Silent Hills

Heck, Death Stranding is at least partially a horror game.

For Sony it would be about capitalising on a brand name. They do have a horror IP under their umbrella (which I know because I'm currently trying to make my way through Siren), but I can't imagine that would get much hype if they announced a sequel today.

Odd thing to say, considering we know literally nothing about it.

Also, none of the games have very strong connections to each other, barring 1 and 3.

Both. P.T. was an absolutely phenomenal demo, and the fact that it had basically an All-Star Cast of developers certainly didn't hurt.

Though for me, personally, I was more interested in the fact that the team consisted of former Team Silent members than any of the more famous names attached. And of the famous names, I'd place del Toro and Ito above Kojima.

Silent Hill is a brand with a lot of cachet even if it's had a lot of shitty sequels.

In a way, it's EXACTLY like a beloved horror movie franchise.

(Halloween, Nightmare, Friday)

You keep hoping the next one won't be terrible.

And...yeah, they turned out to be right when The Phantom Pain turned out to Metal Gear Sold V, but hang on. Hexagonal floor tiles? You'll have to show us what you're talking about because I never paid attention to any floor tiles...

In the hallways of the Cyprus hospital the floor is made up of hexagon shaped tiles.

In some corners of the internet this was taken as another cue of it being Metal Gear because of the hexagon motif in Sons of Liberty (shape of Big Shell and Struts, lighting up on the floor in Arsenal Gear and against the Rays, in the intro, etc.)

How credible is Rely on Horror? Because twitter just led me to this: https://www.relyonhorror.com/latest-news/sources-playstation-backs-silent-hill-series-reboot-silent-hills-revival/

...

I don't know if this is true or not. But I do know that it's stupid.

Why would you reboot Silent Hill? There are exactly two games in the franchise that have a plot, and they pretty much take care of themselves. Three if you count my personal headcanon crack theory that claims that Shattered Memories secretly takes place after Silent Hill 3 and is about Samael trying to reclaim Heather by corrupting her memories of her past, using Dr. Kaufmann (last seen being pulled down into his domain by Lisa Garland) as his agent.

...

Point is, Silent Hill hasn't been plot-driven for a long time. It's a concept series. Person visits the town, the town manifests their psychic trauma, person has to work out their issues or be destroyed by them. Rinse and repeat.

And that's fine. If you want to make a new Silent Hill, that's easy enough to work with. A reboot would be totally unnecessary, because there's basically nothing to reboot here. It'd be like rebooting Super Mario or Pokemon. Like, sure, you can do that, but what are you actually accomplishing by wiping the slate clean? In terms of ongoing overarching narrative, there's barely anything on the slate to begin with.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 15th 2020 at 12:01:55 PM

Most of the games don't really refer to others much. Silent Hill 3 was a sequel to Silent Hill 1 and Silent Hill: Origins was a prequel to 1, while Silent Hill 4: The Room only made a vague reference to Silent Hill 2. The rest of the games are pretty much standalone games.

I hope this "reboot" if it is a thing doesn't try to explain why Silent Hill is what it is. Because that was never really all that important in the games. We didn't really need to know why Silent Hill is some kind of Epiphanic Prison that turns a person's inner demons into literal demons.

Edited by M84 on Mar 16th 2020 at 2:16:41 AM

A "reboot" in this sense probably just means a revival, the series hasn't had a mainline entry in nearly a decade after all. Or it could mean the series getting a refresher of sorts, with the original team (more or less) returning after years of Contested Sequels by third-party developers.

And IIRC, SH4 and Homecoming both involved The Order, didn't they? And Downpour explored the town's history a little bit. Would've explored more, if it weren't for its Troubled Production.

Edited by Primis on Mar 15th 2020 at 11:21:15 AM

Right, SH 4 did have Walter being groomed to be used by the Order too. And Homecoming did involve a branch of the Order.

Personally, I'd consider it a reboot in a conceptual sense. Getting to the bare concepts the series is known for and going from there rather than building off previous iterations of the series building blocks. Even if the story never continued really, there were still a lot of trends and ideas that the games built off of and certainly the series started to develop patterns on how they executed their stories or gameplay.

Having something go back to the drawing board in an attempt to bring a 2020 mindset of game development and challenge a lot of our old expectations of the franchise sounds like a great idea. How a horror game operated in the 90s isn't how a horror game works now. And, to be honest, I think there are also a lot of more interesting psychological traumas we could dive into with the franchise that, quite simply, a third person shooter-esque gameplay and simply SHOOTING everything that comes at you is maybe the wrong approach.

Silent Hill as a concept could be so much more interesting if the gameplay evolved past 'Shoot the monster'. I know some games did away with that; I think Downpour outright made the monsters not something to fight, but it'd be nice to try some new concepts.

For example, why not look at what Alien: Isolation did with the Xenomorph and take the next step in a Silent Hill game? I could think of a lot of ways to make that idea so much more terrifying with a sandbox of Silent Hill's caliber. A level that constantly shifts layout in subtle ways every time you leave hiding to find your next closet or locker or table to hide at? Not only is the monster hunting you, the level is fucking with you too. Or the horror of entering a locker to hide from the monster... only for the locker to be locked and you're stuck there. Or the back of the locker disappears and you're pulled into a completely different room that could not have possibly been there with nowhere to hide.

Shattered Memories did try something different, given that you couldn't actually fight the Raw Shocks — instead you had to run away from them, drive them off with flares, etc.

SHATTERED MEMORIES

That was the one I was thinking of! My bad. Sorry. Been a long time since I even thought of the series and even then I kind of played vicariously through my friend's playing the series.

...does it, though? Modern AAA game development mentality is kinda garbage.

There's a reason the Resident Evil 2 (Remake) was a smash hit: because it wasn't like modern AAA games.

Combat has never really been the focus of any Silent Hill title. It's always been about the puzzles, exploration, story, music, and atmosphere. Basically everything except combat.

Eh, I'm not real big on the idea of turning Silent Hill into yet another Outlast clone where you just hide in a locker until the monster goes away every five minutes.

It was a neat idea once, but it's really overdone now.

Edited by Primis on Mar 16th 2020 at 7:28:06 AM

Oh boy, modern horror game design

That's what I want out of Silent Hill

A confusing mess with almost no direction, being completely helpless, because fighting back is bad for some reason, and jump scares

Ok, 2020 mindset of game development might have been wrong word choice, but a 2020 mindset of what HORROR as a genre looks like would be nice. Take notes from Midsomar, Get Out, Us, and Quiet Place. Look at what horror is building upon right now.

Which could be REALLY fascinating since a lot of Silent Hill's prior horror was based on psychological terror while a lot of modern horror is sociological.

And, while I fully agree that the Outlast trend of 'Dont fight the thing for no reason' is incredibly annoying, I don't think it's impossible to do well and I think a lot of what makes those annoying are how much they saturate the gameplay. It's the only thing you do in those games.

Keep something like a Xenomorph-esque and level fuckery situation to be maybe twice or three times in a massive game and perfect that single sequence into being a memorably terrifying moment. Make it That One Level but in a really good way.

I think one of the biggest issues of modern game development is having a single gameplay feeling or gimmick and dragging it out for the entire journey rather than... diversifying your experiences to create a better sense of pacing and keeping things interesting. I'm more forgiving of Outlast because 1) New Gameplay concept for the time and 2) Indie Studio (I think?) but other studios should know better.

The reason I cited 'shoot the monster' earlier was I sometimes felt like 'shoot the monster' (or 'dodge the monster' in a certain creature's case) is some of the only ways the series really engaged with the horror. I love the puzzles. In fact, I really think modern development needs to do MORE puzzles. But I think we need to think of new ways to engage with the horror or the monster than 'Shoot it' or 'Run away'. Sometimes both are needed, but I think we need more than such a simple dichotomy.

Edited by InkDagger on Mar 16th 2020 at 2:06:42 AM

> jump scares'

Count me in as someone who hates jumpscares,Fatal Frame I'm looking at you right now

What do I want from Silent Hill 5?

• Scary disturbing monster designs
• Lots of rust, barbed wire, and industrial hell
• People dying horribly
• No Pyramid Head
• No Fanservice
• An actual intricate but insane plot (more like Silent Hill 4 than 3)
• No Alessa
• If the protagonist is suffering from some terrible secret or guilt, he actually did something genuinely evil—no halfsies like with Downpour.
• No Hostel or SAW homages.
• Combat but it should be both unnecessary and awkward

To use PT as an example, if Norman Reedus was the protagonist, he actually murdered his wife and family. Maybe he thinks he can bring them back.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Mar 16th 2020 at 3:18:21 AM

Yeah that last bit would be too much for me. There's a line between a protagonist who did something awful and a protagonist who did something genuinely monstrous.

Like, James murdered his wife, but she was deep in the throes of a degenerative neural disease; while his motivation was muddied with selfishness the act itself is something that can ultimately be forgiven since it was, in a dark and fucked up way, a mercy. Murdering your whole family with a shotgun is, uh, harder to justify.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Mar 16th 2020 at 7:52:28 AM

I'd personally like a Silent Hill game that does an elaborate Interface Screw for a few levels if not a whole game, such as simulating deafness by cutting out all audio but leaving in vibrations.

I remember when Homecoming was originally called Silent Hill V. Safe to say it didn't determine the future of the franchise going forward

Though Downpour was the proverbial nail in the coffin. Probably because it was a Troubled Production.

Here's a Wha Happun vid covering it.

I had no idea that Downpour had such a troubled development before I saw that video, though in hindsight, the developer's inexperience was not a good sign.

It also didn't help that Konami released a remaster of the old games that was the worst remaster ever until Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Here's another Wha Happun vid covering that debacle.

Edited by M84 on Mar 16th 2020 at 11:17:31 PM

honestly, trying to "Fix" the combat in Silent Hill is in part what sent it down this road of problems with Homecoming. then later with shattered memories. and later downpour.

fighting the monsters has never been central to silent hill, and to be honest, never been scary. the designs have definitely been out there, but fighting them has never been scary.

at most, it could be stressful, because at the end of the day the Silent Hill games of old was still born from the survival horror genre, so resource management is big, and combat just serves to be something that drains your resources if you get into it. it was, and always will be supplemental to the core appeal of the series.

the appeal of silent hill, to me, was in its atmosphere and story. the walking down mostly empty fog covered streets, and finding out the deeply melancholy or macabre tale being spun. combat just served the slight wrinkle in traversing the town. like the jammed doors or the bottomless chasms littered everywhere.

Edited by I-M-THE-Jetyl-1 on Mar 16th 2020 at 11:56:04 AM

Fair enough. If they can capture that old critical thinking loneliness while trudging through foggy streets, I'm down for that. Reminds me of my own childhood playing point and click mystery games... God I miss those days.

I'd still say data from current horror games is still relevant though, even if we are critical and dismissive of them. Horror as a genre is based around expectations so knowing how you audience is want to think when interacting with your world and how they'll approach the encounters; combative, intellectual, puzzles, or whatever you have in mind. Games are teaching tools. The Player is constantly being told to learn and grow. Horror is about subverting expectations to scare you. The concepts can produce staggeringly beautiful results when married.

So, for example, encountering a monster in Silent Hill right now would probably have players trying to run from it instantly and not trying to fight it, like Outlast. If you know what their gut anxiety driven reaction to the encounter is, build around that a bit. It's one thing I liked about alot of the concepts presented in the PT demo; a lot of players will naturally run from the ghost, but the nature of the hallway could result in the level configuring itself in infinite ways to force the confrontation.

With that design idea in mind, tell me: What is the larger scale iteration of that idea?

Edited by InkDagger on Mar 17th 2020 at 12:39:52 PM