Did Silent Hill Downpour Fail the Fans? | In Depth Critique For Halloween
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Vatra Games
Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360
I’ve never understood the hate towards Silent Hill’s transition to Western development teams. Silent HillOrigins added new mechanics that gelled well with the series, further distinguished it from its cousin Resident Evil and should have become a staple of the franchise. The idea of turning off the lights to skulk through the darkness whilst at the same time, not allowing yourself full view of your surroundings is brilliantly scary. Homecoming attempted to continue the innovation with a new combat system, it was a bit of a mess but in other areas like level design and atmosphere, it got it spot on. But there’s another black sheep in the Silent Hill family: Downpour, a title which I remained quietly optimistic about, until I played it!
Rather than Double Helix games returning to develop after Silent Hill Homecoming, Downpour was given to Vatra Games by parent company Kuju, responsible for such mind shattering titles as Dancing With The Stars, Grease: The Game and Zumba Fitness 2...what a great pairing for this blood-curdling game series. Past work doesn’t always relate to future work though, so Downpour could have easily gone down as a solid title. Early talks with developers revealed they probably had other things on their minds though, as Downpour was initially slated to be a first person shooter with multiplayer elements. Now that’s scary!
Gameplay
Downpour certainly doesn’t begin like a Silent Hill game. Within a short space of time, you’ll be doing quick time events to climb up fallen debris, crossing balancing beams and making shallow A-B choices that affect a hidden moral compass. It’s early doors, but already it seems like developers were attempting to ape all of the 7th generation gaming tropes they could muster. The game begins straight out of the first cutscene with a fight against a human enemy (Yes, in a Silent Hill game) This scene serves a dual purpose, to introduce you to the player character Murphy who is evidently a hardened criminal sentenced to life in prison and also it’s a little tutorial getting you used to the controls of the game in an initially safe environment. I covered a similar bit of game design in my review of Silent Hill 1 which has a phenomenal introduction doubling as a tutorial but I’m going to argue that Downpour could have done this even better. How? By either scrapping this fight scene entirely, or by having it be a short cutscene.
Here’s why: The weapons in the game, introduced in this first scene and the small introductory area following it, are found scattered all over every area and serve more purposes that just combat. In the first proper area you get to roam around, the only way forward is through a padlocked gate, so you pick up a nearby wrench and get a prompt to say that padlocks can be broken with a melee weapon. This is done in the same way as you would attack enemies, so when you hit that padlock, you’ve also just learned how to attack, therefore rendering the prior scene completely counter to what most of the previous games delivered in their strong openings.
This weapon system is a slightly different take on both Origins and Homecoming’s mechanics, using weapons from around the environment that break after some use but also needing specific weapons to progress through certain areas. Axes can be used to chop boarded up doors and hooks can be used to pull down ladders. For the most part, the game does a good job of making sure the player always has the opportunity to find the weapon needed in order to progress, something which could have easily broken the game if you lost a weapon through combat.
It does take a while before the first real combat scenario comes up, which is nice as it kept me on edge for a good chunk of the game wondering if I might need to defend myself from some abomination around the next corner. When the combat comes though, you’ll probably wish it didn’t as not only are enemies pretty much everywhere in this game, but the combat system is the real abomination you need to defend yourself from. Hitting with a melee weapon will be your main mode of attack, but enemies will usually block after a couple of hits, then retaliate. This means you then have to block which also wears down your weapon durability. If your weapon breaks, your bare hands won’t be enough to stop you taking damage. It’s a very simple yet functional system for most games. The problem is, in Silent Hill Downpour, it barely functions. The character’s animations are insanely stiff, once you block he can’t seem to turn in predictable increments, instead swinging around to face odd angles. The camera also flails around violently and gets caught on walls. This is a problem that game designers solved years and years ago, the developers of Die Hard Trilogy in 1996 introduced code that made walls invisible when the camera went around them so the important stuff was never out of view.
The firearms in the game suffer from an aiming system that flails around more hideously than even the melee camera does. There’s an auto-targeting system that cannot be turned off but is more likely to make you miss shots than hit them as it frantically sways from side to side. The enemies are far too fast-moving in this game and it affects the gunplay negatively too. Enemies will dodge and flip around akin to MGS2’s vamp boss fight only if Solid Snake spent the majority of his training eating magic mushrooms.
Anyway, most will want to avoid this awful combat, opting to run away when possible and it usually is possible. However, it seems enemies in this game are not there to fight you, they’re there to annoy the hel out of you. Throughout the entire game you will encounter an insane amount of the first kind of enemy, the screamer, who can keep a pace with you better than any Silent Hill enemy before it, also frequently lets out an air piercing scream that stuns Murphy for a few moments. The range of this move is bizarrely inconsistent, sometimes having no effect at close range and sometimes stunning you from a mile away. As I said, more an annoyance than a challenge.
There’s also the gameplay that makes up the majority of your visits to the otherworld in Silent Hill Downpour, a major disappointment unfortunately. Rather than an alternate layout of your surroundings to explore, one that has warped the familiar and mundane to hellish proportions, you’re running away from an eerie light, running straight past any potentially interesting environmental storytelling. Rather than being introduced through interacting with an otherwise innocent-looking object, like running a bath or going down a lift, the otherworld in this game is first spawned from a gas explosion, thrusting you straight into what is essentially an action sequence that does not fit the tone at all.
In fact, I almost scrapped doing this review entirely, so uninspired was the first instance of the otherworld sections of this game. Remember the obscenely long staircase from Silent Hill 2? It’s one of my all time favourite moments from the series. You think you’re just going down into a basement, but you keep going and keep going and Akira Yamaoka’s sublime music starts easing its way in with every step you take. Then the surroundings start to become more hellish, yet still you go deeper down these stairs. Well Silent Hill Downpour thought it was being especially clever when within the space of 15 minutes it uses an abnormally long staircase in its level design no less than three times! The last one seems to go on forever and you’re sat there rolling your eyes thinking this has in no way been earned! Here’s the real kicker though, this staircase is a trick, because you have to turn around and go back the way you came to progress. That is taking the absolute piss! It’s not like this wouldn’t have worked later in the game if it was more subtle and maybe had a hint just beforehand, but for people who have played Silent Hill 2 (and you better have played Silent Hill 2) they are going to think this staircase probably has an end when it doesn’t.
You might be wondering if Silent Hill Downpour ever picks up and the answer is yes. Eventually, you are let loose on an area of Silent Hill with the obligatory map, soon to be filled with squiggles showing where the huge chunks of the road are missing. It’s starting to feel more like Silent Hill. This game introduces a few new things that could have potentially been really great. Side quests are scattered around various indoor areas such as houses, a bank and an art gallery. The rewards for this vary, some give very little, others give new weapons or maybe healing items but these are mostly simple fetch quests and there’s also a bigger problem. Even when playing on hard mode, the misguided addition of regenerating health is more than enough to survive through the game and you also have all your weapons and items taken away from you for the lengthy final dungeon of the game, essentially rendering all of your side questing pointless.
Enemies become more numerous as the game goes on and the ones I thought were done really well, the only ones I enjoyed fighting, were the dolls. These are female mannequins that remain stationary but send invisible ghost dolls after you. The ghosts can only be seen by the UV light you get later in the game, a really cool addition which creates a few creepy scares allowing the character to see ghostly footprints and blood trails across the floor. You can’t kill these ghosts though, you will have to run-up to the physical doll itself and give it a few well-placed blows. The developers got the movements of these mannequin monstrosities spot on and this is one thing that does fit in well with Silent Hill.
Whilst out and about in Silent Hill proper, you may periodically get caught in the rain. These showers gradually turn into an increasingly vicious thunderstorm that spawns enemies in large numbers. The only way you can escape these storms is by finding an indoor area to go into, these are handily more abundant in Downpour than the other games. I do like the idea of this mechanic, but to be honest, it only got to the last stage of the storm once in my playthrough. There’s not really much reason to hang around and other than looking cool and adding to the atmosphere, this only serves to throw more annoying enemies at you. Again, due to the regenerating health, it also doesn’t add any sort of survival aspect to the game as you would expect of such a mechanic. All this makes for an anti-climactic embodiment of the game’s titular downpour.
The later areas of the game, such as a multi-story building with a huge library, an orphanage and the prison are by far the best areas of the game. Other than the side quests the outdoor areas didn’t particularly hold my interest but these definitely did. The more open environments gave me a feeling of exploration and discovery, and some of the set pieces, such as one involving setting up a sound and light show for a stage production, just oozed atmosphere. Every time you’re forced into a fight with an enemy though it just got tedious again, such as with a real oversight I found with the final boss where I would get killed by an enemy even though a cutscene was still running. Hard mode was a mistake basically.
Visuals
One of the first things you’ll notice about Silent Hill Downpour is that it is without a doubt the worst looking Silent Hill Game with the possible exception of Silent Hill 1. I say possible exception because there are visual flaws present in Downpour that even the PS1 game managed to avoid. Close objects flickering in and out of existence, shadows being cast in unnatural trajectories, ugly texture aliasing, the list goes on. The artistic direction of the series has not carried through to this game at all, the generous helpings of film grain have been clinically wiped clean, allowing Downpour’s blemishes even more opportunity to show themselves.
The environments of the game are lacking in character due to a tendency of the developer to dump the same handful of objects absolutely all over the shop. Look at this workbench, seriously, what is it doing in a motel room, in part of a museum, in the police station, just every area of the game has multiples of this same workbench. Previous games have had weird, out of place things in rooms before but this was always very purposeful placement to compliment the horror. Downpour does have a few well-timed horror moments scattered throughout, making good use of a mechanic that has environments change when you’re looking away, but even then, when you look back the most likely thing you’re gonna see is yet another hanged man. They really love them some hanged men, these developers. .
Anyway, let’s take this kettle for example, would you think that this kettle was actually an object that can be interacted with? In the previous games, this kettle would be conspicuously placed, the fixed camera starkly contrasting it with the rest of the room, but here, it’s a completely inconspicuous object just like everything else. But actually, you need to replace the fuse in this kettle to progress the game. The developers could have added some sparking wires to signify it needed to be looked at or changed to the fixed camera, as it seems to do in entirely random rooms later in the game. (Well actually it’s fairly obvious it’s to hide loading screens.) Instead, it took me far longer to move on from this area than it should have done through lack of player guidance.
Luckily in most of the indoor areas of the game, darkness goes a way to disguise the ugly environments, but with this comes even more problems. If you get too close to any object it may have a good chance of blocking all the light from your torch. It’s one of those ludicrous video game torches that only shine light in a very narrow circle directly in front of you and in Downpour, everything outside of this circle is pitch black. Combine the dark areas with the game’s combat, and you’re gonna have a bad time. But then there are areas of the game that are uncharacteristically bright, but not in a way that’s pleasing to the eye with dynamic lighting and shadows, just like a general vague light over everything.
Apart from the dolls which I mentioned, the rest of the monster designs are uninspired and don’t feel like they held much significance with the psyche of the character as the other games did. I get the prisoner enemies, they have facial bondage forcing their eerie grin and their tattooed bodies are very much a reference to Murphy’s life in prison, but did they have to use them so much throughout every single area of the game? I think the main problem I have with the very small number of enemy types is that they are all far too close to human, rather than monsters with a couple of human-esque features. Even the final boss of the game is pretty much a giant guy in a wheelchair, it’s quite comical if you really think about it. I feel like the best visual moments in this game and also the best scares 100% hinged on the rare occurrences of environmental storytelling and not on these boring, repetitive enemy encounters.
Story
I think creating a Silent Hill story centred around a criminal is an excellent idea. In fact, when I first watched the series Prison Break I wished they would use the character Tea Bag as an inspiration for the main character in a Silent Hill game and even use the actor’s likeness and voice. But again, the earlier portions of this game get off to a very rocky start with the characters and narrative. Firstly, Murphy Pendleton does not seem to have much emotion concerning what’s going on around him. Yes, this is definitely a problem in a lot of the other Silent Hill games, but most of his interactions make it incredibly hard to relate to him. I think it’s because whilst previous characters were very mysterious, with little snippets of backstory coming throughout, here we know not only that Murphy is sentenced to life in prison, but also that he murdered the guy in that first scene, and indeed it’s an action that is forced upon the player to execute.
So it is jarring then, that almost immediately after this we get a decision on whether to stop Annie, the guard tracking you down, from falling to her death and even weirder that she falls whichever option you decide to go for. There are very few of these choices in the game and I think they do not come at the right story beats at all, you almost forget they’re a thing and then all of a sudden, oh “would you like to randomly goad this character into suicide that you’ve been perfectly civil with up until this point?” umm, no thanks, I’m good.
We do learn much later in the game and more so with multiple playthroughs (something I will not partake in by the way) that there’s a reason for this moral system. Murphy is not all that he seems and the reasons for his incarceration are a really intriguing revelation. It’s also the case that depending on how you chose in these morally black and white quick time events, the events surrounding both his and Annie’s intertwining fates, including their backstories, can be completely different. It is something that is far more satisfying than just having it decide which single cutscene to play at the end when the writers had talent enough to be able to interchangeably tweak the flashback sequences to give impact to the story going forward but as I said, the generally neutral demeanour of Murphy means this is an admirable yet imperfect twist.
As for the supporting cast, they are hit and miss. Characters have disappeared as mysteriously as they left in previous games, but none as blatantly spooky as some here. With that classic scene of a character continuing to speak, then turning round to see they’re gone. This first happens with the postman who seems completely unfazed by the thick fog, distinct lack of people and abundance of monsters. He seems to know more than he’s letting on but this is something that never really pays off, he only leaves hints as to the goings-on of the town.
There’s also a radio show host who has been sending messages to Murphy whenever he gets near one of the radios scattered across the town, playing some eerily upbeat tunes in between. Eventually, Murphy meets this DJ, demanding answers, but he simply reveals that he gets phone calls from an enigmatic figure who knows all about Murphy and presumably, why he’s trapped in Silent Hill. You might assume this person is the big bad of the game, the final boss, but this can’t be the case because the few times you encounter him in the game he seems just generally annoyed with Murphy, asking who he is and why he’s lurking around. The game never makes it clear but perhaps the answer lies in the revelation that the final boss is not bad at all, merely a manifestation of one of Murphy’s haunting mistakes. Another manifestation takes shape as Murphy’s alter-ego of sorts, “the boogie man” as he is called. Wielding a giant hammer, he is essentially an attempt to do Pyramid head again without actually doing Pyramid head, so although the boogie man has some impactful moments, some of the scariest in the game in fact, he is not the most original of monsters.
By far the strongest characters are the prison guards that worked in the prison Murphy was being held in and we learn more about them as the game goes on. The two main ones being a guard who is very kind to Murphy, helping him with his parole hearings and encouraging him with getting his life back on track. The other, a completely corrupt maniac who tries to manipulate everyone, either to maintain his trafficking of contraband into the prison or even just for his own sick amusement. While the two characters are unambiguously black and white, this does play nicely with Murphy’s character and his inner struggle. Almost like the two are an angel and devil on Murphy’s shoulders.
Let’s return again to the thematic “downpours” of the game. Whilst the game certainly delivers here on the visual front, with even the otherworld being a network of gears and pipes with rainwater perpetually flowing downwards through it, I can’t quite connect with what significance rainfall has with the story and characters of the game. I will have to get into spoilers now to discuss this fully so skip to the next chapter if you like.
One reason I believe rainfall might have been significant for Murphy is the way his son was murdered. Charlie Pendleton was kidnapped by the man you have to kill in the first scene. He was put in a sack and thrown into Toluca Lake. So we do have a tenuous connection to water, but we see the scene where Murphy first finds out his son has been killed. He goes down to the lake and glimpses his body being pulled out, but it’s not raining. Perhaps it should have been, then it would be more a part of Murphy’s psyche rather than his son’s.
My main problem though is that this theme would have been far more fitting to the strangely similar scenario we had in Silent Hill Homecoming. The main character Alex accidentally knocked his brother into Toluca lake from a boat, causing his death. In Homecoming this is excellently foreshadowed and represented by a number of enemies, including the final boss which resembles a waterlogged body. Its bloated stomach is cut open by Alex at the end to reveal his brother inside, submerged and choked in the creature’s bodily fluids.
The symbolism in Homecoming is simply far superior to Downpour and to be honest, it’s some of the best in the series, earlier in the game you learn of the brother’s love of spiders and this photo is another foreshadowing that plays into the symbolism of the final boss. I absolutely loved Homecoming’s story. It did things in a similar way to Silent Hill 2 without outright copying, but Downpour? The symbolism it tries to convey just doesn’t ring as true to me here, it feels like a bit of a mish-mash, hampered even more by its similarities to Homecoming. Despite this, just like its gameplay, Downpour’s story does get better and more gripping as it goes along and the canon ending is a satisfying one that ties up threads satisfactorily. The game also has the usual handful of alternate endings, including the obligatory joke ending which is always nice to see.
Music & Audio
In charge of audio, Silent Hill Downpour has a crack team of composer Daniel Licht, sound designer Joe Hogan and audio director Nathan McCree who was the composer on the first 3 Tomb Raider games. Licht set out to pay homage to the previous soundtracks, he wanted to stay true to the series style whilst also adding a splash of his own and as a fan of his work on the Dexter series, he achieved this brilliantly I’d say. The music in the opening cutscene introduces a mandolin melody as a very nostalgic call back to the original Silent Hill theme, it also features vocals from series regular Mary Elizabeth McGlynn whom Licht said was an essential inclusion.
There was a bit of fan backlash however to the main theme of the game which featured vocals from Korn singer Jonathan Davis. The track was also fairly similar to Korn's style, not exactly too far-flung from Yamaoka's collaboration with Joe Romersa but this time it's pretty lame both lyrically and in the delivery of the vocals. It’s also a pivot in style to more nu-metal, with stabby repetitious guitar chords rather than the steady, cool grunge infused trip-hop of Yamaoka’s collaborations. Needless to say, this track is welcomed by me about as much as those fans who petitioned for its removal.
Let’s not be too harsh based on a single track though, because the rest of the soundtrack is fantastic and goes a long way to inject atmosphere. Licht often lays down a percussive beat with generous use of stereo delay to create a spacious but full texture. Then a really interesting selection of instruments will swell in and out, with full chords or arpeggios. This is something very different to Akira Yamaoka’s style and more akin to Danny Elfman, such as the cool glockenspiel section that dominates ‘The Downpour,’ a track that plays mainly when Murphy is out in the town. The soundtrack is certainly more of a modern one that would not be out of place in a Hollywood movie, and the only disappointment is that the crazy sounds of some of the other games were not there to increase the scare factor, but the moods and dynamics of Daniel Licht’s work compliments Silent Hill Downpour really well as one of its strongest assets.
The same cannot be said of the sound design however. It’s not that it’s bad, but rather I think misses the point entirely. The strongest parts are complementary to the horror, especially in scripted moments when you’re creeping around following the ghostly footsteps of the dolls in the library knowing full well you could be attacked at any moment. There’s a lot of texture to it all, with static, the creaking of the building or little moans and giggles. The problem is the dynamics or lack thereof. These sounds are only ever on or off, with no subtlety making you second guess yourself on how safe you are. The biggest example I can give of this is the radio, which is something the developers of Downpour clearly did not understand the significance of. In previous games, the radio would be louder depending on your proximity to enemies. This was a way to reduce the frustration of a fixed camera angle, allowing you to know you were in danger without actually laying eyes on the enemy. This also doubled as a very scary mechanic when you knew something was right next to you but might find it a better idea to run than turn and face it. In Downpour though, any area that has enemies even remotely in the vicinity, and we’re talking the space of an entire building here, the radio is buzzing at one volume. No dynamics whatsoever. So I’m sure you can guess what kind of frustrations this led to, having no clue that enemies were right behind you about to lunge. A player may simply opt to turn the radio off for the whole game because it simply doesn’t add anything to the experience and in fact, you can even miss picking up the radio entirely in this game. That shows how little thought was put into it.
Conclusion
Silent Hill Downpour failed on so many levels, it’s quite unbelievable. Especially after all the complaints about Homecoming, many of which are unfounded, some of them very much so, you would think that Konami would have tasked a studio that understood what makes the series what it is. However, it does seem that Vatra games at least tried to create a good game here and perhaps if the development wasn’t as rushed as it clearly was, they would have made some fundamental changes to the game that would save it. As it stands, the combat is utterly broken and one of the worst, most frustrating I have ever wrestled with. But the rest of it, despite lacking in the psychological horror and symbolism of the previous games, is a pretty competent exploration game with decent suspense and an interesting plot, that really does get better as it goes along. So perhaps Downpour, despite being an utter failure as a Silent Hill game, is actually worth playing on the lower difficulties to ease off some of that frustration.
Pros:
Fantastic soundtrack that is mostly true to the series.
Has some atmospheric setpiece moments.
An interesting take on storytelling.
Cons:
Every kind of visual bug and eyesore under the sun.
Clunky, stiff, repetitive combat that sucks balls.
Uninspired level design that does not feel like Silent Hill at all.
