For whatever reason, it feels like the current console generation has been unkind to the survival horror genre. What developer has the knack for creating that deep sense of dread and powerlessness, while still delivering a memorable gameplay experience? I'm not talking about half-measures, either—those games that were pretty scary but had terrible combat, or had a cool mechanic here and there but figured horror meant endless gore.
Have any designers remembered what William Castle knew so well, that all you need is a house, a sound, and some commitment and you'd have the audience in the palm of your hand? And that's what the Silent Hill games are, after all: elaborate haunted houses where the things you imagine—what's around the corner, what will I do, what's next—are worse that anything the game can realize.
Unfortunately, Silent Hill: Downpour goes for the Haunted Mansion-meets-Saw approach, and there's no mystery, nothing left to the imagination, and buckets of blood for their own sake. Oh, and it doesn't play very well, either.
THE BASICS
In Downpour, you play convict Murphy Pendleton, who finds his recent parole abruptly revoked when the prison transport he's on careens off the road. Pendleton awakens alone on the outskirts of a certain town and spends the remainder of the game trying to get out. Along the way, flashbacks or visions or whatever it's called when Silent Hill gets into a character's head gradually reveal the reason for his incarceration (and the reason behind that reason). Along the way, he'll meet other lost souls trapped in Silent Hill who are plagued by their own traumas and sins.
After the first couple of hours, Silent Hill: Downpour becomes something of an open world game, with the occasional rundown, lightless house or movie theater, or public building to explore when you're not being chased by the abstract, murderous creatures that make up most of its population.
Numerous side missions are littered throughout town, typically involving unlocking the memory of a past event at that location or seemingly putting a soul to rest. Generally, these are fetch quests, but they have the benefit of fleshing out the town, with the minor drawback of pulling focus away from Murphy for extended periods of time.
Which is in itself a real issue, because Pendleton needs all of the attention the game can give him. There's often a feeling of sleepwalking and dreaming in Silent Hill games, but Pendleton just seems drowsy and mostly uninvolved in his own story. Worse, it doesn't feel like there's any sense of mystery or danger to him. Occasionally, Downpour presents you with a character and then a binary dialog option for how to deal with them, but in either outcome, it doesn't feel like our convict is making his choice based on anything we've learned about him up until that point (and ends up feeling extra game-y to boot).
Worse, Silent Hill itself doesn't engage all that much. Some locations, at a distance, look pretty well-realized, but at medium and close range you'll find you're just encountering the same muddy, rough textures over and over again. The game is dark (which is cool, it's a horror game) but there's a problematic lack of contrast between the environment and objects with which you can interact like weapons and quest items (they get a little red outline, but it doesn't help). Sometimes it gets extra grimy and gross when the ubiquitous sprinklers put Pendleton into the netherworld version of Silent Hill where you're chased by a blog of distortion. This isn't especially effective since the "real" version of Silent Hill is pretty beat up already. There's no sense of normal so there's no context.
Pendleton's inventory will be packed adventure game-style with all manner of objects and geegaws from around town that you'll have to plug in or attach or whatever, and like an adventure game, you'll typically have to manually select these pickups to apply them to whatever puzzle they accompany. This is fine at times because it allows you to feel like you're figuring something out, but it would have been nice to have a smart system for keys.
Likewise, the monsters are a mixed bag of the current trend in horror of the faceless, fleshy thing, which in and of itself isn't particularly scary. Most of Silent Hill's enemies are of the meat monster variety, all pink and grotesque but not actually scary. Fighting, them with the terrible flailing combat, now that's scary.
Even the in-game quest logs and maps are no fun to navigate, with so-called mysteries being tucked away in Pendleton's little scrapbook, but good luck trying to squint your way through the tiny text. You can zoom in with one of the sticks, but that just crops the image in awkward ways, meaning that if you're so inclined to read this stuff, it'll take some patience and fiddling.
This isn't the only "quirk" with Downpour, where you'll occasionally find the game chugging and freezing for a second just because you're walking a couple of steps and the game has to load the next portion of an area. This might not be so objectionable if it didn't seem like multiple areas where loading in a narrow spot, meaning that if you move Pendleton just a couple of steps, it's load... load... load.
WHAT'S GOOD
The score is a solid successor to Akira Yamaoka's work in previous games
Film and television composer Daniel Licht (Dexter) handles the music chores here and he's the sole bright spot to the Silent Hill: Downpour experience. Moody, textured, with an interesting emphasis on a kind of twangy guitar (I'm an idiot at describing music, forgive me), it's really the best and only expertly executed element of the entire game.
WHAT'S BAD
Murphy
He's a non-entity, a zero. You don't root for him, you don't hate him, you don't even really think about him, meaning his overall "mystery" just feels like another thing to get through in your quest log.
Painfully not scary
Jump scares can do only so much. Gore doesn't really do anything at all. Adding a layer of rust and gross and grime just means that the game is rusty, gross, and grimy. The biggest sin of Silent Hill: Downpour is that it never effectively sets a mood or follow up with a real sense of menace.
THE VERDICT
Between the performance issues, barely functional combat, and worse, lack of actual scares, Downpour is really a letdown in every way a survival horror game can be. It's loud and it screams at you and constantly tries to grab your attention, but when it comes to actually trying to scare you, Downpour seems to be without a clue.
Related posts:
March Will Be 'Silent Hill' Month From Konami
Konami Makes It Official: 'Zone of the Enders HD Collection' On the Way This Fall
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