Recent reviews by itakenaps

So I made a review when the pre-order early access was available and I decided to just completely redo it since it's fully available now. Just for my experience, I cannot recommend this game. If you enjoy the game I am very happy for you and I wish I could say the same for myself. I'm roughly at the midway point in the game currently and I'm trying to finish it but the graphical amount of bugs I am encountering is making it difficult. I'll give a bit of a rundown of how I feel below:

Edit: I finished the game and I hate everything about it. The ending is trash. The final area is just nonstop fighting, with limited room and you can't dodge everything. The last boss has an ungodly amount of health and 1-shot moves. The game is trash and an embarrassment to the silent hill franchise

If you don't wish to read what I have written my overall score is a 4/10. If I can get the game to stabilize, I'll re-evaluate this later and might increase it (I actually decreased my initial review from a 5.5 to a 4. I hate this game) Also the game is extremely short, I'm over halfway at this point which means it takes roughly 8 hours to finish a 70$ game. I don't feel like a game that's 70$ should rely on constant replays to justify the price tag.

The Good:
-Soundtrack
-Atmosphere
-Environment
-Character Design
-Characters and dialogue (Japanese w/ English subtitles. The all english version was like watching an old godzilla movie)
-I actually don't mind the puzzles. I know there's a good amount of complaints about them, but I'm chill
-The middle school lvl

The Bad:
As a background, I have a 5090 and an Ultra 9. The comments need to stop saying people with 5090s aren't optimizing their PC. We shouldn't have to optimize a PC with a GPU that costs over 2000$ anymore than what it is given out of the box for a game.

Starting off with the first issue. It's not running well and UE5 is the reason. There are multiple bugs and glitches and I will name some below:

These are ones I have personally encountered in almost 5 hours of playing.

-Startup crashing (Changing the startup to add -dx12 or -dx11 sometimes fixes this issue)

-After encountering the first enemy, the game will sometimes change native resolutions to where you are basically in an almost first person mode. The workaround for this is as follows; chain closing and opening the game, completely restarting, or changing from windowed to fullscreen mode multiple times. Please note this also happens at multiple points throughout the game. It seems that the lock on mechanic (left trigger) is what can cause it, as well as cutscenes themselves

-Sometimes when ending the game and then deciding to play again later, the game decides that every single environment detail is now a rubberband and will follow you around on the screen. The workaround is as follows: re-download the latest drivers, multiple times.

-Traversal stuttering. This one is pretty self explanatory

-Scarecrow puzzle will sometimes bug out to the point where you cannot pick the correct scarecrow note as it won't allow you to zoom in and select. the only way to fix this is to completely restart the game.

-Excessive screen tearing to the point it generates GPU errors.

Just because you don't experience these issues doesn't mean that they don't exist. There are multiple negative reviews and discussion topics on steam and reddit that highlight that performance is an issue and we need to stop ignoring this fact.

Now that we are past the graphical and optimization issues.

-The game isn't Silent Hill. It's a mid tier japanese horror game with the name slapped on it to sell more. There are no tie ins to the main series at all. I would have even been happy if they threw in the idea that the town actually changes shape completely depending on the person who enters it. But it looks like team silent has decided that what makes silent hill is 'basic trauma and fog'

-The combat and inventory management is atrocious. There's an ungodly amount of enemies in the game and some just re-alive themselves with no explanation other than to be annoying pests. The fact that you only get small amounts of inventory increases (ie: +1) every few hours is ridiculous. Her stamina depletes so fast that dodging enemies can be a huge chore. Then when she runs out of Stamina completely, she pauses (no movement at all) for roughly 3 seconds and is completely vulnerable to any and all monsters.

-There are no ways to break out of a hold. If you stutter into a monster and it grabs you, it can basically 2 hit you.

-The story is extremely weak, you can figure out the plot within roughly a 3 hour period just by picking up the notes and taking your time to read the journal as it updates.

-I'm not going to spoil this part for people. But as you continue the game, something happens to the main character that completely changes the dynamic and pace of the game itself. Making it go from a kinda psychological horror game to just RE action, and it's like, really.

All in all I am disappointed

I'm a huge fan of the series and have played the games multiple times since I was a teenager. What makes Silent Hill and its games great are its complex story telling and the presence of guilt, isolation and subtext that are presented in the original games. In the end I waited over a decade for Silent Hill to be revived only to be greeted with a game that doesn't follow the formula that makes Silent Hill a great franchise and I hope that maybe the next one will go back to its roots.