Silent Hill: Homecoming (PS3)

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There are a couple of game tenets that players have grown accustomed to: crates contain items, drum cans explode, and you don't go to the town of Silent Hill if you can help it. Up 'til now, we've only had a few glimpses at the latest installment of the Silent Hill franchise, which will make its first frightful steps forward on the PS3 and 360 in September. However, at Konami's Gamer's Night, we were finally shown many more details about the game, as well as given an opportunity to go hands on with a few levels of the title.

The first thing that we were told during a presentation of the game was that The Collective wants to maintain the psychological fear elements that have made the franchise so popular. In fact, we were told that because this is only the second Silent Hill title to be developed outside of Japan, there was a ton of pressure heaped on the game's shoulders. To that end, the development team fastened upon four primary tenets to make the gameplay stand out. The first one of these was trying to keep the title stylistically mature, keeping the traditional feeling of the series while opening up the gameplay for those players that have never come across a Silent Hill title. This means things like holding onto the claustrophobic nature of the town thanks to the thick fog that blankets its streets.
We were shown an example of this via the entrance of the main character, Alex, who was dropped off in town by a trucker in an 18-wheeler. As soon as the truck started to pull off, it appeared to be swallowed by the fog itself. The same could be said for Alex during a camera switch, which pulled out slightly to reveal the sign for the town; the ambient environmental effects occluded Alex from view. However, it's much more than simple fog effects – the development team spent a lot of time working on the visuals to make sure that the game fit the elements of the franchise even though it was being made on the current generation of systems. So even though Homecoming will feature dynamic fog systems, per pixel lighting and much sharper graphics than ever before, the title will still implement grain features to make the situations that Alex will experience seem completely unnatural and strange.

The second element The Collective focused on was making sure that the quality of the narrative was solid. The previous titles have always been anchored by solid plots, focusing on alienation, struggle, or personal discovery and supposedly Homecoming will be more of the same. The plot will focus on Alex Shepherd, a young man who returns from the military after being discharged because of continually having horrific dreams about his little brother and events befalling him. Driving him to return to his hometown of Shepherd's Glen, Alex discovers that his little brother has disappeared, leaving a much larger mystery to his dreams and the meaning behind the vanishing. To highlight this, we were shown a cutscene where Alex interacts with his mother, who appears to be shell shocked that her child has vanished and that her husband (who's gone in search of the boy) has disappeared as well. Of course, there's something off, from her extremely pale appearance and thousand-yard stare to the strange screams emanating from the basement of his house.

Silent Hill: the one place you don't want to visit or live in.

The next system was tied to the combat, which has always been focused upon the "everyman" concept of the main character. Silent Hill characters have never been extraordinarily skilled with firearms or their weapons, so it made it much more realistic that there was a hit or miss quality to battle.


However, since Alex has some experience in combat (being a Gulf War vet), he's a bit more skilled. In fact, this is perhaps the deepest combat system ever seen in a Silent Hill game, with both light and heavy attacks that can be chained together in any sequence or powered up for harder strikes. What's more, Alex can now perform light or heavy counter attacks, as well as perfect or imperfect dodges. A perfect dodge manages to put Alex in line to immediately strike back at his attacker while an imperfect one lets him take reduced levels of damage. Alex will also be able to continually switch back and forth between monsters with a subtle flick of the right analog stick, and he will be able to perform finishing moves with each weapon. In fact, we managed to see a decapitation with an axe.

Finally, the developers wanted to make sure that the title would be scary, with a focus on subtlety, creepy gameplay and uneasy visuals. All of these make players think that they saw something that wasn't there while hearing and seeing things that play tricks on their minds. This was combined with the discordant sound effects of Akira Yamaoka to constantly keep a player on edge. To highlight this, we were shown a segment where Alex was strapped to a hospital gurney and wheeled to a room. While things initially seemed to be a flashback to a previous instance in his life, he quickly started to panic when he realized that the other people in the game were being tortured or abused in the facility. The last thing that he sees is a large light shone in his face.

She's got a horrible bedside manner.

Once the presentation was over, we were given a chance to try the game out in one of two levels. The first was a graveyard stage, where Alex tried to survive the various beasts, like-skinned dogs, that assaulted him as he tried to explore Shepherd's Glen. The other was the Asylum stage that we were just shown, which featured a rather gruesome demise for the male nurse. However, from there, the level opened out, with a mix of action, puzzle solving and combat. For example, Alex needed to access the caged-off area which appeared to be holding his little brother, but once he managed to track down the final code, Josh was gone. While he was able to hop over different environmental effects, such as windows or gallery walls. The amount of detail was startling, particularly when we noticed a couple of elements, such as the ripping of the world to indicate the switch back to the other world, which appeared to match that taken from the movie.

In fact, there are a couple of elements that appear to have subtle nods to the film as well as previous games. For instance, the odd bug creatures with faces have returned, as has the sensitivity to light that the freakish nurses exhibited. Turning off your light managed to hide Alex for a few minutes, giving him a way to avoid these creatures. Then again, attacking them with one of the weapons provided appeared to be dynamic, as slicing towards them with a combat knife left large, angry gashes in her chest. As for the games, I already mentioned the 18-wheeler driver, who appeared to look much like Travis from Silent Hill 0rigins. There were also some "condition of toilets" joke which seemed to extend the running gag from the third season about sticking your hand in the bowl to try to receive items.

Watch your back -- you're not safe anywhere.

Even with these homages in mind, there were some changes that have been made for the better as well. Environments appear to be more interactive than ever before, with Alex easily knocking over IV stands, bookshelves or other items. If Alex comes close to finding an item, which you'll do frequently, your head will swivel to look at it. If players then hit the R3 button, they are immediately taken into a first-person viewpoint, where they can easily collect the item in the environment. Speaking of collecting items, players are no longer paused when they collect something. Now, players can grab items from the world without the game slowing to a halt to recognize it. This could be a benefit to players trying to get through the title, but it could also be potentially nerve-racking if you move into a combat situation, try to grab an item and no longer have a breather to plan your next move.