I'm in the home stretch now, I played a Silent Hill game from this year. It was... fine, I guess?
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| I played this on my PS5. |
If you aren't aware what this is, it's a PS5 exclusive game that has you playing as a teenage girl trying to find one of her friends in a run-down apartment building. There's very little mechanical depth and it's more a game about taking in the ambience of its environments than anything else, so in a lot of ways it feels reminiscent of P.T.
Those environments are the star of the show here, personally. Nearly every wall is coated with some sort of art or geometry, ranging from graffiti to post-it notes to rusty Otherworld chain-link fences. The graffiti and notes were surprisingly varied, though with how dense the walls were covered in this there were certainly repeats. Repeated messages aside, it lends a great atmosphere to the game
That atmosphere is nice, but there are gameplay sequences in this game where the dense imagery actually complicates things. Rather than having combat, this has chase sequences where you need to run through similar-looking hallways while trying not to get caught by this game's monster, a cherry-blossom woman. The art is impressive and the creature is animated at a different frame rate so its motion is memorable and disturbing, but when you're trying to move through these spaces, nearly-identical hallways make navigation difficult. The game is also very dark. I think it could have benefited from Shattered Memories's Mirror's Edge runner-vision, as the mazelike areas you need to traverse often left me feeling lost and disoriented.
This game is largely a narrative experience, then, so it's unfortunate that the story ultimately isn't all that great. It's serviceable, if a bit cliched, but more importantly the dialogue just doesn't always feel particularly natural. There are full-motion-video sequences with line-readings that feel awkward, and most of the characters involved are angsty teen girls which not everyone will necessarily connect with. Some friends watched me play this and they were very harsh on it, but I enjoyed it well enough. It has its flaws but it's a solid story about someone coming-to-terms with their grief and guilt while traversing eerie and upsetting environments, so it felt enough like Silent Hill.
Suicidal themes and some graphic imagery is integral to the game's plot so know that going in, but there are enough on-screen messages that when it became relevant to the story I'd been properly warned. Still, if that stuff is tough for you then know that this game gets grim, at points.
I know this is a bit shorter than most of my usual posts, but I don't know that I have all that much more to say about this. It took me about two-and-a-half hours to finish it, though I was certainly taking my time, and whether or not it lands for you will ultimately come down to a matter of taste. I thought its story worked, my friends seemed to hate it, so my advice is to give it a shot if you've got a PS5. It's a new Silent Hill story and it's free.
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