I'm convinced the Silent Hill fanbase is the worse fanbase out there and actively hates anything in the series that isn't their favorite entry in the series. The immediate reactions I saw to this game have solidified this into my brain. To be honest, can it really be helped though? I feel like Silent Hill's impact on the horror game community can't be understated but also to be honest, I don't think Silent Hill as a concept ever really died even with Team Silent or Climax and Double Helix.
The problem is Silent Hill was embraced at a conceptual and inspirational level by Indie devs. Everything you could do with Silent Hill has been thoroughly explored and recontextualized for someone else's personal story. The amount of indie horror games that are very obviously inspired by and even just list Silent Hill directly as an influence is more numerous than there has ever been Silent Hill projects. In the last year we had half a dozen that have high profile coverage (Go play Lost In Vivo and Signalis, they're wonderful) and another dozen of them on the horizon. There basically is no room for Silent Hill to comeback in my opinion because we just sorta never needed it back.
But obviously Konami has been watching all of this and here we are with a new mood board for the franchise following in the foot steps of PT before it. Honestly, it's OK. I don't think it's ultimately worth playing but I think it's really not that terrible or that disrespectful to the series in terms of themes. It's certainly no different than the billions of other Silent Hill fan games.
I think it's biggest problem is it's largely just kind of nothing on the gameplay front while the story isn't done well enough to make up for it. I appreciate what it wanted to do with it's story about suicide, parental abuse, bullying, young love triangles, and vapid obsession with social media fame. I think it was brave to try to tackle these at all in the way that it did (though really not uncommong) and I appreciate how often the suicide hotline messaging comes up. But it's just also kind of... badly written. It's patronizing most of the times and none of it really sticks the landing well either. It feels like the target audience for this story is largely teenagers and that's fine, they need their stories. But there's not much to really chew on here when everything is so upfront.
That being said, I loved the music and loved the monster design. Love to see Ito and Yamaoka doing cool shit. I thought Yamaoka's score had a modern twinge to it that fit the presentation and had some genuinely pretty ambient melodies thrown in. Ito's new monster captures the beautiful tragedy of the character it manifests and I think it's interesting to see a design that doesn't try to be just generic scary but still menacing in its own right. The low frame movement was a neat effect too.
The problem is Silent Hill was embraced at a conceptual and inspirational level by Indie devs. Everything you could do with Silent Hill has been thoroughly explored and recontextualized for someone else's personal story. The amount of indie horror games that are very obviously inspired by and even just list Silent Hill directly as an influence is more numerous than there has ever been Silent Hill projects. In the last year we had half a dozen that have high profile coverage (Go play Lost In Vivo and Signalis, they're wonderful) and another dozen of them on the horizon. There basically is no room for Silent Hill to comeback in my opinion because we just sorta never needed it back.
But obviously Konami has been watching all of this and here we are with a new mood board for the franchise following in the foot steps of PT before it. Honestly, it's OK. I don't think it's ultimately worth playing but I think it's really not that terrible or that disrespectful to the series in terms of themes. It's certainly no different than the billions of other Silent Hill fan games.
I think it's biggest problem is it's largely just kind of nothing on the gameplay front while the story isn't done well enough to make up for it. I appreciate what it wanted to do with it's story about suicide, parental abuse, bullying, young love triangles, and vapid obsession with social media fame. I think it was brave to try to tackle these at all in the way that it did (though really not uncommong) and I appreciate how often the suicide hotline messaging comes up. But it's just also kind of... badly written. It's patronizing most of the times and none of it really sticks the landing well either. It feels like the target audience for this story is largely teenagers and that's fine, they need their stories. But there's not much to really chew on here when everything is so upfront.
That being said, I loved the music and loved the monster design. Love to see Ito and Yamaoka doing cool shit. I thought Yamaoka's score had a modern twinge to it that fit the presentation and had some genuinely pretty ambient melodies thrown in. Ito's new monster captures the beautiful tragedy of the character it manifests and I think it's interesting to see a design that doesn't try to be just generic scary but still menacing in its own right. The low frame movement was a neat effect too.