Silent Hill 5 Homecoming

While Silent Hill: The Movie was a very pretty affair and not all that bad as an exercise in cinematic oddity, in a larger sense it completely failed to grasp the essential theme of the Silent Hill video game franchise. Silent Hill games have always been about guilt and redemption... a Father trying to reconnect with his son, a husband who cheated on his wife while she was dying of cancer. The movie discarded these powerful subjects in favor of revenge, an overdone plot device if there ever was one. Happily, Silent Hill 5 returns to the series roots, offering a story that incorporates the best ideas from the movie while exploring darker and more interesting emotions than simple anger and revenge.

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Silent Hill 5: Homecoming
Platform: Xbox 360
Played For: 12 hours



Being a classic survival horror game, Silent Hill 5 maintains most of the traditional weaknesses of the genre... extreme linear play, awkward combat and long stretches where the designers kind of forgot to place a save point. But let’s face it, if you are a survival horror fan, you’ve probably come to accept a reasonable amount of these quirks. There is no doubt that infrequent save points, while annoying, raise tension and help to keep a player on edge. Even a sluggish combat system, purposeful or not, gives the prospect of combat an extra sense of danger… unlike in a typical FPS, you have to actually think twice before deciding to engage an enemy.

Combat was particularly nerve wracking for me as I decided to play the game on the Hard difficulty setting. Suddenly I found myself back in the survival horror experiences of my youth, running past enemies in order to save ammo and health, finding doorways that monsters would get stuck on so I could get in a few cheap shots (there are thankfully many of these locales in Silent Hill) and actually taking the time to somewhat learn the dodge and block system. The fighting was fun, but often broken... a number of critters could never get an attack in on you if you kept swinging the fastest weapon (the knife) at them over and over again. But I’m not complaining, because manipulating the system was much easier for me than actually getting good at the controls.

Beyond combat and retro survival horror qualities, however, Homecoming is a surprisingly strong entry in the series, with great visuals, a solid story, psychological depth and some very creepy monsters indeed... with extra points for over the top grody boss visualizations. Critters take the form of the characters’ neuroses, each one a rather infernally pleasing caricature of some real world fear. While the re-introduction of crowd pleasers Pyramid Head and the Naughty Nurses (that should be a band...) was a marketing-necessary irrelevancy (both of which originated as part of James’ psychological trauma from Silent Hill 2) the rest of the monsters can be seen to directly relate to our hero Alex Shepherd’s childhood and current quest to find his younger brother. Alex Shepherd has secrets, some of which he keeps from himself. Silent Hill presents an opportunity for healing the hard way... sort of the “confront your personal demons before they manifest and chow down on your innards” school of psychotherapy.

I’ll finish this review by geeking out completely with an explanation of how Silent Hill can improve your Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Yes, this paragraph is a shout out to anyone who knows the difference between the Prime Material and the Outer Planes. My thesis is that the “other world” of Silent Hill is a really good representation of the Ethereal Plane. Here we have a ghostly, haunted realm that exists in a super-imposed state upon the real world. Dangerous, unnerving and responsive to fear, Silent Hill’s peeled paint, bloody grills and fleshy tarps are a weird, visceral caricature of reality, separated by a twilight world of quiet ash and mist. In D&D the ethereal is the realm of ghosts, and giving its description a Silent Hill twist really helps to raise the apprehension of would-be planar travelers. Now if only someone would release the stats for pyramid head and his two-size categories too large bastard sword....

There are several possible endings for Silent Hill 5, but I only had time to play through to one of them… guess I’ll have to check out the rest on YouTube. There is a feeling of finality to this episode of Silent Hill. It is hard to see where the story conventions and plot can be taken next, without a significant new invention. As one of the most intelligent horror games on the market today, let’s hope that the series finds a way to push forward to new frontiers, while remaining true to its very human dilemmas.

Will I play it more: As soon as the next Movie hits the stands