Oh boy, I shouldn't have let my curiosity take the best of me because it lead me to play this trainwreck. Silent Hill: Homecoming tries to emulate the old Silent Hill formula of Silent Hills 1-3 but ends up falling down and breaking its nose. Let me cut straight to the chase. I am keeping this review spoiler free so don't worry about those. Keep in mind also that this is a review from a person who has only played Silent Hills 1-3.


Much like previous installments in the Silent Hill franchise, it follows a protagonist who ends up in Silent Hill not much out of curiosity but due to being in pursuit of a person. It is practically the story trope of Silent Hill by this point but I am kind of glad that they didn't try anything worse instead of playing safe. However it doesn't feel so polished and the themes it tries to convey do not feel as remarkable or deep as the ones in the previous games. I never really felt that emotionally invested in what was going on and mostly felt quite indifferent. The choices you make during your journey do matter however and it is good that they are clearly presented to the player so that there is no possibility to accidentally make a choice that you didn't want to make. The endings that you get based on these choices however are really disappointing. They are way too short and feel extremely rushed. There are 5 different endings in total but I wouldn't count them adding any replayability for what they offer. You are just better off playing it once through and looking up the other endings on Youtube.


The gameplay is the Silent Hill standard: explore area A enough until you find what you were looking for then proceed to area B etc. etc. Fight a boss, solve a few puzzles here and there. However I can't help but feel that this is much more linear than the previous installments. It seems as if you will mostly find everything that there is to get by just going forward. Don't get me wrong, I do know that Silent Hills are known as the broken door simulators but my gripe is the fact that some areas just feel too barren and linear. The puzzles are also too easy and there is no way to adjust the level of their difficulty so that's a bummer as well.


*sigh* It's like they held a meeting with Konami America, in which Konami said to Double Helix Games: "I bet you can't mess up the decent and unintrusive combat system which Team Silent developed." and Double Helix devs looked back at them with faces full of so much challenge accepted that it wasn't even subtle. Jokes aside, I get that they were trying to make the combat feel more immersive with the dodge mechanics and all, but it is apparent that the whole system was not polished enough. It feels... broken and that's the best way to describe it. Sometimes dodging works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes our lovely protagonist dodges in the direction he feels like rather than what you are trying to input. Counterattacks are a mixed bag as well, sometimes they connect but sometimes they just don't. This was mostly apparrent during boss fights, in which Alex would blatantly miss hits even though the boss' model was in the weapon's reach. Credit where credit's due though, the mutilating animations you get after finishing an enemy off with a heavy attack feel quite satisfying. However, in trying to make the combat feel different, they have just developed another way into making it as monotone as it was in the previous games. I found that the easiest way to go about things is to do the same combo over and over again with a melee weapon until the enemy dies, or in some cases just mash heavy attack because for some reason that works too. What takes the cake though is that unlike in the previous games combat is quite mandatory way too often. I would mostly choose to avoid combat in the previous games, but in this one you just have to fight in some situations. What also does not help is the fact that most enemies take way too many hits so it makes the encounters feel even more tedious and even more of a pacebreaker. Free aiming with guns could have also potentially been a great inclusion but here it just feels as clumsy as the rolling and dodging mechanics.


The good old, and might I add, quite nostalgic sound effects are back. The ambiance however is not as strong as what the predecessors had to offer. Akira Yamaoka still knows how to make Silent Hill sound like Silent Hill but there was never really that feeling of anxiety and nervousness, which at least a one or two tracks caused in Silent Hills 1-3. It is not terrible by any means but not really that awe-inspiring either. Also the use of royalty free screams in a couple of points just made me mostly chuckle rather than feel fear.


Where do I even start with this... Let me just list all the issues that I encountered so you get the idea:

-Missing, mistimed or muffled sound during cutscenes.
-Freezing caused by loading and this can happen at any time. At the start of a cutscene, in the middle of a cutscene, during gameplay, before saving, you name it.
-Crashes when loading the next area which became much more frequent as the game progressed.
-Bugged maps when the resolution is above 1280x720. This means that you are not able to see the whole map but rather a portion of it which results in having to zoom and scroll through the map to see where you are going.
-Unable to see photos and drawings you have collected when the resolution is above 1280x720.
-Loop problems in the ambiance.
-Sound playing from only one speaker.

Also there are loads of unskippable cutscenes which is apparently in every version of the game but it is really annoying as well. Getting a game over because you failed a quicktime event? Don't worry, here's the 5 minutes of cutscene that you watched one more time so that you can really feel the frustration if you fail the quicktime event yet again.


I had to make a section about this because some decisions which the developers made feel a bit off. For instance, I don't understand the big emphasis on combat in a horror game. We are not playing through a horror game to experience the same monotone encounters with enemies that take way too many hits. As I stated before, you are able to avoid most encounters in Silent Hills 1-3, but here it is downright forced because I guess they want to showcase how "cool" and "epic" the new mechanics are. But they are not. And I don't understand how neither the developers, nor playtesters saw this. Also the depiction of Silent Hill has taken way too much "bad influence" from the movies. Mostly prominent being the inclusion of Pyramid Head. I do understand that Pyramid Head is iconic for Silent Hill but why exactly is it even here. Silent Hill (at least in the previous games) changed in correlation to the visitor's psyche. That is why in Silent Hill 2 James Sunderland was chased by the Pyramid Head because he felt guilty and Pyramid Head was trying to exact punishment for that guilt. Here however Pyramid Head has no role whatsoever, he's just there to remind that "Hey! This is a Silent Hill game because I am here.". That's the exact same novelty purpose as what it had in the films but it just doesn't work here and feels way too bothersome. It is also a really lazy way to avoid designing something new. Something which the whole game suffers from: Being too much of the same old, same old.


Silent Hill Homecoming tries to be a good Silent Hill game but fails to deliver that ambition due to a lackluster story and an awful combat system. It does not try enough to be different and the areas it tried to make different feel either broken or uninspired. If you want to play this game, do not buy the PC version. It is riddled with bugs and instability.