Though the rest of world probably has forgotten by now, those who have followed Silent Hill long enough know that there were rumors going around for years about a remake of the original. I scoffed at the idea. You shouldn’t fix what’s not broken. Time passed, and this happened. It’s not a remake at all. The characters may have the same names, but they are not the same people. It’s also different because there are no weapons, but more on that later. I have heard a lot about the way this plays on the Wii, and that it makes a lot of use of the Wiimote, but you will have to go elsewhere to learn about that. I don’t have a Wii, so I waited for the PSP port. The controls seemed fine to me, though.
The game starts off with a silly intro text about how the game profiles you. A “psychology warning.” I groaned, but imagined this could be fun, also. The questions seem a bit generic. “Do you makes friends easily?” Predictably, owing to my responses, everyone in the game was a misanthropic asshole. Your responses affect some of the areas you can get to, but not enormously so; what people are wearing (i.e., if Cybil’s tits are hanging out of her shirt or not); the wording of the phone calls and memos, and how people treat you.It does add to the replay value considerably.
The survival horror genre has more misses than hits, and I’m not sure where this falls. Clock Tower for Playstation made great use of your main character hiding instead of fighting enemies; though you were physically pretty helpless, there were tricks you could use to outsmart baddies. Resident Evil for Playstation had places where it was best to run from approaching hordes of zombies, but in other places, I felt like Rambo with my acid rounds, obliterating zombie scum. The Silent Hill series has been a mixed bag when it comes to combat, especially now that a few different teams have worked on games, and the protagonists all have different strengths and weaknesses. The first few games used different tactics to put the “horror” in “survival horror.” Sometimes they would make ammo scarce, making you choose whether you should run away or risk your health by using melee weapons. Other times, they would throw several baddies at you at once, so you had to run. Occasionally, they had enemies you could not harm.
SH:SM eschews the whole “what weapon should I use?/Should I run?” questions and just eliminates weapons altogether. That’s right, you don’t even have a kitchen knife. Unlike Travis in Silent Hill Origins, you cannot use your fists, either. All you can do is run. This is not to say you don’t have any contact with monsters. When they grab you, you have to shake them off. But there is no real combat and no boss battles. The first nightmare sequence did have me on the edge of my seat, but after that it gets a bit repetitive and feels rather pointless. It lacks a scare factor after a while because it’s too predictable: (1)Explore for a while, knowing that no enemies are around. (2) Wait for everything to freeze, run around and shake off baddies until you reach the end of the sequence. (3) Lather, rinse, repeat. The rest of the nightmare sequences are just tiresome and don’t add much to the game. Chase sequences can be used well. Silent Hill 2 had the Pyramid Head/elevator chase sequence, which was nicely done. Adding tiresome, long chases pursued by enemies you can’t kill just sucks. I had to say it. The chase parts suck. It’s also easy to get lost in the forest, where everything sort of looks the same, even with the map. I would just run and run and repeatedly get killed by the stupid monsters. I haven’t let out such long, colorful strings of curse words since I last played the end level of Marble Madness for NES. Eventually I got the hang of these parts, but they are still somewhat annoying.
The story is the strong part, though, and it changes a lot depending on how you play the game. The cellphone actually helps a lot too. There is a GPS feature, which you use like the maps in the other games, and you receive phone calls and text messages. You’d think that would kill the whole Silent Hill atmosphere, but somehow, it doesn’t. It’s still pretty bleak (though in no way scary), even when you’re receiving weird phone calls. You also get to do some spirit photography. More intriguing than the past few Silent Hill games, and a worthy sequel in any case.
