Silent Hill: Downpour

I have very mixed feelings on this game. It's rough but I think I liked it?

I played this on my PS3.

I suppose I should start with something positive because this game is pretty uneven and I might as well begin on a good note. Visually, it's quite impressive. Characters all look high-quality and the lighting is pretty stellar throughout. A lot of small details stand out such as a film projector's image being blocked by a character in the way or the way an intricate railing's pattern might be cast as a shadow when light passes through it. There are even working mirrors! You can also flush toilets and turn on sinks and that sort of superficial interactivity is always welcome.

That being said, there are quite a few technical issues. There's occasional pop-in that can be noticeable, but performance is the biggest problem. It's shoddy with frequent stuttering and occasional seconds-long hitches. The end result is that while the game looks great (for something from 2012, at least) it's a bit of a pain to actually play.

All of that is a shame because the story is pretty solid. The characters aren't as nuanced or as deep as some of the better entries in this series, but as for the events that take place it's all pretty standard Silent Hill. The main character is someone with a troubled past who ends up stranded in the town after some bad luck and he bumps into a few strange characters who are also seemingly dealing with their own problems.

Unfortunately, the combat is also pretty standard Silent Hill in that it's bad. You have a few ranged weapons, a basic melee attack, and a block, and that's it. The melee attack and block don't feel particularly great, though part of that may be due to the fact that the enemies aren't all that interesting. They're sort-of-generic disheveled people rather than the fleshy BDSM monsters you'd typically find, and as a result they aren't very memorable.

There are a few chase sequences that feel reminiscent of Shattered Memories, but those are also pretty terrible. The long and short of this is that actually playing this game is a bit of a pain. Even the better sequences where you're exploring the streets of Silent Hill, which feel reminiscent of those early games in a really great way, are ultimately overshadowed by the rest of the game.

On that note, the game deviates from earlier entries in that it more closely resembles something open-world. It's not a massive area to explore, but much of the town is at your fingertips and you can easily backtrack to earlier areas with the use of some shortcuts through the underground. It's a neat idea, but it often led to me feeling lost because I wasn't sure where I was meant to go. Maybe that's not a bad thing, as being lost in a town as mysterious as Silent Hill is probably deliberate, but with the performance as shaky as it was even simple traversal could be frustrating to deal with.

I've included my statistics screen below at the time of the game's ending. I had 46 kills and I earned "Ending A", if you were curious. As one final aside, I spent a lot of time looking at this stats screen because it was the only way to get an actual number for your health (rather than the general "you're bloody so your health is low" vibes based system the game ran with).

While there's a ton I like about this game the performance was simply too bad for me to get past. For as much as I love the PS3, a lot of games just didn't run well and this game feels like it was trying to do too much on that poor thing. Maybe it's petty to be so harsh on a game for how well it performs but it's something that's hard to overlook when it feels like you're fighting against it the entire time. The game here has some great ideas and at times feels like the Team Silent games, but it's simply too unstable and inconsistent to be something I can easily recommend.