redemption to a struggling series. The game does have some issues but on a whole it was an awesome experience.
Silent Hill: Downpour offers very few changes from arguably the best game in the franchise, Silent Hill 2, and eschews most of the cult-related ideas from Homecoming, proving that looking to the series’ distant past is better than trying to rewrite the fiction. Many nods to previous games were quite welcome in this one.
Murphy Pendleton, a convict, stars in this iteration as a fairly average man caught up in some trouble caused by his convictions. The beginning of the game offers very little in terms of back-story on Murphy, but does set up for some potential twists and turns. Later on, I became more fond of the main character, and more invested in his story.
At the beginning of the game, Murphy is being transferred on a prison bus when a ruckus caused by another inmate takes the driver’s attention off of the road. The bus crashes in a forest and thus begins Pendleton’s quest to escape. It appears no one else has survived the crash and Murphy sets off into the woods. It takes a couple hours of game time to reach the town of Silent Hill, but when he arrives there, things take a very creepy turn for the worse.
The early areas of the game seemed somewhat tacked on as an attempt to give Murphy a reason for being in Silent Hill, and aside from some interesting dialogue and a fantastic ride through a mine, seemed very different from how the game feels when the player actually makes it to the town.
Silent Hill is, as usual, covered in thick fog with monsters roaming the streets. The difference in Downpour is the element of rain. Depending on how heavy the rain is coming down, enemies will be stronger and in greater numbers. Thankfully, the presence of tons of explorable buildings allow Murphy a chance to get dry and safe from the creatures in the streets. These buildings generally offer a side-quest, an optional mission that the player can work through for better items and a ton of Playstation trophies.
These optional quests added to my play time astronomically (which ended at roughly thirteen hours), and went from as wild as using a gramophone to turn back time to as mundane as returning stolen goods in an apartment complex. The majority of these missions had some great atmospheres and aside from a couple, offered interesting little stories of events in this twisted town.
Scattered throughout Silent Hill are notes, or “mysteries” that reveal back-story on Murphy or on the area, and finding them all was not as frustrating as collectibles in other games, and a lot more rewarding. The “mysteries” ranged from newspaper clippings to children’s drawings. To solve a lot of the puzzles throughout Silent Hill: Downpour, the player must read the notes carefully.
Aside from one puzzle nearing the end of the game, I found most to be interesting, clever, and fun. Many of them felt directly lifted from earlier Silent Hill games in spirit rather than in actuality, which was refreshing after Silent Hill: Homecoming‘s majority of sub-par puzzles.
One interesting new puzzle element is the use of a UV light as well as a flashlight. The UV light grants Murphy the ability to see some hidden clues and markings that otherwise do not appear. Footprints and wheelchair-marks dot the town of Silent Hill, drawing attention to a lot of the interesting locations the player can visit.
The story was great, though it would have been nice to learn more about some of the other characters Murphy met on his travels. This is excusable in terms of the usual mystery element in Silent Hill games, but it did leave me craving more, as a good survival horror game should.
The game looks and sounds fantastic, aside from some frame rate issues I will address shortly. Downpour is certainly the definitive Silent Hill game as far as graphical quality is concerned. Little touches like leaves falling off of trees and some really neat lighting effects really pull through to make this a pleasure for your eyes. The voice acting is surprisingly good for a Silent Hill game, and in particular, Murphy’s voice was dead-on.
Unfortunately, the experienced was brought down by a couple factors. The issues I had were annoying, but didn’t detract so much from the experience that I had a bad time, they were merely annoyances I had to cope with.
The combat of the game could have used some serious work, which is unfortunately a big downfall for the game. No dodge or roll mechanics meant a lot of running around in circles while trying to evade enemy attacks. Weapons in the game are often household items lying around the environment, or in the later portions of the game, pistols and shotguns, and all are prone to break after extended use. Weapon durability did cause some intense moments as I darted around frantically looking for a chair or a kitchen knife to defend myself with, but in some situations, became a little frustrating. After a couple battles, I became used to the system in place and worked with it, but some improvements would have been nice.
Along with poor combat in my list of disappointments comes limited enemy design, which was too bad because I have always enjoyed the weird creatures of Silent Hill games, and seeing about four or five different types aside from a couple boss battles let me down quite a lot.
My biggest complaint of the game would have to be the serious frame-rate issues. The game stuttered horribly at certain segments, particularly near the beginning, and this really detracted from the experience. I rarely experienced the frame rate dropping during combat but mostly when I was wandering around the town. As I haven’t played the game on the Xbox 360, I do not know if the problem persists on Microsoft’s system, but after a 4.5 GB install, I expected minimal to no issues regarding my fps.
Silent Hill: Downpour is a must-buy for any fan of the series regardless of my aforementioned issues. The game brings forth so much more good than bad, and tons of great scares. The atmosphere is what I’ve always loved about the franchise and Downpour has it in spades. I haven’t felt genuinely scared in a video-game for a long time now, but this game brought so many creepy moments and very few cheap scares. I had a great time with Silent Hill: Downpour and I think you will too. If you have any interest in the title, I highly recommend it, providing you can cope with occasional frame rate issues. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to get the UFO ending!
