As some of you may know I’ve always had a hate/wanna-love relationship with Silent Hill Origins. Basically it was announced then shown in movie form at the last E3 (not to be confused with the most recent). What I saw there was laughably poor in quality and very vague as to what was happening. Later that year something like two thirds of the development team was sacked (notably the art director) and the project was moved over to England where things would hopefully shape up.
After this the demo videos released went from Resident Evil 4 style over the shoulder camera to the old faithful Silent Hill style. Slowly as more information was released it seemed like, yeah, hey things may actually be shaping up for the better. Hell the producer, William Oretel, even said in an interview basically everything I wanted to hear (like, that everything in the game was more than skin deep, horror movie schlock). I thought at worst the game would just be decent.
SH:O was released nearly a month ago now and I bought it on release, but for my wife. See, the Silent Hill series is something she found pretty much on her own. Shortly after we got married she had a friend who had possibly the most PS1 games in a collection I’d ever seen. She was looking for something to play and asked how Silent Hill was and her friend highly recommended it. I recommended her against it because I made the assumption that it was just Konami trying to break into the survival horror craze. Turns out I assumed wrong and since then the Silent Hill series has become and remained my favorite and most frequently theorized about series. But! my wife always gets first dibs on the games when they’re released. This often means I have get to watch her play through it slowly first. She easily gets too creeped out to play for more than a couple hours a night, and if her schedule is too busy I often have to wait weeks before I can play the game. It’s ok though, I still love her for it.
Shortly after we picked up SH:O our largest, and probably final, home move took place. Since then both her and I have spent a lot of time looking for new houses, visiting family we’ve been ignoring for nearly 8 years and other misc. stuff. Did I mention that we’re also living in my parents basement? Anyways, somewhere along the way we both pretty much completely forgot about the game and it sat at the bottom of a bag in suspend mode for nearly 3 weeks. Well, she’s been gone for a couple days, and I’m getting a bit tired of PC games at the moment (more on that later perhaps) so I pulled out the main PSP memory stick and put in my camera’s so that I can get a crack at it.
Considering that I’ve now played for about an hour I feel that the game has done much more wrong than right, and is pretty much what I have come to expect from all the information I’ve collected. Considering that it’s a prequel to the first Silent Hill game (what ever happen to the series becoming a Twilight Zone-ish installment based in the same city anyways? Why not come out with something that isn’t aping off the back of success? I regress) I can’t take off too many points for being unoriginal… but wait! I can.
See, I don’t know when it happen, but somewhere along the line people believed that Silent Hill 2 was their favorite game, but the fact that it is nearly unrelated to the first game broke their souls. Since then they’ve tried and tried and tried with all their might to make SH2 and the greater SH1+3 canon collide into something that makes sense for them. This can be seen either in the form of creating rules that don’t exist (if you need examples of this read the awful Silent Hill comics), making a movie that is essential a remake of the first game and then inserting SH2 canon items, or retconing SH2 canon into the greater SH1+3 story line by creating a prequel with it. This last option baffles me the most because SH1+3 already have a wide variety of fauna that you can steal bad guys/narrative from, why take it from the unrelated SH2? Is it that hard not to just give in and ape on … oh I said I wouldn’t do that.
The other thing that gets me is the whole “nurse=silent hill” issue. I mean, you fight a nurse in Silent Hill Origins within the first 5 minutes of the game. That’s pretty impressive. Just by inserting nurses you’re not reassuring the old fan base that you know what you’re doing, the only thing I think when I see something like that is “this is all you got?” To take it one step further, the first original creature in the game is obviously Pyramid Head only… slightly different. It’s not worth getting into I guess because, like I said, I kind of expected this.
The main reason I’m giving these lengthy comments after only playing for about an hour is because I’ve spent most of that time in the exact same area dieing far too often because of design flaws that I’m sure seemed awesome on paper. See, if you’re going to steal a combat/weapon system from Dead Rising at least do it right Climax. If you make weapons that break over time (especially if it’s far too short a time) and they don’t respawn, DO NOT make enemies that respawn. I’m having a difficult enough time killing everything with the weapons I got and I don’t appreciate being slaughtered when I go back to make sure I didn’t miss anything because of respawns. Now, yes, enemies have had a history of respawning in SH games, and the usual tactic for this was to just run the hell away if you don’t have enough health. But you see, that’s not an option anymore.
Climax has decided that just worrying about your health isn’t enough, now you have stamina. So if you want to run away from enemies you better have, yes that’s right, an energy drink! But wait, what’s that you say: some enemies can actually run as fast as you and overtake you when you run out of breath? That’s brilliant! I mean, seriously though, it’s way too overwhelming. Did anyone besides the developers play test this game, because it’s exceptionally unbalanced. When I died most recently I could see at least three enemies when I looked around in the fog (I got chased down by the one which killed me making it four total). By that point (just going from one building to another) I had already used 3 health drinks and one first aid kit. Normally I can play any Silent Hill without using that much health in about a half hour, but in SH:O I’m using that much in a five minute span of time. I think they just forgot to reduce the encounter rate after it changed from a RE4 clone back into a Silent Hill game.
No, I really don’t have much positive to say. It does look really good for a PSP game, and it has very brief load times. There, something positive.
And I didn’t even get into the fact that this game retcons an insane asylum into the town of Silent Hill.
