Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008)

So first off, some words about this version. I played the PC version of this, bought through Steam (sometimes running through the client sometimes not). When I first bought it, I could not play it at all, the game would crash, sometimes before the main menu, but if I was lucky, it would crash while trying to load the opening cutscene of a new game. One time I got the game to make it past that, but none of the controls would work. I tried a mod that's supposed to fix things and was sort of able to get it to start but it was still so finnicky it was unplayable. This had nothing to do with my hardware as I had a low-medium build for 2022 at the time and this game is old enough and not a high demand on resources that the specs were fine on paper. I tried it again after upgrading my gpu with hopes that it would at least help with a change in hardware and finally, I could get the game to start, though it wouldn't read the controller input and, I kid you not, I could not alt+tab without the game crashing. The game plays fine with keyboard so the controller problem wasn't too bad (though some QTEs were very difficult since the button prompts simply don't show up and youtube vids I found were playing with a controller so it would show those buttons). More importantly to me, I wasn't able to stream it to friends like I was hoping given I couldn't alt tab to start the stream. So as far as a PC port, I give this game 0 stars. I'm normally less interested in reviewing the quality of ports, so it's not factored into the rest of this review or my overall rating, but I do want to warn anyone buying this on PC that this is the worst PC port of anything I've ever played.

As for the game itself, I mostly felt it was "okay." I've been playing the mainline games of Silent Hill in release order, planning to skip Book of Memories which I think is considered mainline? Origins felt like a decent game that achieves some of the same atmosphere and vibe, but is not to the same legendary status of the first four games. Homecoming continues that trajectory downward, if not steeply. I'd consider it the weakest of those I've played so far, but I still wouldn't consider it a wholly bad game, even if it feels like perhaps the most noticeable step down.

The story misses a lot of the allure of the subtlety you find in early Silent Hill titles. Earlier games you probably won't even fully understand that well immediately after finishing. They're quite purposely the kinds of games that will haunt your thoughts for days, weeks, months, even years to come. The story of this game on the other hand is pretty straightforward and easy to follow for the most part. Now, that's not all bad. I do sometimes like a simple story that's easy to follow and there are certainly benefits to that. But I definitely found much of the game to be far more forgettable in its characters and premise. Simple, basic story just isn't what I come to the series for. There's just too little of the subtlety and deeper meaning to things. The villains don't generally have interesting motivations and the story doesn't have quite the same moral ambiguity that adds to the delicious tragedy the series is known for. It aims at that ambiguity briefly but even then, it feels ham-fisted. There are also some twists that work well, and others that work not so well and border on the problematic (and super predictable). We also get to see Pyramid Head return. After reading some fan theories, it kind of makes sense why he's there as apparently it's not THE Pyramid Head, but another manifestation of one of the cult's icons here to punish one of the characters. But ultimately, it's pretty clear that he's in the game for fan service, justification came after the fact. Much of the story is about Alex coming back home from war to see his family. But things are not right with anyone, or anything, and it is quickly apparent that something is off even with Alex himself as facts and timelines just don't seem to add up. The mystery unravels itself and while it has some good ideas, it's overall not up to par for the earlier series. The cast of side characters feel very stock and basic. There are mildly likeable allies, but they are cookie-cutter archetypes.

Gameplay is okay. I personally think gameplay (at least combat) is kind of straight up bad in just about every Silent Hill game so far. Hilariously though, despite that consistent lack of quality, it seems tweaked significantly in just about every entry, and this game is no exception as once again, the combat feels like it works a lot differently, most notably in that it include...combos?! It was definitely an attempt to make the game feel more action-y, especially with the by-this-point more standard third person over-the-should POV. While it wasn't totally awful, combat still felt pretty jank and like most of the strategy was just trying to remember which weapon is best at stun-locking each kind of enemy. As a caveat, I simply don't think Silent Hill is really about the combat, and in fact, the jank combat is somewhat intentional since you're never really supposed to feel like Rambo, it's not that kind of game, even if you have 300 shotgun ammo by the end. So I generally don't care too much but while the game overall isn't super action-y like a RE4 (2005) shift, it does feel like combat is more of the game and like they wanted it to be a greater appeal this time around. I got sort of used to it, but it's still mostly pretty eh. There is also a weird shift in that Alex eventually does fight and kill actual people in this game, something the series previously has avoided to this point.

That said, while the game does fall short in a lot of ways, it at other times feels like an okay attempt at imitating what's beloved about Silent Hill and this is why I wouldn't say the game is just plain awful. The exploration aspect tends to be pretty similar and is in some ways improved with environments that are more fleshed out than 15 of the same room with a chair or a mirror being the only differentiation. The atmosphere of the environments and exploration feels pretty close to the standard. Akira Yamaoka returns to deliver some good tracks to parallel the foggy alleys and deadly corridors.

I think if like me you're interested in playing through most of the series, this one is lowest of the titles to this point, but definitely still worth playing (just buyer beware with the PC port). If you're new to Silent Hill, I would definitely play one of the early games first. I think it would also be a good title for someone who wants more Silent Hill but has already played the first four titles and is itching for something fresh.

My other Silent Hill reviews:

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories ★★★

Silent Hill: Downpour ★★★★

Silent Hill: The Short Message ★★★

Silent Hill Homecoming in my view is a thoroughly unremarkable game, and it's the first non Team Silent game that feels like Silent Hill in name only. SH isn't exactly ironclad in its identity, and not every SH game needs to be extremely similar to SH2 to be good. That said, Homecoming mostly bears resemblance in the visual design through repetition of SH staples in enemy design, world design, and setpieces. The general narrative/plot design and combat are worlds away from usual SH territory.

The first thing that will jump out at you in Homecoming is the inclusion of a traditional 3rd person camera. Oddly, due to back walk speed being atrocious, the game ends up feeling like RE4. We lose the cinematic scenes that tank controls gave us, but unfortunately we don't get a good combat system in return. It boils down to stunlocking single enemies and getting smoked by multiple enemies without abusing AI quirks. Playing this on hard, it was definitely the most difficult SH game yet, but I wouldn't call it satisfying or interactive due to extremely quick enemy windup animations and the jank of arena fighting. Trying to charge long range heavy attacks is a recipe for certain death, just use the light light heavy combo on your pipe and knife. To its credit there were times where I was just low enough on resources to have real tension, but it was too flawed to be a broadly pleasant experience.

Environment design is key to atmosphere, and Homecoming generally retreads tired locations, with a few appreciated additions. The most notable addition is being able to see the fog world transition into the otherworld, which looks very good for the time and is one of the highlights of the experience. That said, most of the major locations are either seen in previous SH games or feel uninspired, hospital, street, cemetery, hotel, sewers, church. If you haven't seen a location in SH before, you've seen it in another game. The otherworld itself at this point is very stale too, rusty hell factory gets old, and there's no parts of it that I can even uniquely recall, and no unique segments like Nowhere.

There's a few reused setpieces in this game too, which aren't tasteful enough to feel like an homage. The reuse of the confession booth from Silent Hill 3 stands out to me here. In SH3 the confession booth is an optional character of unknown origin begging God for forgiveness for her sin of murder in an act of revenge for her daughter's death, and Heather has the option of saying she forgives her (playing the role of the cult's God and increasing the chance of the possessed ending) or to remain silent and leave (not easing the confessor's feelings of guilt and sorrow). There isn't a right answer here. Homecoming has a confessor booth, but it's the main character's father begging for forgiveness for his sins of neglecting Alex. To get a good ending you must forgive him, the rest lead to death/torment/etc. In my view he doesn't deserve forgiveness, and Alex doesn't appear to hold real hatred for his father, this just gives his father absolution for the acts he committed. But to go any further we must dive into

MAJOR SPOILER TERRITORY

The characters boil down to flat stereotypes very visible in horror movies. The main character, Alex is a soft spoken man with a military background that's searching for his younger brother Joshua. Depending on the choices you make in the game you are either kind-hearted or impatient/harsh. Elle is a generic love interest / damsel in distress that has no combat ability who probably would fail the Bechdel test. Wheeler is fun but is identical to 1000 other police officers in horror movies and his existence further cements the game's B movie status. Every other character is fully one dimensional (The founder descendants) and their motivations are never complex or explored. They're all just evil. Alex is probably my least favorite protagonist in SH for a couple reasons, but his flatness is not the first. Silent Hill seems to be better than average in portraying more severe cases of mental illness with tact, and while there's cases where that isn't as true as it should be, I would say it holds generally true. Eddie is tormented and violent but he's not a comic book villain. Alex being revealed to actually being in a mental hospital for 4 years as a shitty plot twist is bad writing and rubs me the wrong way. There's no interesting exploration of his trauma of his hand in the death of his brother, he's essentially just crazy and needed to be locked in the funny farm. I'll discuss enemy design in spoiler territory bc the bosses are spoilers. Many enemies are similar to past entries (nurses, dogs, smog, swarms, Siam) and most of the others are kinda generic pink fleshy opponents. That said, there's one extremely wild choice made in this game, and that's the inclusion of real human enemies. The rampant killing of real humans makes the game really feel like a B movie, and it carries none of the real weight that self-defense would in real life. Our soldier boy might not be a soldier but he has no issues with ending the life of another man. The boss designs in this game are pretty decent visually, and they all represent sacrificed children and the ways that they died. The final boss has more general themes of birth as it is a pregnant mother that is carrying Joshua. I like them well enough, the fights aren't anything to really write home about though.

Some other complaints:

• QTE's are just annoying and add nothing to the game
• Escorting Elle is tedious and Wheeler fucking smokes enemies for some reason
• Not being able to examine in world for more dialogue is disappointing
• Sound design seems a lot weaker in this game than normal! I was shocked by this, but dialogue in the later scenes literally muting music didn't help this at all.

As a break from the negativity, I genuinely did enjoy the game's last 20% or so. The final puzzles were extremely SH and had a nice bit of thinking required, alongside better designed Otherworld segments that had me reasonably invested.

Overall SH Homecoming feels like it grasps both SH and Horror at a very surface level, and clunky gameplay mechanics further bury the game. It doesn't really capture any of the magic that SH has outside of a few scenes, and it doesn't bring anything unique to the table.

I wouldn't recommend this to anyone specifically, but I did have some fun nearing the end. It's a playable b movie slasher while missing most of the charm of something like Illbleed, in a different world maybe that's exactly what this game would be without the burden of the SH label. Skip it unless you're playing through the series, I played on RPCS3.

I have lots to say about this game but I'll try to be brief. Silent Hill: Homecoming is a severely underrated game. It's not a perfect game (or even as good as the original 4 Silent Hills) but it doesn't deserve the majority of the hate it receives. Homecoming is a survival horror game in the classic sense. It's all about creepy atmosphere, resource management, puzzle-solving, exploration and tense enemy encounters. The biggest mark against it is that it simply came out at a time when the survival-horror genre was in a state of existential crisis and it needed a more distinct identity and additional polish in order to boldly steer the franchise into a new era.

3 years earlier, Resident Evil 4 marked a radical shift for the genre by adopting a slick, action-focused gameplay style that expanded upon many of the ideas found in classic survival-horror but made them more approachable for a larger audience. In doing so, it set a new precedent for survival-horror games: they now had to be fun. This transition within the genre happened to occur at the same time that Konami was transitioning the development of the Silent Hill series to new studios as the original Team Silent had called it quits. It was now time to see if this flagship horror series could thrive without the hand of its original creators.

Short answer: yes and no. Like I said, Silent Hill: Homecoming (like the other 3 non Team Silent entries in the series) is good. It just lacks some of that special hard-to-define nightmare sauce that the original 4 games had in spades. Homecoming attempts to be a more action-focused game a la Resident Evil 4 while retaining a heavy dose of that trademark Silent Hill feeling of fumbling in the dark against unspeakable horrors. It kind of lands in an odd space where you have more means than ever to battle said horrors, but doing so can feel a bit clunky and haphazard thanks to a combat engine that is pretty rough around the edges. Combat was never a main focus of Silent Hill and by shining a light on it, you draw attention to how messy it is. That being said, the monsters you fight in this game are superbly designed and definitely hold their own with the best creature designs the series has to offer. Also, this game contains some of the best boss fights in any Silent Hill game. Scarlet, in particular, is one of the most beautiful and frightening enemy encounters in the entire series. Music is handled by series staple Akira Yamaoka and is similarly superb, though at this point you can kind of see him recycling earlier ideas a bit. That's also a problem when it comes to the plot of this game: not enough new ideas. The first 4 Silent Hills were boldly creative in their approach to psychological horror storytelling, so to see recycling of ideas is somewhat disappointing. That being said, the story is good and features some genuinely memorable moments. It's just not quite as brilliant as, say, Silent Hill 2, something that became somewhat of a persistent curse for the series.

Homecoming is a game that attempts to chart a new course for the Silent Hill franchise. In some ways, it's one of the most ambitious titles in the series. In others, it's crippled by an inability to break free from the stylistic constraints of its forebears. Homecoming seems like an attempt to modernize and reconcile the Silent Hill formula and it almost pays off magnificently. It merely needed more time in the oven. If it had been the answer to Resident Evil 4 it should have been, it could have helped chart a course forward for the genre. Instead, its turbulent development led to one of the great "what ifs" of gaming and helped usher in an era of survival-horror defined by uncertainty and scarcity. I wholeheartedly recommend checking it out though, because it's a very enjoyable game and it's one of the last of its kind.

Well I've played Silent Hill 2 and 3. This isn't as good as either of those but I guess its not terrible. The combat is more interesting I suppose but I think that was kind of the point with the other games, that the combat is supposed to be kind of clunky and hard because your playing as a regular joe and not a martial artist. But this one is much more actiony soo its a plus and a negative at the same time for me. The side characters were kind of annoying. Theres a dark skinned dude that sort of becomes your side kick and really serves no purpose really other than to shout and act "hood" and then your main character has a love interest who also serves no real purpose other than create an unnecessary love story that doesn't pertain to anything. Kinda feels like some hollywood movie tropes to me. But these things would be forgivable if not for one minor thing. This is a horror game right? Well its not scary. At all. I think I jumped once at the beginning and that was it. No sense of dread and one cheap jump scare. Kinda dumb. Although, I can definitely say that the story picks up later in the game and becomes pretty fascinating. But even then you have a couple hours of boredom first. Soo I feel kind of conflicted.

-Pros-

-More interesting combat then previous entries. -Storyline picks up halfway in game and becomes pretty good.

-Cons-

-Annoying side characters -NOT SCARY!!!

Soo its a below average game with some memorable things but not really worth it in the long run.