Video Game / Silent Hill: Downpour

Enter the town's latest prisoner...

"I never hurt anybody who didn't deserve it. And I sure as hell never hurt any kids. I wouldn't be able to live with myself."

Silent Hill: Downpour, the eighth game in Konami's Silent Hill franchise, follows the story of prison inmate Murphy Pendleton and his visit to the best vacation town that Satan ever built.

During a routine transfer to a new prison, the bus transporting Murphy crashes, which leaves him a free man. With a security officer from the transport on his trail, a desperate Murphy tries to escape from both his fate on Death Row and the ever-worsening weather by following a worn-down road through the nearby woods. That road eventually leads Murphy to the world's least desirable vacation destination: the resort town of Silent Hill. His luck changes for the worse after he enters the town, as supernatural monsters assault him at every turn—including two symbolic übermonsters in The Bogeyman and The Wheelman—while an unnatural force threatens to rip his body and soul apart in the Otherworld. He also discovers that he has a deeper connection to the security officer trailing him than he knows, and it could be the key to helping both of them survive Silent Hill.

Like other games in this franchise, notably Silent Hill 2, the titular town of torture takes on a unique personality that preys upon the inner turmoil of the protagonist. This time around, the haunted hellscape is washed out in torrential rain, representing the prison showers where Murphy encountered and killed a child molester, and electricity arcs across the landscape whenever Murphy travels into the Otherworld, along with guillotine symbolism in sliding doors, playing into his fears of execution for his crimes. Many of his enemies serve as obstacles more than free-roaming creatures to defeat, being imprisoned in their own torment even as they block his way forward.

Murphy also sees a lot of fire during his trips to the Otherworld; given the circumstances, Hell might be a better place to live.

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Silent Hill: Downpour contains the following tropes:

• Ancient Tomb
• And I Must Scream: Frank was reduced to a vegetative state after his beating at the hands of either Sewell or Murphy (depending on which ending you see).
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The finale puts Murphy in the shoes of The Bogeyman.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Murphy can gain an extra outfit after completing the "Stolen Goods" sidequest.
• Autosave: In contrast to previous Silent Hill games, which used Save Points, Downpour simply autosaves at certain key points in each level. The game retains the last 5 autosaves, so you can go back a save or two if you use up too many resources or otherwise put yourself in a corner.
• Bag of Spilling: There are a couple of points in the game where you will lose your weapon, firearm, and flashlight.
  • When you cross the Point of No Return, you lose every item in your inventory except the journal. You have to re-find all the other items.
• Beat Still, My Heart: For the "Dead Man's Hand" sidequest, you have to retrieve a the still-beating heart of a dead man, which was savagely ripped out of his body. Emphasis on "still-beating"; the quest also employs a Heart Beat Soundtrack to effectively create the most macabre game of "Hot and Cold" ever.
• Big "NO!": Murphy has one of these moments in one Downer Ending. The game emphasizes it by repeating the word "no" five times, in increasing volume and frustration, to emphasize the failure.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Anne Cunningham to Murphy: "SHUT THE HELL UP!"
• Book Ends: This happens in the "Truth & Justice" ending. Murphy and Anne, having freed themselves from Silent Hill, end up back at the wreckage of the prison bus. The last scene of this ending also takes place in Ryall State Prison. According to the "Anne's Story" tie-in comic, this ending is the canonical ending.
• Breakable Weapons: The game employs this mechanic with reasonable realism, as the different weapons have varying levels of durability that are more or less in line with what you would expect. Vases and bottles shatter with ease, chairs and wooden sticks will splinter into smaller and smaller pieces, and sturdier items like hatchets and crowbars will not break without a lot of work. You might expect certain weapons to last much longer than they actually do, though—a crowbar, for example, will not easily break in half.
  • Of course, if you wanted to, you could probably Epileptic-Tree some of it away by arguing that Silent Hill is playing mind games by making those "sturdy" weapons break unexpectedly easily. Reality Warping and all that.
  • The game kind of plays with the idea, especially with weapons needed to progress. You might get to break a plank or two of a boarded-up door with a pickaxe before the axe breaks—which is odd, especially when you just found it—whereas a fire axe is your safest bet on taking it down without the weapon breaking.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: See Interface Screw below; some of the loading-screen hints address you directly:
  Are you sure you're alone?
  STOP DOING THAT!
  She's lying to you...
  Was it worth it?
  I know you are lying.
  They know what you've done.
  It knows you are alone.
• But Thou Must!: The game justifies this as part of the strange nature of Silent Hill. It even lampshades the idea after DJ Ricks reveals that he has a boat, but someone stole the keys. Murphy says he could hotwire it, but Ricks says that would not work because Silent Hill has "rules". When Ricks breaks those rules, the town punishes him for it.
• Call-Back/Easter Egg/Continuity Nod: Several references to previous Silent Hill games appear:
  • The music tracks "Silent Hill", "Magdalene", "Love Psalm", and "Please Love Me...Once More" can be heard playing on radios at certain points in the game.
  • The Centennial Building has pictures of the "Welcome to Shepherd's Glen" sign and the Shepherd family house.
  • Elsewhere in the same building, a book mentions a member of the Shepherd family who was among the first settlers of Silent Hill.
  • Perhaps the biggest one, you can find Henry Townshend's apartment room, complete with chained door in the south part of town.
  • The red "Void" which periodically chases Murphy is similar to the Red Light of Death from Silent Hill 3, which stalked Heather through a winding fun house. More so, the chase sequences it instigates are basically lifted from its predecessor, Shattered Memories, right down to the player being able to throw down obstacles and glance backwards at his pursuer.
  • Pyramid Head, two Bubble Head Nurses, Heather Mason, James and Mary Sunderland, and Laura all appear in the joke ending.
  • A painting of "Demon Samael" (i.e. the Incubus final boss from the first game), also in the Centennial Building.
  • One particular building (which you can't enter) will offer a horribly familiar metallic scraping sound when you pass by it.
  • Quite early in the game, you can find an ever-present wheelchair tipped on the side with its wheels still spinning. Turns out it's somewhat of a subversion, as it's actually Foreshadowing this time around...
  • A much appreciated aversion: While the stages are more open and sprawling than ever before, the amount of broken Locked Doors you will encounter can be counted on one hand. Doors that you cannot go through are boarded up entirely, so you no longer need to roam around testing every single door. And of the doors that are locked but can be opened, most just require you to break the lock with a metal item.
  • Portraits of Alessa can be found hanging on walls all over town.
  • There is a boat anchored next to DJ Ricks's boat. It bears the name "Angela's Fire".
  • The "Mirror, Mirror" sidequest (especially the psychiatric report mentioning "the people in the mirror") bears some similarity to the insanity of Helen Grady.
  • Devil's Pit was run by the Gillespie Coal and Iron Company.
    • Which is all the more interesting when you consider that in Silent Hill Origins', Dahlia Gillespie burned her house down with her daughter in it.
  • Travis Grady's truck can be found on Ketchum Street.
  • Murphy's cell number is 302B. In Silent Hill 4, Henry's apartment is Room 302.
  • The model used for the heart-less corpse in the "Dead Man's Hand" sidequest bears a striking resemblance to Adam Shepherd.
  • The van in the Centennial Building garage is the same van that blocks Heather's path in the mall's back alley.
• Cardboard Prison: A quite literal one in the Monastery Otherworld.
• Chase Scene: Every time the Void, a black and red distortion of reality similar to a black hole, appears. There's no options for Murphy except run away as quickly as possible.
• Chekhov's Gun: The police badge found by the first set of clothing that Murphy changes into behind the motel. Although Anne seems to understand the significance of it after Murphy encounters her following the train ride, the game never explains its significance until the end of the story: It is a badge of mourning, worn after the death of a fellow officer, that represents the murder of Frank Coleridge. Depending on your playthrough, Coleridge died at the hands of either Sewell or Murphy. The "Truth & Justice" ending sees Anne accusingly throwing it at Sewell as she confronts him. According to the tie-in comic "Anne's Story", that ending is the canon ending.
• Clock Tower: The Downpour s version of Silent Hill seems to be prominently sporting one. After the Centennial Building otherworld, you end up hanging from the clock face.
• Closed Circle: This is par for the course in Silent Hill, although the town pulls this off in this game with subtle Mind Screw and Oh, Crap! type moments: When fleeing from The Void the first time, if you approach an open space in the wall, it may shut an iron door in front of you, leaving you to pass right by The Void. When approaching an obstacle, it may melt away in front of you, as if it's letting you go on ahead.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Compared to other Silent Hill games, this game has lots of cussing. Special mention goes to Sewell; he does not exactly swear every other sentence, but he is probably the most foul-mouthed character in the series thus far.
• Creepy Doll: This is one of the types of monsters in the game. The Dolls, as they are aptly named, appear to be of the sex doll variety. They represent Anne's guilt for having an affair.
  • A small, eerie-looking doll clutching a knife can be found in the monastery.
• Crow Scare: This is frequently and somewhat egregiously used in the earlier stages, though they do taper off in favour of other, more unsettling types of horror.
  • They do make a return in the Centennial garage, however, if you choose to inspect either of the cars.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Unlike most of the franchise, the endings of the game are not all equally possible as canon. According to the tie-in comic "Anne's Story", "Truth & Justice" is the canon ending.
• Deal with the Devil: Sewell has a habit of performing tit-for-tat favors for the prisoners under his watch. Officer Coleridge warns that these "favors" never work out well for the inmates.
  "I know you're a man of your word, Murphy. You be a straight shooter with me, I'll be a straight shooter with you." (cocks revolver)
• Death Faked for You: In the ending "Forgiveness", Anne tells the police that Murphy died so that he can escape.
• Death of a Child: With one possible exception, every kid either shown or referred to in-game ends up dead before the end, making it somewhat of a running theme. Examples include:
  • Charlie Pendleton's death and defilement.
  • In the sidequests, a father who axed his wife and children to death in a fit of rage, and a mother who is heavily implied to have indirectly caused her severely autistic daughter to drown.
  • A past accident in the Devil's Pit that claimed the lives of eight children.
  • A young autistic boy who succumbs to archaic mental procedures.
  • Murphy is tasked to find a rhyme that is explicitly stated to repel The Bogeyman. When The Bogeyman approaches a little kid, Murphy tries to save the kid by reciting the rhyme by memory. The Bogeyman snaps the child's neck before Murphy can finish.
• Defiant to the End: Murphy is this in the "Execution" ending.
• Diegetic Interface: The state of Murphy's health is discernible only through the number of wounds on his person.
  • There is a health statistic viewable in the menu. Murphy's physical appearance still makes for a passable estimate, but the occasional case of Critical Existence Failure would take the viewer by surprise.
  • The light from his torch also becomes clouded with a bloody filter as he takes more damage.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • JP Sater jumps off a cliff no matter what you say to him.
  • Murphy tries this in one of the bad endings. It doesn't work.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: DJ Ricks does not last long once you finally meet him.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Of the vocal sort: "Revenge is a long and treacherous road, isn't it, Mr. Pendleton? Where do you suppose it ends?" is heard in the opening. The game does not reveal whose voice that is, or its significance, until much later on.
  • Another vocal one is so subtle that most may miss it. Just seconds after the first appearance of The Void, a voice says, "Murphy... RUN!". In either of the good endings, Frank Coleridge, who Murphy refused to kill, tells Murphy the exact same line, tone and all.
  • The Wheelman also makes several blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearances before either it, Frank Coleridge, or any pieces of Murphy's backstory have been introduced.
• Empathic Shapeshifter: The Bogeyman changes his appearance underneath the gas mask to match its viewer's idea of evil. When Murphy sees it, he sees both Napier and himself. When Anne sees it, she sees Murphy.
• Endless Corridor:
  • When you first flee from The Void, you go down a short corridor. You approach the corner, then the corridor extends forward, doubling in length. It continues to extend forward as you flee the Void, then just randomly stops. An unusual example in that the corridor becomes "endless" as you go through it, instead of being endless from the start.
  • A more standard example comes after you escape the Void the second time, and you go up a staircase. But no matter how much you go up, it never ends. In fact, in order to move on, you need to go 'down', where eventually a door will appear, putting you back in the kitchen.
• Epiphanic Prison: This is the most literal example of the entire franchise. Prison imagery figures heavily into the game thanks to the story focusing on a prisoner on the run. Just like previous installments, the only way for the characters to escape is dealing with their personal issues.
• Expy: DJ Ricks might as well work in Dubai.
• Fan Disservice: Napier, in only a towel at the very beginning. Seriously...
  • Also: The Dolls.
• Femme Fatalons: The Screamers have nasty sets of claws.
• Flunky Boss: The Wheelman telekinetically opens prison cells to unleash monsters on Murphy halfway through their battle. Later on, Anne also opens cells to unleash Prisoner Juggernauts during the fight.
• Flushing-Edge Interactivity: There are a lot of toilets you can flush in the game. None of them do anything.
• Foe Romance Subtext:
  • So much between Cunningham and Murphy. Especially when she talks about all the sick and disgusting things she debased herself with just to get Pendleton under her thrall...
  • Murphy and Sewell, to a lesser extent. Largely because of the prison setting.
• Gas Mask, Longcoat: The Bogeyman.
• Genius Loci: Silent Hill would not be Silent Hill if it was not actively trying to kill its newest visitor in some way.
• Get into Jail Free: This is done by Murphy so he could kill Napier.
• Ghostly Goals: The gramophone sidequest has a family who appears to be stuck in limbo urging you to burn the picture of the father who murdered them.
• Glasgow Grin: All non-boss enemies except for Dolls have their mouths mutilated in some fashion.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Officer Coleridge is the good angel to Murphy, giving him as much respect as his own family and motivating him to apply for parole. Sewell is Murphy's bad angel, giving him the oppotunity to have revenge on Napier. Officer Coleridge honestly cares about Murphy, but Sewell only wants him to take revenge so he can use Murphy to get Coleridge for trying to have him charged with corruption.
• Grief-Induced Split: Murphy's son Charlie was killed by Patrick Napier, a pedophilic neighbor. His wife Carol leaves him, placing the blame squarely on Murphy's shoulders, despite neither of them having known Napier was a child molester.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: The "Full Circle" ending heavily implies that Howard Blackwood, JP Sater, and Bobby Ricks were all Heroes of Another Story, but somehow failed or did something terrible, which made them permanent residents of Silent Hill. This ending results in Murphy having this happen to him, which means you will have to play the game again to see another ending. Something similar happens to Anne in the "Reversal" ending.
• Handshake Refusal: When Murphy and Howard first meet, Howard introduces himself and offers his hand to Murphy. Murphy actually takes a few steps back.
• Harbinger of Impending Doom/Hell Is That Noise: The game never explicitly says so, but the dedications are apparently an indication of monsters. DJ Ricks receives calls to his radio station^note Implied to be coming from Silent Hill itself that ask him to play songs with dedications to Murphy, which he obligingly does. When Murphy hears these dedications, there are seemingly always monsters nearby. When Bobby finally meets Murphy and begins to discuss his plans to escape Silent Hill, he gets another call for a dedication...for himself. He does not react well; his next line to Murphy is "they're coming".
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: The aforementioned "Dead Man's Hand" sidequest, as well as every time Murphy has to make his way across a balance beam.
• Heroic BSoD: A small understated one:
  Murphy: "I... I can't believe he jumped..."
• Hero Stole My Bike: Murphy stole a police car and proceeded to lead the cops out on an extended car chase, all to get himself jailed together with Napier.
• Hobos: The game has only one, and he provides you access to the subway network in exchange for favours. The game never really explains why he is there...
• Hollywood Darkness: Frequently averted.
• Humanoid Abomination: The monster designs are decidedly more humanoid in contrast to previous entries.
• Human Shield: Well, maybe not human, but the cages you throw in front of The Void to stall it all have something clearly biological and living inside.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted with weapons. Unlike in previous entries in the series, Murphy can only carry one weapon at a time. If he finds a gun, Murphy can holster it and carry a melee weapon. Played straight with regular inventory items.
• Institutional Apparel: Murphy is a freshly escaped con, so he starts out wearing a prisoner's jumpsuit. Later in the game, he finds a different outfit, and he can find another via the "Stolen Goods" sidequest.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: At times, you might see certain spots around town that Murphy probably could feasibly reach without too much effort, but are nonetheless off-limits to the player. Usually, you can sort of think of it as an unspoken implication that Murphy is automatically filtering out those unremarkable places for the player, although there is an instance where Murphy explicitly looks at a potentially viable pathway that is blocked by a foot-high tree trunk and proclaims he "can't go this way."
  • Aversions also exist where Murphy actually forces his way through certain trivial obstacles, such as smashing off padlocks and hacking through the loosely boarded door.
  • Also worth mentioning are those mysterious chasms and towering fences which are truly insurmountable and block off entire roadways.
• Ironic Echo: The "Execution" ending, when Sewell asks him "Any last words?"
  Murphy: Yeah, I'll see you in hell, cupcake.
• Interface Screw: In the latter half of the game, every once in a while the loading screen quotes will change from your standard "Press X to jump" advice into... something a little more sinister:
  It's in the room with you. You just can't see it.
  Why are you lying?
  They know you’re alone.
  Just give up...
  You can’t ignore it forever.
  They never really loved you anyway...
  We are all slowly dying.
  • They have no obvious connection to anything in-game, and no explanation is ever given.
• Jive Turkey / Large Ham Radio: DJ Bobby Ricks
• Joke Ending: The Surprise ending, where Murphy is suddenly digging his way out of prison with a spoon. He then digs up, and enters a dark room, then the lights turn on as a bunch of characters from the past games reveal a surprise birthday party for him. Pyramid Head from the second game walks in, dragging his BFS behind him. He then swings it to cut the cake, and cuts the table in half with it.
• Jump Scare: Unlike the majority of the games in the Silent Hill series (mostly the earlier ones), there are quite a few.
• Karma Houdini: Sewell gets away with everything in every ending except "Truth & Justice". Conveniently, according to the tie-in comic "Anne's Story", that ending is the canon ending.
• Karma Meter: The game keeps a hidden tally of points, which increases or decreases based on whether you kill or spare defeated monsters and at certain points where you have to make moral decisions. Whether your score is positive or negative combined with your decision at the very end of the game determines your ending.
• Karmic Death: Sewell is heavily implied to be shot by Anne in one of the endings.
• Last-Minute Reprieve: Figuring out whether wandering into Silent Hill is preferable to sitting on Death Row is an interesting thought exercise.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: During the climax, Murphy is given the choice of killing or sparing Anne. The chosen option is then combined with the game's invisible Karma Meter for a total of four endings. There is also the less obvious choice of letting Anne kill Murphy, which counts as a separate ending.
• Light and Mirrors Puzzle: While it is a puzzle that does involve both lights and mirrors, it's not an entirely straight example; The lights are floodlights used to chase and trap monsters into cages, while the mirror (here a flooded floor) shows the entirely different plane of existence said monsters and floodlights reside on.
• Lighter and Softer: Insane as it may sound about a game which opens with a serial pedophile killer, Downpour is a game where things are significantly less malevolent. There is less gore, there are less extreme reactions, and a lot of people seem semi-justified in their actions. Killing the man who murdered your child is less severe than killing your wife, after all.
• Magical Negro: Blackwood.
• The Man in the Mirror Talks Back: Officer Coleridge.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: The Screamers.
• Meaningful Name: The "Ribbons" side-quest involves discovering the fate of Ariadne Johnson, an autistic girl whose mother tied colored ribbons to street lamps in order to guide her home from school. In Classical Mythology, Ariadne was the princess whose magic string guided Theseus through the Minotaur's maze.
• Minimalist Cast: There are less than a dozen characters populating the entire town in the present day. All the dozens of houses, hovels, and residential areas are completely abandoned in The Otherworld, though. But between flashbacks, humanoid monsters, and the various well-fleshed out ghost personalities and backstories, the town ends up feeling a little less desolate.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: Unlike previous games in the series, Downpour doesn't have traditional boss fights. Even the Final Boss is more of a Puzzle Boss encounter in which you run around throwing switches while dodging remote attacks rather than actually directly fighting a physical threat. The closest thing to a boss fight is the showdown with the Boogeyman towards the end of the game, but even that is a relatively short encounter that's more about figuring out how to cause the boss' death instead of fighting it until it runs out of health.
• Multiple Endings: Downpour continues the series tradition. This time the endings depend on how much good or bad karma you get while playing the game and whether or not you spare Anne during the final fight or kill her.
  • "Forgiveness": One of two good endings. It’s revealed that Sewell killed Frank and put the blame on Murphy. Anne understands what really happened to her father, forgives Murphy and hugs him as they reappear back at the shore by the lake and she allows him to escape before police show up.
  • "Truth and Justice": The second good ending. Plays out similarly to "Forgiveness" regarding Sewell killing Frank and Anne forgiving Murphy, but this time the two reappear where the transport bus crashed, then it shows Anne confronting Sewell afterword with a gun behind her back, potentially to get revenge.
  • "Full Circle": One of two bad endings. Murphy is shown killing Frank, but after seeing his and Anne’s dead bodies tries to kill himself with Frank’s pistol knowing he can’t live with what he’s done, only for him to be stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop in the last level.
  • "Execution": The second bad ending. Murphy is seen on death row, strapped up in the execution chamber and ready for lethal injection for drowning his son Charlie and killing Frank.
  • "Surprise!": The Joke Ending which, interestingly enough, doesn’t involve aliens. This ending can be acquired during your second play though. During a side quest, Murphy digs his way into the execution chamber, only for the light to turn on and the characters from not only this game but also of Silent Hill 2 and 3 to be shown throwing him a surprise party, complete with Pyramid Head cutting the cake.
  • "Reversal": The hidden ending. Allow Anne to kill Murphy as the Bogeyman and it’ll show Anne in the same jail seen at the beginning, but now she’s the criminal and Murphy is the cop.
• Murderous Mannequin: Played with in the Devil's Pit mines. At one point, Murphy comes across three eerie-looking miner mannequins, one of which suddenly falls over (and even changes position) should he get too close. Later, not long into the train ride, many more of these mannequins can be seen — then the lights flicker, and the mannequins not only change position, they get closer to Murphy. And they only get closer with every light flicker, until they're right inside the train, staring right into Murphy's face. Then the lights flicker again and they're back in their starting positions.
• My Greatest Second Chance
• Mythology Gag: One of the apartments you can enter in Silent Hill is a replica of Henry's apartment in Silent Hill 4.
  • In the Centennial building, you can find a painting of Alex Shepherd's house.
  • Murphy Pendleton is a possible reference to the Dean Koontz novel 77 Shadow Street, which takes place in Pendleton Drive, and has a security guard character with the first name of Murphy. The novel also deals with sudden horrifying changes to the world much like Silent Hill.
• Neck Snap: The Bogeyman does this to the little boy you meet in the monastery.
• Never Going Back to Prison: Murphy explicitly says this to Cunningham, and the trauma that prison has caused Murphy is visible throughout the game.
• Nightmare Face: Monocle Man.
• Not Quite Dead: If you go for a Pacifist Run and only knock out enemies, there is a slight chance that they will get back up again and attack you from behind.
• Not What It Looks Like:
  • As Murphy kneels over the dead body of the boy killed by The Bogeyman, a little girl walks in on the scene. Naturally, she peels off as fast as her legs will let her.
  • After killing The Wheelman, Anna reveals that he represented Frank, her father. In fact, the Wheelman is replaced by Frank, who is in the shower where Sewell (or Murphy) killed him. Then the cycle becomes full and she tries to murder you. If you spare her, the game reveals what really happened depending on you actions in the game.
• Obstacle Ski Course: Well, Obstacle Slide Course, but there are a few of them in the Otherworld sequences.
• Oddball in the Series: Soundtrack wise, this is the only console Silent Hill game to not feature series regular Akira Yamaoka on music, instead it’s done by Daniel Licht of Dexter fame.
• Offing the Offspring:
  • One of the side quests involves a missing little girl. She followed a route home from school made by her mother, who tied ribbons around various posts around town. The girl would always follow the ribbons without hesitation due to her severe autism. You eventually discover that the mother deliberately altered the path one day because she hated living with the girl's condition. The new route caused the girl to walk off a pier and drown.
  • Murphy himself can end up as an example in the worst ending.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Three in the span of one minute: When Murphy turns on the gas on a kitchen stove, it sparks and catches fire, and he reacts with "Oh shit!". And when he pulls the fire alarm, the world around him distorts into the Otherworld ("What the hell IS THIS!?"). And when the room is filling up with water, he notices it approaching an open breaker box...
  • Napier, too, has several in the space of a minute: When he realizes he isn't alone in the showers, then when he realizes Murphy is armed. Then he finds out the doors are locked. Then Murphy calmly reminds him that they used to be neighbors, and the realization kicks in...
• Opening the Sandbox: The first few areas on the outskirts of Silent Hill are very linear, it's only when you finally get to the town itself that the game world really opens up.
• Orphanage of Fear: A letter you find in the Monastery is written by a child who says they're being "hert" and the medicine they're given "makes them feel sick all the time". The letter comes with an angry note writtten by a supervisor, demanding that every sent letter must be screened and censored by her from now on. In other notes written by her, she refers to the children with nothing but disgust.
• Pacifist Run: You can go through the entire game without killing any enemies, though you will still have to knock a few down to proceed. The game has an achievement/trophy for doing a run this way.
• Pædo Hunt: Murphy arranging to murder his son's killer, Napier.
• Parental Abandonment: Murphy grew up in an orphanage as a child.
• Personal Space Invader: The Screamers have an attack that involves latching themselves onto Murphy's back. Some of the QTEs have Weeping Bats and Prisoner Juggernauts suddenly grabbing him, as well.
• Point of No Return: DJ Ricks' boat. When you enter it, Silent Hill and all its sidequests and items are all lost until you start over.
• Post-Final Boss: After taking the gigantic Final Boss off life support in the game's climactic battle, you have one last fight with Cunningham. She falls in only one hit, and you can take a lot of damage, but you also move very slowly, which can make it difficult to catch up to her as she shoots and sends Prisoner Juggernauts after you. If you happen to lose, you get a special ending.
  • Or three hits from the hammer shockwave attack that the Boogeyman used on you if you can figure out how to perform it.
• Posthumous Character: Charlie Pendleton; Frank Coleridge; Patrick Napier.
• Precision F-Strike: Murphy's verbal reaction whenever enemies appear out of nowhere in front of him (specifically from the ceiling).
• Prison Riot: Overlook Penitentiary was a site of a riot. It is suggested that it was instigated by George Sewell in order to cover up the planned murder of Frank Coleridge by Murphy Pendleton.
• Properly Paranoid: A sidequest tasks you to clear a haunting by arranging a room until it matches its Mirror Universe counterpart. But if you fail to do it in the proper order, a monster only visible in said mirror will spawn. When you complete the sidequest, you will find a psychiatrist's case file on the previous owner of the house: They were driven totally mad by having to do the same routine of rearranging the room every day, "or else the monsters in the mirror will hurt me!". Then you turn around and there is a shadow (texture) of a swinging hanged woman on the wall...even though there is no body hanging from the ceiling.
• Puzzle Boss: The Wheelman.
• Quick Time Event: Occasionally show up, though not to the extent that Homecoming had them, and all but a few of them only consist of waggling the left stick.
• Ragdoll Physics: Murphy is subjected to it if he dies.
• Regenerating Health: If your health drops below 40%, it'll regenerate up to that amount after a while when not in combat. This gives you at least a chance of surviving even if you run out of health kits.
• Revenge: A major theme in the game.
• Revenge Before Reason: Murphy and Anne.
• Role-Reversal Boss: The Post Final Boss has you playing as Bogeyman fighting the Hero Antagonist.
• Sanity Slippage: After his first Otherworld experience, Murphy says this in an offhand comment: "...I'm losing my mind". Considering Silent Hill, we can't blame him for initially thinking that.
• Say My Name: "CHARLIE!"
• Scenery Porn: Surprisingly for a Silent Hill game, The Devil's Pit in particular features many meticulously rendered mountain-scenes. The game as a whole has a lot of little details in its environments, including, but not limited to, the Scenery Gorn elements. Hell, there is even a lot of detail in the areas where Murphy cannot afford to stop and take a good look around, such as Void chases in The Otherworld.
• Self-Inflicted Hell: Anne in the "Reversal" ending, Murphy in the "Full Circle" ending.
• Sequence Breaking: Many of the game's puzzles require you to find a code to open a door. However, the numbers are the same each time, and the game will allow you to input it as soon as you find the door, bypassing the need to track it down in game.
• Schrödinger's Gun: Your actions determine whether Murphy killed Coleridge or was framed for it by Sewell. They also determine whether Murphy killed Napier and, in one ending, if it was Murphy who killed his son Charlie.
  This could tie into the idea that the town itself is a sentient reality-warping entity. If Murphy refuses to learn that violence and vengeance are wrong, it retcons him into being a violent murderer.
• Shadow Discretion Shot: The death of the young boy in the monastery is shown this way.
• Shock and Awe: The Otherworld's water and electricity motif, which includes the likes of an engulfing fog of electricity that pursues Murphy.
• Shout-Out:
  • The bus crash and Murphy's subsequent escape is more than a passing nod to The Fugitive.
  • Word of God states that the water slide sequence is a homage to The Goonies.
  • The reward for completing the "Cinema Verite" side-quest is the Golden Gun from the James Bond movies. The caption for it even says "just like in the movies".
  • At one point in the monastery, a Screamer advances down a corridor while dragging her claws against the wall.
  • One of the captains at Ryall State Prison is named Bryan Handley, which sounds rather similar to Byron Hadley.
  • One area of the town is named Chastain Heights.
  • Murphy's name is a reference to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - the protagonist's last name is McMurphy and the mental institution in which the novel is set is in Pendleton, Oregon.
• Shout-Out Theme Naming: Most if not all of the major streets in this iteration of Silent Hill are named for famous horror/suspense/Gothic fiction writers: Stephen King, Anne Rice, Ambrose Bierce, Billy Martin (using his professional name Poppy Z. Brite), Ann Radcliffe, Robert R. McCammon, Peter Straub, Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, John Saul, Douglas Preston, Richard Laymon(d), and Joe R. Lansdale.
• Shows Damage: Murphy's health is determined by the state of his clothing and the injuries on his person.
• Slut-Shaming: In Anne's Story, a doll does this to Anne:
  Doll: YOU REMEMBER THE VOWS YOU MADE, DON'T YOU, SLUT? IN FRONT OF GOD. AND GOD HEARS, ANNE, GOD REMEMBERS. GOD PUNISHES.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Andy Williams' "Born Free".
• Stock Clock Hand Hang: Murphy briefly ends up hanging from the clock of the otherworld Centennial Building.
• Stylistic Suck: The fighting style in this game is slow and weighty, and most enemies have major, major advantages. Like the earlier games in the series, this is an attempt to preserve a sense of helplessness and fear between Murphy, who is very scared, and the player.
• Survival Horror
• Terms of Endangerment: Sewell addressing Murphy as "cupcake."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Sandwich: In the "Surprise" ending, when Pyramid Head sends half of the cake to the floor - along with half of the table beneath it - by the might of his Great Knife.
• Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: For a game that actively deals with the death of children, naming the recurring baddie "The Bogeyman" was probably intentional.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Guess. However, this is the second game to suggest that the town itself is sentient, the first being Silent Hill 2. The town seems to capture people, putting them through tests to determine if they are worthy of redemption. If they succeed, they achieve some sort of closure; if they fail, they die. When DJ Ricks tells Murphy about his boat and its missing keys, Murphy replies that he will hot-wire it. Ricks responds that trying would end in failure, then says the town has some weird form of reality, complete with "rules" that must be followed. The town then demonstrates what happens when you try to break them by sending a group of screamers to grab Anne and DJ Ricks but leave Murphy unharmed.
• Tranquil Fury: Murphy, when he is beating Napier to a bloody pulp.
• Trapped in TV Land: The "Cutting Room Floor" sidequest.
• Ungrateful Bastard: The game's Karma Meter is primarily determined by whether you execute downed enemies or simply leave them be. However, if you spare them, half the time downed enemies just get back up again with a large portion of their health restored and run up and stab you In the Back.
• Unreliable Narrator: Murphy, but only in the "Execution" ending.
• Video Game Caring Potential/Video Game Cruelty Potential: How nice or mean you are basically determines your ending:
  • You can ignore Anne or try to save her when she is about to fall down the hole;
  • You can console or taunt JP when he is about to jump;
  • You can kill or spare enemies that you knock to the ground;
  • And finally, Bogeyman!Murphy can kill or spare Anne after defeating her.
• Villain Teleportation: The Dolls are sometimes capable of this.
• Violation of Common Sense: For some of the side quests, the only reason the player would even know to do them is because Murphy jots the objective down in his notebook.
  • Upon finding a dead body with the heart torn out, Murphy somehow decides he should go searching for the heart in the creepy underground labyrinth so he can jam it back into the body.
  • After finding an urn full of someone's ashes and a photograph of a spot in town, Murphy speculates that the place was meaningful to the couple who lived there and decides he should take the ashes and scatter them at that spot.
  • Despite running around the whole town grabbing all kinds of loose items, at one point Murphy finds a stash of stolen goods and decides that he is supposed to return these particular items to their rightful owners.
  • After encountering some police cars inexplicably being driven around by monsters, Murphy decides to try to get rid of those cars by seeking out the police dispatcher and calling all the cars back. While it does makes logical sense on some level, it's still a rather strange solution given the mysterious, supernatural context of the game.
  • In most Silent Hill games, leaving the monsters alive will only give them the chance to get back up and kill you. You typically need to search the area for clues that you killed them in those games. In this game, the decision to kill or spare the monsters will affect the ending, and to get the best ending, you must let non-repenting monsters live. This is not like Napier, this is legit self-defense—and sparing them suddenly matters.
• Vulnerable Convoy: The prison bus transporting Murphy and other inmates from Ryall State Penitentiary to Wayside Maximum Security Prison takes a tumble and rolls off the road into woodland. Murphy wakes up and escapes the wreckage on foot, eventually arriving in Silent Hill.
• Waking Up at the Morgue
• Weirdness Censor: The game toys with this. The Postman seems oblivious to the strange occurrences of the town and continues his route unabated. It helps that he's a manifestation of the town and has been present since before 1867. DJ Ricks has been continuing his job as a Disc Jockey despite the town being in near ruins. (This only applies in the Otherworld, as the real world is fine and functional.) Ricks is actually aware of the monsters, but plays along with the act out of fear. He says that the town has "rules" and tries to contact Murphy several times to help him escape, but the efforts later backfire.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The game doesn't mention DJ Ricks after the attack at the radio station.
  • You can hear some rather monstrous radio broadcasts while travelling the Otherworld that imply it didn't go well. And if you use your UV light on the ground, you can see blood marks on the ground that go towards the mirror in a separate room on the same floor, implying that Ricks was dragged into the Otherworld.
• Whispering Ghosts: Frequently, sources including but not limited to Frank Coleridge.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Not quite a giant sandbox, but you have more areas to explore and some side-quests to complete; think "original Silent Hill" and some of its optional areas, as opposed to the more linear areas of later games.
• Written Sound Effect: In the Otherworld Monastery, there is a prison hallway made entirely out of cardboard that contains a life-sized string-puppet version of The Bogeyman, LittleBigPlanet-style. A little cardboard Speech Bubble with the appropriate sound-effect written on it appears whenever it swings its hammer.
• You Killed My Father: Anne chases after Murphy for this reason; whether he did it or not depends on which ending you get.
• Zero-Effort Boss: The final boss fight turns Murphy into The Bogeyman, which is how you fight Anne. You can die in this fight, but you have to intentionally stand there and let Anne Scratch Damage you to death. Doing so, however, grants you one of the game's Multiple Endings.

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