[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]The main problem with SH4 was that it wasn’t originally planned to be a SH game, so the SH team found themselves a little lost at the start. It was a game that didn’t know what to do with itself because you had moments of oldschool horror tainted with misdirection.
I can understand Konami wanting to use the SH brand to make it more recognisable.[/quote]
I agree that Silent Hill 4 should be cut some amount of slack, as it was an SH game in name alone (well, in name and in a half-dozen irrelevant links to the previous games’ plots). The last “proper” SH game was certainly the third, and to be honest, SH3 gives me reason to think that a new team’s take on the series might be quite welcome.
As good as SH3 was in its own right, it didn’t seem to do anything that the second game hadn’t already done. While that didn’t bother me much for that game alone, I wonder how many SH2/SH3 clones I could play through before the magic would keel over and die. As an obvious parallel, I thoroughly enjoyed the first few Resident Evil games I played, but by the time I’d gone through RE1, RE2, RE3, Code Veronica, the RE1 remake and RE0, I’d honestly lost interest; they were just different iterations of the same game. If RE4 hadn’t been billed as significantly different, I wouldn’t have felt interested in it.
Although I don’t think Silent Hill is at that stage yet, I also think it’s perhaps better that it never gets there. A new team will hopefully bring some sort of innovation.
It’s interesting you mentioned the storyline first because, for me, the storyline is not the selling point of the SH series. (My opinion is that the first game’s storyline is unnecessarily cryptic and not particularly rewarding; that the second game’s narrative is very good, but more of a concept than a story; that the third game has effectively no plot except for the revelation in the middle of the game that what happened in SH1 is more or less happening again; and that the fourth game has probably the most developed plot of any of them, despite having a non-character as the protagonist and barely being a Silent Hill game.)
What attracts me is the playing experience itself, which I feel is really defined by the mood and atmosphere of the games; without this distinct atmosphere, the games would be little more than Resident Evil clones, as the gameplay is otherwise mostly identical. The art direction and audio direction and the well-thought-out horror set-pieces in each game are the things that really set them apart in my opinion.
This is partly why I feel warier about the series being outsourced than some other game series: this abstract, artistic angle is the sort of thing that different developers can have quite different takes on.
As a quick example, one of the monsters in an earlier (and discarded) version of Silent Hill Origins looked to me like it had walked straight out of a cheesy Hollywood zombie film; it was a mutant/zombie style monster that I’d say barely fitted the feel of the SH series at all. The person who designed it presumably didn’t think that, though.
I’d say that several successful outsourced games - the Metroid Primes and F-Zero GX, for example - have an easier ride in that they don’t have as much abstract and artistic baggage weighing them down.
Anyhow, on a related note, some more info and media for Silent Hill Origins has started turning up online since I posted this topic.
