Silent Hill may be one of the strangest franchises in gaming.  Known more for their vivid, nightmarish atmosphere and mythology than any sort of gameplay, the Silent Hill games were always an extremely divisive prospect.  I played the second and third installments of the series and felt like they had sluggish controls, an awkward camera, poor combat, bland level design, obscure puzzles, inane fetch-quests, mediocre voice-acting, and yet, for some strange reason, I couldn't stop playing them until I had reached the end.  The sights and sounds of Silent Hill were guaranteed to be unique and surprising, and though the stories were sometimes nonsensical, they were intriguing enough to keep you coming back for more as you tried to piece it all together. Most of these things are true about the series' most recent outing, Silent Hill: Homecoming, but many of these aspects are ever so slightly improved making it my favorite Silent Hill yet.

The story has to do with Alex Shepherd, a soldier returning to his hometown of Shepherd's Glen in order to search for his lost brother, Joshua.  Upon arriving, it's clear that things are not going well, with a thick fog covering the streets, nobody's around, and your mom has gone completely catatonic and loco.  Oh, and the streets all end in an abyss to oblivion.  It's a compelling starting point, and does a great job engrossing you in the narrative as you try to figure just what the hell is going on.

But that's all to be expected from a Slient Hill game. The great thing about Homecoming is the subtle ways in which it has improved upon its predecessors.  The biggest improvement this time around is the camera.  Finally ditching the "cinematic" camera of yore for the more modern "behind the shoulder" approach, Homecoming is a far more fluid game to control than its' predecessors.  You still can't rotate the camera, and you turn rather slowly, but that only helps keep your view of your surroundings limited in order to keep the tension up.  It controls a bit like Resident Evil 4, except you'll hardly ever have ammo for your firearms and the melee combat is clunkier.



Speaking of combat, that's another thing Homecoming improves ever so slightly upon its predecessors.  You can now use light and strong attacks, and they've finally added a dodge button.  Some may say that this cheapens the game by making things too easy, but it really doesn't as combat is still a rather awkward, sluggish affair.  The attack animations can take awhile and likely won't keep up with your controller input, so don't be afraid that this has turned into a hack-and-slash by any means.  It's still good ol' Silent Hill where you'll likely end up mashing buttons and trading blows with enemies, so combat is something to be avoided, if possible.

And though combat has been improved, it seems to play a smaller role here than it usually does in these games.  It's not uncommon to play the game for a good hour and only encounter little more than a dozen enemies.  Some may say that fewer enemies will make the game less scary, and that may be true to some extent.  But it also makes the game less annoying and frustrating, as it improves the pacing dramatically by not making you run around aimlessly trying to sort out what to do, all the while enemies chip away at your health bar.  And the rare times when an enemy does rear its' ugly head, it will make you jump more than you'd expect, making it a different kind of scary than the predictable hallways full of slow moving enemies from past iterations.  So it's not a constant sense of dread exactly, but rather a delicate balancing act of letting you explore in relative peace only to shake things up when you least expect it.  As a result, it's equally scary as the past games, but definitely the most fun.



The best thing about the game is its' environments.  They're still the typical Silent Hill claustrophobic interior environments full of hallways, repetitive rooms, and lots of locked doors (something I initially hated about the series that has somehow grown on me), but they are varied enough and look beautiful.  There are some lazy, familiar locales like a hospital and a prison, but there's some really neat new ones like an abyss into Hell, for example.  I'd say more, but won't, so as not to spoil it for you all.  Even the familiar fog soaked streets of Silent Hill that we've seen 5 times before look better than ever on a "next-gen" system, without losing any of their surreal, otherworldly charm. 

The sound in particular is fantastic, utilizing a great orchestral score full of familiar themes and all new ones alike.  The enemies sound great, and the series' signature radio is still as creepy as ever, emitting static sounds to alert you to a nearby enemies' presence.  The voice-acting is not as strong however.  Alex sounds fine and so do a few of the supporting cast, but there's still some pretty bad acting by the likes of Alex's mom, brother, and a few other colorful characters you'll meet upon your quest.  It's still a step up from the voice-acting in the previous games though, so no love lost there.

Aside form the wonderful environments, my other favorite thing about Silent Hill: Homecoming, is its' creatures.  They're fantastic!  Some of the best I've ever seen, ever. Rather than going the tried and true route of giving everything tentacles, slime, and blood as so many horror games have done in the past, the creature here are generally bizarre mutations of human body parts cobbled together and contorted in grotesque ways.  Like a caterpillar made out of a mesh of several human torsos, arms, legs, hands, and an ass sticking out the back.  Or a giant bloody, spider-like mannequin.  The final boss in particular is especially gruesome, but I'll leave you all to discover that one for yourselves.  


Silent Hill games have always been known for their puzzles, but I was generally not a fan of them as they seemed too obtuse or illogical much of the time.  For better or worse, Homecoming really scales back the puzzles, so they're virtually nonexistent through much of the first half of the game, but the later areas have a few decent ones.  One puzzle, very late in the game, I particularly liked.  But there are seldom few solid, logical puzzles in the game.  The good news is that most puzzles are now self-contained and can be solved in the room you found them, rather than make you run all over looking for hard to see objects.  So while they don't add much to the game, they don't detract much either.

The game's story is very intriguing, but not always great.  It's mostly very surreal and metaphorical, except for when it isn't (which are the only times it seems silly).  There's lots and lots of backstory and symbolism here, so trying to piece together how it all fits is half the fun of these games (and where much of the replay value comes in).

That being said, Homecoming does have some shortcomings in this department.  In previous games it was always as if no two people were seeing the same thing, adding to the vivid, dreamlike atmosphere.  Here, there are times where you and other characters can see the same monsters, giving it a cheap, B-movie feel.  Some of the later chapters are particularly straightforward and literal, which is a shame. 



The games does feature multiple endings, a trademark of the series, but one that I never really liked that much.  I'm okay with different endings if they're directly tied to your actions, but here they seem rather arbitrary.  They're decided based on a few multiple choice questions late in the game and you could quite reasonably play the game "straight" as it were, only to receive the now infamous "flying saucer" easter egg joke ending that has become series tradition.  I'd rather have fewer endings that make sense, rather than multiple ones that do not.

Even worse, is that the multiple endings contradict one another in terms of what actually happened throughout the entire game.  I'll give you an example that isn't actually part of the game.  Let's say that in one ending a character is revealed to be a spy, but in another ending they're not.  Depending on whether they're a spy or not completely changes how you view the rest of the game.  I'm okay with multiple endings if they all tell the same story and merely conclude differently, but in this case, they all tell drastically different stories, some of which don't make any sense at all given the rest of the game.  Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of open-endedness, but that sort of thing is just lazy, unfocussed, and a copout from having to write a "real" ending.  There's still enough backstory here to form your own conclusion as to what really happened, but a little more focus on Double Helix's part would have been nice.

There are other flaws with the game as well.  One of my chief complaints about the previous Silent Hill games was that items and interactive objects were sometimes hard to see and so I'd find myself mashing the examine button around everything lest I miss something important.  Most items are more visible here, but there was at least one occasion where I got stuck for quite some time as I simply wasn't standing just the right way in front of a piece of interactive scenery and thus didn't get the "interact" prompt I needed to progress. Occurrences like this are few and far between, but can lead to much frustration when they do happen.



And while I'm nitpicking, I never liked the idea of bosses in a survival horror game.  That idea always seemed a bit at odds with me.  The concept of survival-horror was that you were "surviving," and that usually meant trying to flee enemy encounters.  Boss fights are more of a trope of action games and when placed in a game with survival-horror mechanics it just exposes them as being a "bad action game."  Even scripted sequences where you're running from a giant monster would make more sense in this sort of setting.  But hey, at least the bosses here look awesome, so it's only a small price to pay.

Still, Silent Hill: Homecoming is pretty much exactly what it aims to be; an old school, traditional survival-horror experience made fresh with new technology.  Better graphics, smoother controls, and significantly reduced load times all do wonders at making Silent Hill more fun than it's ever been.  The story gets a bit murky at times when it toggles between a surreal dreamlike experience and being a cliched literal B-movie, and the endings are rather unfocused, but the good more than makes up for the bad.  Silent Hill: Homecoming is not a revolution by any stretch of the imagination, but it gets Silent Hill's unique, haunting vibe down pat, and that makes it a trip worth taking.

8/10

Pros:
+Great environments and atmosphere.
+Improved camera and control.
+Fantastic creature design.
+Intriguing story.

Cons:
-Story gets muddled, contrived, and possibly contradictory in the end.
-Some bad voice-acting.
-Sometimes the game is too dark, making important things easy to miss.
-Arbitrary puzzles don't really fit the game.