Silent Hill: Downpour, released ten years ago this year, has long been lambasted for its awkward place in Silent Hill canon. It is still the last “proper” full-length Silent Hill actually released; P.T. technically doesn’t count. So for the longest time, it has been where Silent Hill ended, where the trail goes cold.
Developed by Vatra Games, a now-defunct studio that was based in Brno in the Czech Republic (and sometimes mistakenly believed to be an American company by some reviews or retrospectives I have seen), Downpour frequently ends up at the bottom or towards the bottom of people’s Silent Hill ranking lists. I think the only more unpopular game is Homecoming, a game which I started playing but to this day still can’t bear to finish. Maybe I can finish it on stream instead.
I have been playing Downpour for the first time this year (after putting it off for quite some time now), and am surprised at how competently it is put together. The game certainly is not amazing, which I think is why it sits at the bottom of so many lists, or is even forgotten altogether. It is not a standout survival horror experience that demands to be replayed by fanatics of the genre. But it is a surprisingly well thought through game that can in fact be quite fun to play.
After Homecoming, a game which struggled to build any kind of coherent atmosphere, Downpour does a surprisingly good job at reinventing Silent Hill‘s Otherworld for the new protagonist, escaped convict Murphy Pendleton. While Murphy is perhaps the blandest looking white male protagonist I’ve ever seen, his struggle contains some genuine pathos and his reactions feel (mostly) genuine to the horrors he sees. The Otherworld, for Pendleton, reforms into an Escherian nightmare of impossible geometry and looping hallways, filled with bars, valves, and levers. The game is obviously going for prison imagery, and in the puzzle sections where you are given the opportunity to soak in the environment, I am genuinely impressed by the way in which they were able to successfully reinvent Silent Hill‘s dark underbelly by pushing it through the lens of a man who fears his inevitable imprisonment that will consume most of his life.
The combat is not exactly flawless, but it at least functions as a more natural extension of the original game’s combat, which emphasised the main character’s fragility and mortality. Murphy might be more of a fighter than Harry Mason, but not by much, and when fighting more than one monster, it is very easy to be picked apart as the two monsters successfully harass you. This makes the game’s survival element very pronounced. Murphy can carry one melee weapon and one firearm, and the most memorable moments of the game so far have come when I’ve been facing off against a relentless enemy and the chair I am wielding smashes on their head, but they just keep coming. So I have to weave around the room, dodging flurried attacks and banshee-screams to grab another weapon desperately off of the floor, then I can resume my offensive.
Every encounter has a surprising weight to it, and in being forced to use environmental weapons (and not carry more than one melee weapon at a time), players are forced to examine their environment and think strategically when they are ambushed by monsters.
The game’s main issue is definitely what others have pointed to – the monsters have an unfortunately generic feel, for the most part. While I quite like the “Prisoners” (tortured male figures with their faces stretched into permanent rictus grins by leather straps) and the “Dolls” (mannequin-women who stand stock still in their mannequin form, but torment you in undefeatable ghost form, so you must find the mannequin and smash it before the ghost tears you to shreds), the Screaming Women and the Cave Bat enemies feel painfully generic. The Bogeyman, the game’s “Pyramid Head” style tormentor figure, is also pretty generic (a big guy in a raincoat with a sledgehammer and gas mask), but at least it is an indicator that Vatra were trying to move away from the series’ past and create a new canon of monsters. I only got one good scare so far from the game, and that was when a pair of Prisoners spawned behind me in the open streets of Silent Hill’s suburbs, and rounded the corner at remarkable speed when I was trying to see how to enter a building. Sadly that was the exception rather than the rule, and the monsters rarely have a strong presence on the screen. The Screaming Women are by far the most prevalent monster so far (I am about halfway through the game), and they simply aren’t scary. They are just your generic kind of horror creature – ragged black hair, long claws, and banshee-scream. They are fun to fight, and in groups they can easily tear Murphy to shreds, but still – they’re not uncomfortable to look at in any way, unlike the best Silent Hill monsters.
The best atmospheric sequence has been, perhaps, an optional sequence in the basement of a house. You enter into a dark basement through a small window and see a scratched-out face of a girl on a milk carton. In the distance, you can hear a faint weeping. So you pick your way through the pitch-black house, lit up only by the small lighter that Murphy has as he trudges closer and closer to the sound of the weeping, before it abruptly stops. Heading back the way you came, you notice that a door is now unlocked. Stepping inside, you meet your first Doll mannequin, who surprises you as a ghost of the mannequin flings herself at you from behind the actual enemy. The gun you just found in this room is no help as the bullets go wide and the creature closes in for the kill… it was an impactful and interesting introduction to an enemy that is probably the most novel monster idea in the game (so far).
I think the lack of scary monsters is an indicator of one of Downpour’s two big issues; it just doesn’t manage to hit “scary” enough. It certainly constructs a really great somber atmosphere, with the thick fog, and the rain that accompanies it to indicate the increased presence of monsters in the streets. As luscious storms roll over the desolate streets ofSilent Hill, for just a moment, Downpour begins to construct a haunting atmosphere. That’s when the framerate drops to a solid ten frames per second.
I am not a person who really cares about framerate, but when the game drops to a solid ten (or less) then we have a problem. To scare people, you need to first create a sense of control – then you must show that your mastery over whatever system you are using is so great that you can destabilize the system on purpose in order to frighten the viewer. Sadly Vatra Games just couldn’t get their game under control, which totally shatters any immersion they are working hard to establish. The frame rate is stable indoors, but if you wander the streets of Silent Hill, the open-world quality of which was intended to be one of the greatest draws of the game, be prepared to stagger drunkenly around (at least on the poor PS3 I am playing it on). Some areas are surprisingly gorgeous (The Devil’s Pit mines could be a genuine tourist destination, if they were real), but they are obviously too taxing for the system to render all at once.
The game’s overwhelming use of friendly human characters feels a particular point of divergence from the earlier Silent Hill games so far. I will have to see how the game unfolds, and I’ll report back here and give a final verdict when that’s done. But so far, it’s not as horrendously bad as I had anticipated it being. It remains true to the core of the series and tries to evolve it by modernizing survival horror in what I see as a natural way. It is just a shame that it is rarely scary, and the technical issues are so overwhelming. I’ll see how the rest of the game unfolds, and whether it ends up at the bottom of my own Silent Hill ranking after all… but for now, it’s surprisingly okay!
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