[Ed’s Note: While this review doesn’t completely reveal the ending of the game, it does touch on some aspects of it.  So, if you are at all sensitive to being exposed to spoilars, consider this your warning.]

I’ve never understood why franchises stop numbering their games.  It starts off normal with Game 1, then Game 2: Return of Whoever, then Game 3: Eternal Something-Or-Other, and then that’s where things branch off.  Sometimes you’ll get a Game 4: Somebody’s Revenge, but other times the numbering stops, and you’re left checking copyright dates to figure out whether Game: Object’s Curse comes before or after Game: Legacy of Guy-From-First-Game.  Personally, I think dropping numbers is ridiculous.  You aren’t fooling me, I know you’ve been milking this franchise for 10+ titles.

Silent Hill: Homecoming, should technically be Silent Hill 6: Homecoming, but for whatever silly reason, Konami stopped numbering after the fourth installment.  Go figure.  I will still refer to it as Silent Hill 6.

Before Homecoming, I’d only ever played two Silent Hill titles.  My memories of Silent Hill 2 are brief; I stopped playing after about half an hour because I was playing alone and got too freaked out.  Silent Hill 3 I finished, and the thing I remember best is the “Mirror Room” where if you stand in it for long enough, the whole room fills with blood, and you die, while your reflection stands motionless, watching.  Those games were SCARY.  Honestly, seriously scary.

Silent Hill 6, however, seemed decidedly less so.  It could be that I’m older now, and I’ve been desensitized to it, but I think not.  In a recent article about Dead Space, I pointed out how its attempts at terror paled in comparison to the Silent Hill franchise.  I still stand behind that, and SH6 was ten times as frightening as Dead Space, but I’d have to say that compared to SH2 or 3, they kind of wussed out a bit.  The cut-scenes (which there are too few of, in my opinion) were scary, but it was missing those Mirror Room type events, things inserted into gameplay that have no bearing on your game progress, but exist solely to creep you the hell out.  As soon as a video sequence begins in a game like Silent Hill, I brace my nerves, tensed and waiting for gruesome, startling and disturbing imagery.  I’m ready. It’s when I’m walking through a room and a noise makes me turn around suddenly, to find my environment changed, with no immediately discernible threat, that I lose my safe zone.  It’s like watching a horror movie.  When the movie clock rolls around to night-time, and the characters are walking through the cemetery, you know something is going to happen.  When they’re sitting on their porch in broad daylight, scary things become scarier, because they’re unexpected.

SH6 has almost none of those types of events.  Sure, there’s a room filled with creepy looking dolls, but their heads don’t fall off when you walk by, or anything like that.  Although there was a boss that was a giant doll, which was cool.  They get extra points for the children’s crayon drawings you collect throughout the game that depict horrible acts of torture, but lose points for environments that are disappointingly non-interactive.  I think for the next game (who are we kidding, there will totally be a next game), they should take a few hints from the Condemned series.  Those guys know how to make a scary environment, though they share the SH penchant for locked doors.

I know it seems like I’m talking too much about the scariness of the game, and not enough about the game play, but seriously, why do you play a scary game, if not to be scared?  To be completely honest, if you’re not going to play SH6 for the fright factor, don’t bother playing.  The combat system has its virtues, but if you’re fighting more than one enemy at once, you’re in trouble.  On top of that, I was surprised at how little combat there actually was in the game.  There were long stretches of wandering with no enemies in sight. This was okay in some cases;  my favourite level, which is your house, but in reverse-o hell world, is a giant puzzle that was really fun to solve, and I think we only encountered one bad guy in the whole thing.  Other times, I felt that we’d been walking around too long without anything happening.

Homecoming has all the staples of the genre and the series.  There are a mind-boggling number of doors with broken locks, and both towns you visit have disproportionately large cemeteries.  There is a cult, and a curse brought down on you by your forefathers’ arrangements with said cult.  Ammo is scarce, and head shots are best.  There are zombie dogs, and they look like they’re inside out, and they jump on you and try to eat your face.  It’s all standard fare.  I don’t want to spoil the story too much for you, but you play as Alex Sheppard, and you’re looking for your younger brother in your hometown, which is filled with fog, and zombie dogs, and broken locks.  Also, look out for the lamest zombie enemy to ever grace a survival horror game:  marginally resembling Venom from Spider-Man, but with no arms, this guy breathes poison smoke on you if you let him get too close.  His lack of arms combines lethally with a physical deformity that prevents him from walking faster than a snail.  If you stand still long enough for him to reach you, then you deserve death by poison smog.  By the end of the game, we were just running past these guys.

Since I’ve already mentioned that I play games like this for the story alone, I have to tell you that the story unfolded at a good pace, with just enough suspense to keep you interested, and released tidbits at just the right times… until the end. The end of the game was completely unsatisfying, with a boss that was too easy to kill, and a video sequence that left me saying “Okay, wait…. so…. what?”.  SH6 has five possible endings, none of which make very much sense, so don’t worry, if you don’t understand the one you get, you’re not missing anything.  The 1Up review of SH6 had this to say:

“By the time I reached one of the game’s multiple endings, I had a clear understanding of exactly what happened, and why — leaving little for me to think about afterward — whereas previous games were incredibly nuanced and downright confusing, no matter which ending you received.”

Apparently we didn’t play the same game.  Various endings render the entire game either a dream, a living purgatory, or a premonition of sorts, and that’s with some extrapolating.  If the 1Up guy had nothing to think about afterward, he is obviously a dunce.  I just checked, and he was let go in the recent axings over there.  Coincidence?  Don’t come looking for a job at Completionist.com, we won’t have you.

You may be surprised, or not, to find out that this is the first Silent Hill game I have played.  Although, technically, I didn’t really play it since the controller was actually in the hands of my sister’s boyfriend.  This new perspective, which is usually how Julie expereiences a game, allowed me to wrap myself up a little bit more in the story.

With the exception of gems like Bioshock or Mass Effect, survival/horror games are perhaps the best examples of story telling in games.  Rarely do they stray from standard gameplay mechanics which forces them to develop an interesting story.  While I am unable to compare it to any previous games in the series, Silent Hill: Homecoming was interesting enough for me to want to know what was going to happen next.  The ending did leave me saying “Hrm?” which I find happens all too rarely in games.