B-LOG SLAYING: Silent Hill Downpour (PS3)

'fraid all the roads are out. Every last one of them. Strangest thing

  I've always loved Silent Hill. Right back to the first game on the Playstation, I thought it was a very interesting, unique, SCARY, survival horror game. Way back when, sometime around 1999 or 2000, I rented (do you all remember RENTING games from brick-and-mortar rental places? Man, I kinda miss that. Oh Video Update, we hardly knew ye!) the first Silent Hill, and played it briefly. I don't remember getting far, probably not past the first school. I already really enjoyed Resident Evil, but this was different. Sure, RE had the few jump scares (dogs through the window!), but Silent Hill was just dripping with dread. I mean, that elementary school? Fuuuuck that. Resident Evil never (and will never) come close to being that scary. So anyway, I played the game a bit, but ultimately returned it, as one is wont to do when renting a game.
    I don't remember the exact timeline of events (thanks, brain), but this is how I'm going to lay it out, and call it word of god. I wanna say, I received Silent Hill 2 on PS2 as a birthday present when it came out in 2001, and sometime after that, I bought the original Silent Hill at a sale that Video Update (later Movie Scene, later, a Five Guys Burger and Fries) had. It was only the disc, and the ripped off front page of the manual (I have since gotten it complete, and I'm very happy about that). Silent Hill 2 was the first one I played and beat (I think). I loved it. Absolutely loved it. The story. The grainy graphics (I remember being super impressed with those graphics). The environments. The scares. And of course, mannequin rape (I'm pretty sure my dad was in the living room watching me play during that scene. Yikes). It was a favorite game of mine, and it really started my love for SH. I played and beat the original, then got the third, and played and beat that. At some point, I got Silent Hill 4: The Room, and I did beat that (although it took literally years). Let me say, I don't know why that game (and the series as a whole, after 3) got panned the way it did. It was up to the caliber of the original trilogy, and man, the first person apartment sections were unnerving as all get out. Those ghosts were incredibly aggravating, I will say.
    Before I get off on too much of a Silent Hill love tangent, just know I've loved every SH game I've played. That includes 4. That includes Homecoming. I haven't played Origins or Shattered Memories yet (waah), but they are high on my want list. So, when Downpour came out a few years back, I was very excited. I remember at the time reading that it was a return-to-form of sorts for the franchise, and it was generally well received (something the last few games hadn't really been). Oh, and fuck IGN and their 4.5/10 score. If you're curious, read their review here. My thoughts here will be more helpful to Silent Hill fans (and non-fans even, maybe). I was finally able to buy Downpour with a Gamestop giftcard I got for my birthday last year. My wife helped me decide that was the first game for me to start on my quest to vanquish my backlog (hey, read my ever-updating list here). Without further adieu (and ridiculous rambling), here are my thoughts:

Start screen (for those without eyes)

    I'm not doing a review, but more of a general rundown of my experience, and my thoughts. Before you continue reading, let me get this out of the way very clearly: I LOVE Silent Hill. I know you read that up there, but I'm going to reiterate. I'm going to be as fair as possible, but things in this game that bothered other people didn't bother me. And the worst problem with the game, which would make me pretty annoyed at any other game with this problem, didn't at all hinder my insane enjoyment playing this.
    I'm going to list the pros and cons, as I see them, with the game, and then expand upon those with my thoughts. Easy enough, right? Let's start with the cons first, because everyone always starts with pros!

CONS: 

• Framerate is anywhere between fine and absolutely horrendous
• There is very little variety in the enemies. I believe there are only five enemies (and only two bosses. Although they are pretty good ones)
• The combat sucks. Combat in SH usually sucks, and it continues here. 

There, that wasn't too painful. Before the "framerate" con scares anyone, let's at least read through the pros:

PROS: 

• Very scary
• Good story with great, interesting characters
• The side quests are fun, and add nice variety and a great element of exploration
• On the topic of exploration, the semi-open world of Silent Hill is brilliantly realized, and exploring is really satisfying and rewarding

    Okay, let's talk about the elephant in the room. The framerate in this game is not very good. For the first few hours, I barely noticed. It was more like slight hiccups. They didn't detract from the game. At some point, it started getting bad. Like, really bad. There were a few points where I though I might need to stop playing. It was distressing. When I first installed the game (which took so fucking long), I also downloaded a patch. Apparently, the patch was to fix the framerate problems. From what I read online, it made it worse. In the end, it didn't stop me from playing, and while it is a big negative, it didn't mar my experience very much. If this had been some other game that I didn't have as much emotionally invested in it, and I experienced these framerate problems, I would have considered stopping, or at least severely marking down any score I might give it. So everyone, know going in: the framerate may be FUCKING HORRIBLE. 
    Next on the list is the enemy variety. This, to me, is the single most disappointing thing about this game. Finding all the sick and twisted monsters and demons in the Silent Hill world is one of my favorite parts. They really have made some scary/disturbing monsters in the past (those Twin Victims from 4? Who didn't shit the first time they saw them? Here's a link to the wiki page). This game had five types, I believe. (EDIT: I looked it up, and there are more than five enemies. There's close to double that, but two of them are very similar to each other and I didn't at first consider them proper enemies. Also, there's one that you only see (and hear) for a brief few seconds. So, meh!) And they are pretty standard and boring. I think they missed a huge opportunity here to create more terrifying nightmare creatures. Also, there were only two bosses, and the first you don't fight until about 75% into the game. At one point I was honestly wondering if they had been omitted altogether (apparently there was supposed to be a boss fight in the Devil's Pit Mine that was taken out. This part is much closer to the beginning of the game). However, I will say the two boss battles that are included are pretty good ones. More on them later (bosses back on the blog!)
    The final con is the least severe, because I think it's a problem that has plagued SH since the first one. The combat in this game sucks. It's just no fun. The fact that almost everything in the game can be used as a weapon is pretty cool (weapons degrade over time, so you'll go through dozens in the game's 12-16 hour story), but every time you stand near a weapon or item, a "pick up" prompt shows up. It's tough to tell if you're standing near a weapon (which you mostly likely don't need because you have one) or an item (which you definitely always want to pick up). I found that throughout the encounters in the game, I would get rocked by the enemies. Luckily first aid kits are fairly prevalent (I played the game on normal. Not sure if difficulty effects the amount of healing items).
    And hey, since I'm here, I'll throw in another minor gripe: the "otherworld" chase sections. Generally, I find the "otherworld" sections of Silent Hill games to be more boring compared to their normal counterparts. I love the rusty, bloody, industrial aesthetics, but it kind of kills the scariness. What makes SH so scary and disturbing is the ungodly creatures, sights, disturbing subject matter happening in an otherwise normal, every-town kind of place. Monsters lurking in a "normal" world = scary. Monsters lurking in a monster world = just normal. With THAT being said, when you get transported to the "otherworld" four or five times throughout this game (maybe six times), you are constantly pursued by this red, all-killing orb. I guess it's called The Void? But these segments play similarly: it appears, and you have to run for your life. If it gets too close, it slows down time, and it hurts you. If it hurts you too much, hey, you die! If I had to guess, I'd say I died probably 12-15 during the game, and at least 8 of those were due to not going the right way during a chase sequence. It's nice that it breaks up the gameplay, but it's ultimately just annoying.


    If any of those three (four) things scare you in a big way, perhaps you should not consider purchasing the game. But, enough of the bad. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my time back in Silent Hill, so let's talk about that instead!


    I (and my wife) found this game exceptionally scary. Maybe I'm just becoming a puss, or maybe it's just been a while since I played a SH game (I don't remember the last one I played, Homecoming, being nearly as scary or unnerving as this one), but I was constantly in a state of unease. And that's a high honor I can bestow on a survival horror game. When not in the titular town, you're exploring houses, mines, a monastery (I'll get to that in a bit), a thrift shop, a bank, a movie theater, and other areas. They are all dark. You have a flashlight and a lighter throughout a majority of the game, but it's amazing how much light a flashlight doesn't provide when you're exploring a scary, rundown movie theater.
    I have a nice anecdote I'd like to share. When you first arrive in Silent Hill (after two-three hours), you're free to explore the town (side note: I've seen people complain the game is unclear with its objectives in the main story. This is untrue. You know the general area to go for the main story during the whole game). I wandered into a backyard, and there was a ground-level window, which was for a basement of a house. The light was on, and I had the option to venture inside. So, inside I ventured.
    This basement was very dark. Even my flashlight offered the feeblest protection against the oppression:

How much darker can it get really? The answer is none

    So, I'm exploring the basement, my heart pounding. I'm quite literally scared that at any second, some horrible thing is going to just be seen slinking away around a corner. Well, I find nothing. However, I hear something unsettling: a woman crying. There's a jail-cell door down here, and it's locked. Beyond the door is where the crying is coming from, even though nothing can be seen that would be making the noise. So, I explore upstairs a bit, and come back downstairs. The crying has stopped. Worse still, that locked cell door is now open. There was nothing on the other side of it. Sufficiently creeped out, I got the hell outta dodge. Silent Hill loves to mindfuck people, and I think they are good at it. I know that anything can happen, but usually nothing does. It creates a constant atmosphere of fright. You know something could happen, and it's the anticipatory waiting that freaks you out.
    Another nice little addition is the door-opening mechanic. When Murphy (the main character) opens a door, he grabs the handle, and the camera zooms in to over his shoulder. You're now essentially opening the door in first person. I am not lying when I say that every single instance of opening any door came with a sense of foreboding. Could this be the door that had something scary behind it, just waiting for me? I think it's a great mechanic that I don't see talked about anywhere else.

A common loading screen

    A final note about scary things: this is a loading screen. You'll see a lot of these during play. Normally, it'll cycle through a dozen or two different little tips (the one above reads, "Punching creatures can buy you time to escape, but it's not an effective killing method"), but occasionally, it'll display something like, "I know you're lying", or, "They're in the room. You just can't see them". It only happened to me maybe five times, so it's pretty rare. I really wanted to get a picture, but alas, I couldn't. They are thrown in so casually, it's a great little fourth-wall-breaking scare (or at least creep out) tactic.
    I don't want to delve too deeply into the story, as to not spoil it, but I thought it was pretty good. You're a prisoner being transported to another prison. Your prison bus crashes when suddenly, the driver has to turn to avoid the road which has just disappeared into a black abyss. Turns out, you crash right near Silent Hill. As you progress through the game, small snippits of your past are revealed (via short flashbacks, cryptic dialogue, and pieces of information you find around town that flesh out Murhpy's story), and it's interesting to start piecing them together. Of course, there are six endings (one joke ending), so I'm not sure what would be considered cannon, but the two I saw were both good. Also, I really enjoyed the mailman character, Howard. He seemed to know much more than he let on. Overall, all the 8-10 people you meet are all interesting and add a lot to the game.
    There's something like fourteen side quests hidden throughout the town. This is new for Silent Hill, and it adds a great sense of exploration to the game. I only finished five of them, and only found eight in total I believe. I wanted to find/finish more, but I wanted to finish the game and move on to the next. It's an unfortunate side effect of having a fucking huge backlog.
    These side quests range from gathering items for a homeless guy (his name is Homer, and he sort of looks like Homer Simpson), freeing caged birds, investigating a bank, and fixing a projector in a movie theater (sounds lame, but their is more to it). There's more of course, but those are some of the ones I did. The quests really help to break up the normal gameplay. Just running straight through the game, ignoring side quests, you could probably get through it in 10-12 hours. I finished at 16+ hours, and could have easily added a few more, if I chose to finish all the side quests.

Final game stats (note the progress only counts for the story mode)

    Exploring Silent Hill is a thrill. You'll find several buildings to enter, and each one has something of value in it, be it a side quest, an item, ammo (pretty scare), health, or something else. As stated before, I was sufficiently scared and unnerved exploring these dark, mysterious places. I sincerely hope, with (I hope to god there will be more) this game, going forward, they keep the semi-open world and side quests.
    I made a note of this, and I'm not sure where else to put it, so I'll include it here. St. Maria's Monastery is probably the scariest place in the game. Besides the fact that it's a Monastery that was re-purposed from an insane asylum, there's lots of disturbing kid stuff here, and other little things that just mess with you. Namely, my walkie-talkie was always emitting static, which should indicate an enemy nearby. There were usually no enemies. I don't know if I'm dumb and just didn't see it, or if this was on purpose, but it definitely kept me on my toes. Also, that damn tire swing in the playground area. If you've played it, you know.

    I think that's all I can say about the game. Before we finish, let's talk about...

BOSSES!

 

THE BOGEYMAN (minor spoilers might be ahead)

    As I mentioned above, you don't fight this guy until well into the game, after St. Maria's Monastery. You fight him on a small beach to a lake. You see him a few times in the Monastery before you fight him here. He's a tall man with a gas mask, and a rain slicker on. He holds a large hammer that hurts quite a bit when he swings it.

Are you fighting yourself?

    He has three attacks. If you are far from him, he'll slam his hammer into the ground, which shoots an earthquake line (that's the best I can describe it) at you. I found this absolutely impossible to dodge. Literally every time he did it, it hurt me. If you get close, he has an overhand swing of the hammer, and one that he swings more around his body, which could hit you even behind him.
    He killed me three times, I think. Maybe twice. My strategy was to run up to him for a second, then run back. This would prompt his hammer swing. Immediately after, I ran back up to him, and hit him only once with my fire axe. If I stayed around any longer, he'd hit me. He's deceptively fast with that hammer. After you hit him several times, he drops onto a knee and gathers dark power (??). If you are too close to him during this, you get hurt. This is a good time to run off and heal/switch weapons if need be.

Bogeyman and Velstadt long lost brothers?

    I'm not sure how this fight exactly works, because after I got him on his knee like this three times, I believe, I was able to go up to him, and I was prompted to finish him off. I took his own hammer, and smashed him with it. However, what I don't know is if you can do it the first time he falls to his knees. I never got close enough to see if the prompt shows up, so I could have made this battle much more annoying than it was.

THE WHEELMAN

    You first glimpse this strange creature at the beginning of the game. You see him a few more times throughout, and he proves to be the final boss. He's a very old man (or at least humanoid) confined to a wheelchair. He has various tubes coming out of him. When you see him normally, he's normal sized. Of course here, he's fucking huge.

Bender doesn't approve.

    He has four huge life support tubes that have to be yanked out to kill him. Pretty damn grim. But if you try to run up to one, he smashes you good. You have to ride up giant breathing-tube things that go up and down. The tops of them act as elevators, and they lead to platforms that have spotlights. If you shine the spotlight on him, he's blinded (as seen in the above picture), and then you have the time to pull the tubes. Pretty simple, but it was a fun battle. There's other normal monsters to fight too, and if you stand in one spot too long, old Wheely here throws debris at you. Overall, not a tough fight really once you know what you're doing.
    Once you finish it, you have a tiny bit of the game left to play. It's very cool, ties up the story (for the most part), and is a great gameplay change. I'll leave it at that.

Not the best picture, but Wheelman at another angle (not blinded)

    Well, ladies and gents, I think that's it. If you stuck around and read this whole gargantuan post, well, I thank you. Overall, I would absolutely suggest this game to Silent Hill fans. It wouldn't be a horrible entry point to the series, but for a newbie, 2 or 3 is still the best starting place. I will say, I think Downpour is the best game to come out since 3, so that's something right there. Despite some flaws (one huge and, frankly, inexcusable), I think this is a fun game that retains the classic Silent Hill formula while adding some great new ones. I'm hoping there will be more games in the series (I know the last few have been critically disappointing, and probably don't rake in the dough). As of this writing, 7/10/14, I guess Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear fame) has expressed interest in directing the next installment. There's also a comic coming out in August that goes into another character's story more. Why it would come out two years after the game is any one's guess, but it's gotta be a good sign. Right?

Hideo Kojima directing Silent Hill? Has the world turned upside down?

     So I'll leave you with this: Hideo, add more monsters and bosses! Shit.

See? I really beat it!