Silent Hill: Homecoming

 While I mostly enjoyed Silent Hill: Origins, I think I see why people say the series went downhill after the first four entries. This game was... not as good as the rest. It's a bit tricky to lay out why this one feels lesser than the ones that came before but I'll do my best to try.

While I did play a bit of the PC version, I ultimately played this on my PS3 instead

I'll start with the things I liked because there are things worth highlighting in here. The combat is going for something a bit more action-y and, for the most part, it kinda works. It's centered around multi-hit combos and counters with a dodge being prominent, but the dodge feels pretty terrible. You don't seem to have much control over which direction you dodge into, but the thought behind it is nice and in practice it usually lets you dodge and/or block incoming attacks when timed right. 

The music is still Akira Yamaoka so it's still good and moody. I don't have much to say about it but it gets unsettling at times and is otherwise just really solid, which is what you want from a backing soundtrack to a game. The bossfights, on an unrelated note, are also all pretty good. Multi-stage battles against upsetting-looking designs with a decent gimmick or strategy for each encounter, hard to ask for more from video game boss battles in something like this.

Now, for my issues with the game.  I played an hour or so of the Steam version with the fan-patch that allegedly fixed its issues but it still crashed frequently without warning. It ran well but losing twenty-to-thirty minutes of progress was frustrating enough that I sought out a PS3 version of the game and decided to play it there instead. On the PS3, the performance is rough. It feels like it struggles to maintain a steady framerate and certain situations, such as the Smog's smoke attack, bring an already unstable framerate to a complete stop. The game ends up feeling sluggish and heavy as a result so the combat often doesn't feel as good as it probably should.

The story felt underwhelming for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. On its surface everything feels pretty Silent Hill. You have a plot centered around the cult and their God, you have frequent forays into the Otherworld, you have nurses and a hospital, you have holes you need to jump into, it all should be standard Silent Hill. Yet, something about it felt off to me. Maybe because most of it isn't set in Silent Hill but, rather, a neighboring town of Shepherd's Glen, maybe because the "cinematic" presentation of a lot of it felt like so many other PS3-era action games, maybe because of something else entirely, for some reason the game didn't click with me the way the rest of the series has.

This is a series of games about climbing into dark and mysterious holes.

It's a game that's trying to be like the others in the series but I feel it doesn't add much of note. Also, and this last one is maybe a bit petty, but Pyramid Head makes an appearance and it feels out-of-place. Sure, there are lore reasons why he could show up and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with him showing up, but it comes across as them using iconography from Silent Hill 2 without really putting in the work to make it feel justified.

Sadly, the game didn't have a results screen at the end but I did get this messsage after receiving what-I-think-was the "Good" ending, and who could ask for something better than this?

This was my reward after 9-and-a-half hours.

I've played a lot of Silent Hill games at this point and, unfortunately, this one was probably my least favorite. There are things about it that I feel a bit unfair for disliking but, ultimately, my opinions are what they are and something about this game just never vibed for me. It's not terrible and if you're hankering for more Silent Hill after playing the others it'll give you more of that, but it's gonna have to go pretty low on my personal rankings.