The Five Things Silent Hill Downpour Got Right
Posted By: Whitney April 23rd, 2012 | 10:53 am
So…I was asked to write an article for 1up.com about the 5 things Silent Hill Downpour did right.
To be honest I was flabbergasted and intimidated that such a big video game website would ask someone like me to write this for them. Sure I write on my own websites but this was so different. This article would be seen by a far bigger audience and I was so afraid of fucking it up. Well in the end my enthusiasm for Downpour and the support of family and friends convinced me to give it a shot! I pretty proud of the reasons I came up with. I hope the positives I saw while playing will convince other long time and even new fans to give this title a shot despite the questionable technical issues! I hope you guys will check it out and let me know what you think!
Looking forward to read it 🙂 I’m sure you’ll do a great thing!!!!
Read it. Awesome 🙂
Hm … I must say I disagree on a lot of stuff from the article, but I’ll just mention this:
“It’s an original stand-alone story anyone can play.” – That’s true, of course, but how is it a thing done right? As long as a story is good, it shouldn’t matter if it’s stand-alone or is heavily linked to the previous games.
“Silent Hill: Homecoming basically just copied the plot structure of Silent Hill 2 in which the protagonist suffers from amnesia about a violent act he committed in the past.” – it didn’t, really. The amnesia aspect was just a minor part of the story and in contrast to SH2, the player knew from the beginning that Joshua was dead and something was wrong with Alex’ point of view.
You’re also ignoring that Murphy, while not having direct amnesia, DOES push back memories of a violent act he, depending on which ending you get, either feels responsible for, took part in or committed, not to mention that one of the endings even DOES reveal he actually suffers from amnesia about a violent act he committed in the past.
Personally, I disliked that pretty much the whole backstory is being told in flashbacks, that’s just a bit too easy and cheap storytelling and I also didn’t like that the game spoiled itself with the lot of notes and letters ect. So you always knew the next revelation before it was going to happen. I am also among those who already knew the basic plot structure pretty soon after the beginning due to way too obvious insinuations, so more subtlety would’ve helped there.
Overall, I consider Downpour the weakest of the series as far as “Silent Hill-ness” is concerned, not to speak of the total absence of horror, scare, fear or fright. The caves were creepy because you had almost no light for most of it, that’s about it.
But it speaks much of he series that even Downpour is still a great game. By the way, I killed more monsters in Downpour than in Homecoming – people should stop calling it the action- or combat oriented game in the series just because it has a slightly more complex combat system.
I liked “Silent Hill Downpour”. It wasn’t as good as Silent Hill 2 & 3 but that’s to be expected because they were amazing and creepy games! 😛
You don’t even have to be a Silent Hill fan to get into this game.
It’s way better than some of the crap in stores at the moment.
The only problem I had with the game was the crippling frame rate when auto-saving and going through some doors, but the developers aw hard at work fixing this with a patch. Hopefully it’ll be released soon. 🙂