Silent Hill: Homecoming (Xbox 360)

Because home is where the horror is.
9/30/2008 7:29 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Ah, good old Silent Hill. A town that features more fog than a Def Leppard concert, rows of shuttered storefronts (perhaps a Wal-Mart opened nearby?), and tree-lined streets that are always mysteriously truncated by either a bottomless pit or some sort of awful wreckage. Or both.

In case you're keeping score, Homecoming is the fifth game in the survival-horror series. Silent Hill games are typically 20 percent creepy, 20 percent nuts, 10 percent frustrating, and 50 percent depressing, and this one is no exception.

The series has always earned its scares in more subtle ways than the Resident Evil games. Whereas Resident Evil relies on cheap, boogie-man moments -- e.g. zombie dobermans leaping through a glass window -- the Silent Hill games usually feature a slow and steady erosion of the psyche. It's about atmosphere in Silent Hill, whether it's an abandoned amusement park littered with stuffed animal bunnies (SH 3) or the abandoned school from the original game, which stands tall as the seminal place where I first realized that a videogame could scare the Fruit Roll-Ups out of me.

But there's a fine line between being scared and being annoyed, and the Silent Hill series has always walked that line. The sequels, aside from a creep-out here and there, by and large came down on the annoying side of things for me. So, can Homecoming return the series to its original scary-as-all-hell roots?

The unlucky protagonist this time around is Alex Shepherd, a furrowed-browed war veteran who returns home to find his town of Shepherd's Glen blanketed in fog, his streets ending abruptly in bottomless pits and/or wreckage, and his mother sitting catatonic in an empty house. Alex is in search of his younger brother Josh, of whom he keeps getting glimpses off in the distance. Each time Alex seems about to catch up to him, Josh flees, forcing Alex to explore the town of Shepherd's Glen, and eventually -- and there be spoilers ahead, matey -- wind up back in good, old Silent Hill, of course.

As Alex wanders through the fog of the town, he also wanders through the fog of his past, exploring his relationship with his family (in particular, with his father) via a series of dramatic flashbacks. This is that Freudian backbone to which I previously alluded.

Along the way, Alex also encounters zombified nurses wielding butcher knives, a shambling armless creature that blows poisonous gas, a dog that appears to have been turned inside-out, and a giant, ground-pounding beast that appears to be the result of an unholy union between a department store mannequin and a pile of soiled pillows, among other things. As with all Silent Hill games, it's a question of fight or flight. In the previous games, the combat controls were crude, resulting in more flight than fight. But Homecoming features a somewhat more robust combat engine.

While the series' controls have been revamped for Homecoming, it's still not quite on par with -- or as successful as -- the overhaul that Resident Evil 4 received two years ago. Gone, finally, is the ancient, tank-like d-pad control scheme of previous installments. I wouldn't exactly call Alex nimble, but he is far more agile than James Sunderland (SH 2) or Travis Grady (Origins) were in their respective games. Alex can also lock onto a target, and use a dodge move to get out of the way before an incoming blow. Each creature telegraphs its blows in such obvious ways that it may as well hold up a sign that says, "GET READY TO DODGE BECAUSE I AM GOING TO TRY TO HIT YOU NOW."