Silent Hill: Homecoming

Much of the Silent Hill series had an ability to really creep the player (or anyone watching) out, and send delightful feelings of dread to one’s mind. Feelings that make you honestly afraid to explore farther then what you thought was necessary to get past an area. This entry has successfully done the same.

I have played all of the Silent Hill games except the PSP title, Origins, and the only one among those that I haven’t beaten was Silent Hill 4: The Room. And I watched half of the movie before realizing that it was a waste of time.

Here is a rant about the series as a whole, and is only directed to those that are serious fans of the series, if you don’t want potential spoilers for the older titles or just want to get to the point, skip to “RANT OVER”

Many fans believe that this entry in the series is unfaithful to the rest of the series, and they would be both right and wrong, but mostly wrong. The only thing truly breaking away from the series is the transition from the normal world to the hellish world that they took from the Silent Hill movie. Now really, this is a minor thing.

“WAIT A MINUTE!” screams the Silent Hill fanatic, “WHAT THE FUCK WAS PYRAMID HEAD DOING IN THERE? IT MAKES NO SENSE!”

Actually, the character you are referring to was Red Pyramid, yes he looks very similar, and it is obvious the developers wanted to do a bit of fan service (oh the irony) by bringing a form of Pyramid Head back.

“But he doesn’t make sense; he doesn’t fit as a nightmare of the main character of this game…”

While I do agree, that there is no OBVIOUS connection, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one at all. On another note, “Pyramid Head” is NOT exclusive to James from Silent Hill 2. Why I say this is because in 2, one of the portraits in the game depict Pyramid head in a gruesome scene, with text mentioning that Pyramid Head was a punisher/executioner for the town of Silent Hill, and that he is not only a thing EXCLUSIVELY of James nightmares.

---------------- RANT OVER ---------------

Atmosphere 8.5/10

Silent Hill Homecoming retains the atmosphere of past titles pretty effectively. The mood tends to stay in the zone of unsettling for the duration with a few spots with increases in the uneasiness and creepiness.

Combat 7.0/10

Miles better then the past titles, so if you found the other entries to be a mess in category, you will definitely feel a relief in the fact that this one has much tighter controls, and much more fluid combat. If you felt that the combat was fine in the past titles, you should still feel right at home. The weapons and enemies are varied, and there are plenty of moves that Alex can make that make combat a much more dynamic experience. Though some of the weapons and enemies are a bit unbalanced, with the Knife being a universally effective weapon and “Needlers” being a pain in the ass to kill.

Story 8/10

The story had me caring about Alex pretty quickly, he seemed very human. And even some of the other characters seemed pretty cool as well. The ending was actually pretty emotional. I recommend that you collect all the photos and wait till the end of the credits for the extra end cut scene if you happened to get the good ending.

Stability 4/10

The game is quite buggy, it actually on the brink of infuriating, any time I was pulled out of the game by something on my computer or if I alt-tabbed out the game crashed, this might just be my computer but beware, as the save locations are few and far between and running into a crash can make you lose a lot of progress. One that note, there are also reportedly a few bugs that can keep you from progressing and force you to reload a past save I luckily ran into none of these, but I figured you should know about them.

Longevity 5/10

The game is actually normal length BUT the saves are very far apart making it so that playing a harder area over and over take much longer then it normally would.