So I saw some of the "new" screens from Silent Hill 5 today and.....I'm kinda not really impressed.
Let me preface that. I am a huge, huge fan of the first 2 Silent Hill games. I consider them both to be transcendent pieces of horror gaming and they are easily part of that list of games that definitely bridge the gap between video game and art, even though I know the notion of games as art tends to drive certain people up the walls.


Did I leave the oven on?

Rare is it that a game can conjure up real, tangible fear and bind the player to the protagonist, but those games succeeded well. While the first Silent Hill was more visceral and horrific, SH2 leaned a little more towards the psychological and the philosophical with it's storyline and characters.


I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And, gosh darnit, people like me!

Silent Hill 3, on the other hand, seemed to stray a bit. To begin with, it made, in my opinion, the huge mistake of attempting the bold task of directly continuing the wonderfully surreal and labyrinthine story of the first game. Part of the charm of the original Silent Hill is it's truly unsettling story, many elements of which remain puzzling even after the game is over. 3 kind of ruined that mystique and told a relatively ho-hum story written as an excuse to re-visit elements of the first game and bring some awkward closure to the whole thing. It wasn't a horrible game by any stretch, but it felt like it was merely going through the motions. The few brilliant moments it easily revealing what could have possibly been a fantastic game had the storyline and setting continued the original developers notion of making each SH game thematically different and using different characters.


Ever get that feeling you're being watched??

SH4 was, of course, not really made to be a Silent Hill game, but rather the theme and the weak connections to the Silent Hill universe were made late in development so that Konami could market the game as part of that series and the end result suffered for it.

Now we have the disasters of Silent Hill games in the hands of Western developers who don't really seem to understand what made SH1 and 2 such masterpieces. Now, don't get me wrong..I'm not one of those Japanophiles who assumes that everything produced within the land of the rising sun is the pinnacle of human achievement and that filthy gaijin are incapable are making decent games. It's not that.
But, let's face it....North America and Europe have a lousy track record of making their own incarnations of established Japanese series. When the first details of Silent Hill Zero came out (to be renamed Origins), you could almost hear the gnashing of jaws around the world. When leaked videos hit the internet of an awful, first-person, clumsy attempt to imitate Resident Evil 4's success, the reaction was one of disbelief from most people. Konami panicked a little bit and, of course, re-arranged some of the development team in the hopes of salvaging the game and the result was a passable, but flawed shadow of what the Silent Hill series represented. And, again, it tried to tie itself into the original storyline of SH1, clumsily trying to suggest that it's main protagonist was a major factor in the events that got the whole ball rolling.

Now we have Silent Hill 5, with it's clean, sharp, next-gen graphics and monster designs that seem more at home in a Todd McFarlane comic than in the world of Silent Hill. The game is being developed by an American company whose previous games have consisted mainly of very poor licensed titles. Why Konami went this route is unknown to me; I don't know the story behind it, but it's a little depressing.
The artistry of a truly terrifying and disturbing game is a fragile thing...and guess I have little confidence it can be done right with SH5. DISCUSS.