It's definitely better than the one in The Room, it's way better than the one in Silent Hill 2, and it might actually be better than the one in Silent Hill 3, which would be quite a feat. In the same vein, the "Dark Silent Hill", the trademark crazy otherworld every Silent Hill protagonist slips into periodically by contract, looks as good as it hasn't in a long time. I already said the intro dream sequence is awesome. If it didn't have the "Silent Hill" name all over it, I would've probably gone much easier on the bad parts. Now, there's plenty not to like about Homecoming, but in general terms I have to admit that it's not as bad as I foresaw. And something appears to be moving under the water. Tactfully, Alex takes the gun from her hands and sets to investigate the basement, discovering, well, that it's flooded. Her dress is soaking wet, and a watery trail leads to the basement door. She tells him his little brother is missing, and that he should go look for him, in a tone that sounds like she's blaming him for something. Once at home, Alex finds his mother sitting on a chair, absent-mindedly staring through a window. Hey, does this place begin to look any familiar? There are an alarming number of signs all over the billboards with pictures of missing people. The town appears to be completely deserted. In any case, call it a respectful tribute or a shameless plagiarism, the scene is fantastic, so there.įollowing the tradition, the dream reaches a certain level of creepiness and then -BAM!, our protagonist, this time one Alex Shepherd, is violently jolted awake, just in time to give himself the welcome to Shepherd's Glen -his hometown, from which he's been long absent. It starts with a dream, which as a storytelling device reminds a little too much of the first and third chapters and, to complicate matters even more, the entire thing is a flat-out rip-off of the movie Jacob's Ladder but hey, we didn't call out Silent Hill 2 on that same thing, so it's only fair that we give this one the benefit of the doubt too. In fact, this might very well be the best intro sequence in any chapter of the series. The first few minutes of the game are surprisingly good. With that, and following the lesson I had recently taught myself through Prince of Persia 2008, I decided to try not to judge Homecoming as another chapter in the Silent Hill series, but instead to focus mainly on the fact it is the first American-developed one, to not compare, and instead to judge it by its own merits -in short, to not demand it to be Silent Hill 2, as I did with the others. For one thing, I sort of made my peace with the two previous chapters, to the point I'm going to replay them soon because I expect to enjoy them more than I ever could under this new light.īut more importantly, it allowed me to approach Homecoming with as clear, uncontaminated a mind as I never had for its predecessors. And, as such, it can never happen again.Ĭontrary to what that might sound like, this realization was something good. Sure enough, it's an exception that outshines any of the other game in the franchise in virtually every aspect, but it's an exception nonetheless. I mean, it is a part of the series, of course, but us fans tend to see it as the norm, as an example to be followed, when it's actually an exception. And not because Silent Hill 2 is this beacon, this unreachable zenith in the series, but because Silent Hill 2 is actually not a part of the series. However, this third time was somewhat of a charm, as along with the burn I had an epiphany: There's no "going back" to Silent Hill 2. Homecoming, then, comes to be the third game with which I get burned. I used to have this long lasting dream that the Silent Hill series would one day go back to what made Silent Hill 2 its undisputed highest point so far. Germany Criminal Code confiscations (§131: Excess Violence).It features a brand new graphics engine giving a realistic horrifying feel along with music composed by Akira Yamaoka who also composed for previous incarnations of the Silent Hill incarnations. The gameplay is the same as it's previous entries where the player searches for objects and uses weapons and hand-to-hand to combat and defend against grotesque monsters while solving puzzles to advance further into the game. This time around the player takes control of a new protagonist by the name of Alex Shepherd who returns to his hometown of Shepherd's Glen and learns of the disappearance of his younger brother, his search leads him onto the fog-laden streets of Silent Hill where he must search the desolate town in order to rescue his brother and learn of his family's dark secrets in the process. Silent Hill: Homecoming is the sixth entry of the Silent Hill series.
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