So I don't own a PS5, but I'm very much a fan of Silent Hill. Lucky for me, a good friend of mine does own a PS5, and we decided to get a few beers, sitting down for this short little horror game. I wasn't expecting much after what I heard about it. Wow, this was so bad it kinda became hilarious. It's one of the worst walking simulators I have ever played, and the writing was beyond trash. And I know this will not mean anything to English speakers, but as someone who's second language is German, the attempt to set this in Germany was hilariously incompetent. Not only does it not look anything like Germany at all, but every piece of writing in the game was littered with spelling mistakes I would have bullied people in pre school for. PS1 games from the 90s would be ashamed of how bad they fucked up, not even joking. I love drawing in my Skizzezzen Buch and being part of the Neuzugäng.

We probably took way longer than most people to reach the end because we had to pause every 5 minutes to just riff on what we were seeing. When it finally hit me that they called one of the central characters Maya Hindenburg, I actually got up and left the room. My brain couldn't handle it. That's like setting your game in the US and naming someone John Guantánamo, or calling a Japanese character Miyamoto Nagasaki. This must have been created by AI, no way this was approved by a real person in the year 2024. Anyway, if you're not convinced Silent Hill is dead, here's more evidence of its beaten and bloody corpse with Konami squeezing every last penny out with a fucking vice. Man, Silent Hill 2 Remake is going to be hilarious.

Were game journalists right about this game all along?! Is it "Persona without the heart"? Well, lets explore shall we because I have a death wish lmfao.

Does it have an amazing combat system that has a heavy focus on monster collecting, customisation, weakness targeting and buffing strategies? Yes, this makes it a lot like Persona's combat but it does have differences like how all your party is customisable demons instead of only just having the wild card which is just one in your party, or the Magatsuhi gauge which gives you free crits for a turn. The game also has some other quirks like how you missing an attack is more punishing. But to it's core, it's very similar to Persona's combat at least to me because it felt like I was using the same strategies here as I did in other Persona games. I would say I prefer Persona's a bit more but I do think this game has better boss fights overall. They were extremely fun to me.

What about story? LMFAO because it doesn't have one amirate fellas?! Jokes aside, it does have one, but it's extremely limited in scope and execution. The themes it tackles isn't even unique to this game, it's in Persona 5 too but admittedly it's not the spotlight of Persona 5 (Order vs Chaos yadda yadda). Characters were forgettable, I don't even know their names besides Aogami, Persona games are the opposite in comparison, which I feel is obvious so I won't elaborate further.

What about other gameplay like dungeon traversal, exploration and puzzles? Well this game does have a total of TWO dungeons, but they are freaking terrible, P4Gs dungeons somehow feel more well designed. But comparing this game's dungeons is unfair since the main bulk of the game is overworld exploration. And it still doesn't stack up, because to me, the locales looked very repetitive, weren't particularly challenging to explore and lacked puzzles or anything to spice it up. It doesn't help they somehow messed up the sprinting controls for some reason (how do you do that).

Performance was pretty bad, framerate wasn't very good and the resolution wasn't great and I also don't particularly like the art style because of this. Maybe if the game was a solid 30fps at 1080p I could appreciate the art style more but everything just seems too blurry to me combined with motion blur.

Music was FANTASTIC, stunning music, very comparable to Persona's tracks in quality, a different vibe for sure but a lot of bangers here.

Reading this review, it makes it seem like I hate this game, I do not! I think it is a great game, it's just that I only like two things about it while the rest of the game I can take or leave. But the two things it does have (battling and music) are fantastic, so it carries the experience, I'm not hard to please in that regard.

So to answer my question, were game journalists right? In my opinion, the answer is no..? But I see where they are coming from, I see how you can just say "Oh it's like P5 without the story", I get that, and I think y'all should see from that view too and be a bit understanding. This game could've been more, but as it stands, the battling is just so fun I'd recommend it if you can manage without expecting a breathtaking story or whatever lol.

Appreciate y'all if you made it this far into the review