Mr eel
Silent Hill 0rigins - Competent Rather Than Brilliant, But Still Worth Playing
I’m on some kinda streak here. I’ve actually been finishing games rather than getting bored with them right in the middle. I think it was actually Super Mario Galaxy that actually dug me out of the dumps. Anyhow I finished Silent Hill 0rigins this week. I put it down for a bit while I was playing Mass Effect and came back to it recently.
For a bit of background, Silent Hill 0rigins is the Sony PSP prequel to the Silent Hill series of games. It takes place before the first game and provides a lot of backstory to the events in that and later games in the series. It’s a classic survival horror game. Avoid getting eaten by monsters while simultaneously solving obtuse puzzles. The Silent Hill games are particularly good entries in the genre, with heavy focus on plot and character development. They also feature — in my opinion — some of the best environment, monster and sound design found in horror games. As a result most of the games in the series contain some delightful and terrifying mind-fucks.
Silent Hill 0rigins has our protagonist Travis nearly running over a girl with his truck as he passes through Silent Hill. He then later rescues the same girl — Alessa, for those of you who have played the other games — from a burning house and thus begins his journey through that rotten town, fighting monsters, solving puzzles and generally just trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.
Despite my initial misgivings, SH0 actually pretty good. Still before I get to good bits, I do have a few complaints. Firstly, there are far too many monsters in the game. It reaches the point where the locations are predictable, you know that when you open that door a freaky mmmmmonster is gonna jump you. The problem is the predictability sucks the scares out. Monsters also respawn, which is an incredibly annoying mechanic and quickly becomes predictable as well — after key moments in the game, you can move to another room and know that the monsters will have respawned.
The return of the nurses is predictable and boring. Yes, yes the fans love them, but to me they made more sense in Silent Hill 2 where they are directly related to character’s state of mind. The inclusion in SH0 is obviously just fan-service.
Also, the combat still sucks. It’s always sucked in the Silent Hill games and 0rigins is the same. The problem is that combined with the plethora of monsters, combat quickly becomes a chore. I found myself doing everything I could to avoid a fight, not because it was scary, just boring. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the addition of single use melee weapons either, the bloody things just end up cluttering your inventory.
The pacing felt a little predictable. Move from one building full of puzzles to another, with very little in between. Silent Hill 2 is a better example of how to handle this — plenty of interesting things happen in order to break up gameplay and make it feel less linear or at least less predictable.
Now, the plot in the end was satisfying, but I do have a bit of a problem with certain aspects of it. I think the attempt to have it parallel Silent Hill 2 was a mistake. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t played either game, but I felt it took a bit away from story, viz. the bewildered protagonist getting information in drips and drabs. The problem is that it just wasn’t handled as well as SH2, which has a real emotional kick in comparison.
That said, the main character Travis is sympathetic and likable — a fair amount of effort has gone into his characterisation. The manipulations of Alessa add a lot of menace to the story, as her reasons and actions are ambiguous. Some of the interactions with other characters felt a bit tacked on — like those with Lisa, the nurse — and I think more of the plot advancement should have been handled via interactions with characters rather than fetch-quests. But still, the story was entertaining and satisfying in the end.
The puzzles; my absolute favourites in the series. I’m sure some of the hardcore crowd could point out that some of them are really obvious, but I don’t think that matters. For one thing none of them require you to accumulate seemingly unrelated items which can be combined in unlikely ways — SH2’s major flaw in my opinion. Instead they actually make a lot more sense. Very rarely was I left with the sense of not knowing where to go or what to do. Solving the puzzles themselves isn’t always simple — in fact some are quite tricky — but in the end they all felt less arbitrary, more integrated with game-world and hence more satisfying.
The graphics are top notch. Really impressive, especially considering it’s running on a hand-held. The lighting and mirror effects stand out in particular. In spots some of the textures where a bit low-res, but this was rarely a problem. All in all I think the developers should be proud.
So in conclusion, despite my criticisms, I came out liking the game. The plot is serviceable, the character of Travis is likable, great graphics, great puzzles and a few scares. If I was to make one last complaint, it’s that the game really doesn’t do anything different to the others in the series, but I can forgive it that considering it’s a prequel.
If you’re a Silent Hill fan just buy it all ready. The game was really made especially for you. For everyone else I suggest playing the other games first as the first three in the series are much better. Still if you find it cheap, grab it!
In the future we can look forward to playing Silent Hill 5 on the Xbox 360. Here’s hoping they can take the series beyond a retread of the previous games. As much as I love the series, I’m not interested in playing rehashes of the same game.
Obviously you can look forward to a review of that game when it comes out 
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