They always say you should never go back. And considering the gruesome nightmares of the body and mind that the Silent Hill tourist board have been selling for years, perhaps we should heed the old adage. Against our better judgment though, we’re going to go and poke its festering corpse with an HD stick.
There have been plenty of HD re-releases of late and the majority of them have been awesome.God of War, Metal Gear Solid and Sly Raccoon are still fantastic games to play. Silent Hill may prove to be a rotten horse flaying too far though.
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Survival Horror has been a festering corpse for a while now. Resident Evil and Dead Space have mutated in shooting games with limited ammo and we’re left with the Silent Hill series that’s been struggling since SH3. Nowadays we have Demon’s Souls (ish) and Amy, the later being my frontrunner for worst game of the year.
I’m all for giving Silent Hill: Downpour a shot as it has to be better than SH: Homecoming at least. And I’m glad to say it is. Thankfully, the new developers, Vatra have at least played Alan Wake, one of the rare gems the genre has produced in recent times. Hold it; I should probably put a hold on the semi-optimistic slant this review was heading. This game’s no Alan Wake beater, just so you know.
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Survival horror continues its search for a new host as this promising download-only effort fails on all fronts. A technical nightmare that feels rushed, untested, unloved, thoughtless and irritating. Amy, we are upset and disappointed. More so because before we got to hold your hand we thought this would be the post-Ico hit we’ve needed.
The premise was so deliciously tangible it was hard not to get excited about this ambitious studio bringing survival horror to the downloadable market, especially seeing as the genre has ebbed in recent years on modern consoles.
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Heavy Rain made with a cheap video recorder is a good way to think of this game. The video footage is blurry on the small screen but in fairness, as a Minis title it has to be a small file size and it’s a lot of footage compressed into 80MB.
This ‘interactive (college student-esque) movie’ has you playing as a potential murder victim from a first-person perspective. Everything is shot on camera with no real graphics to speak of. The ‘story’ is simple, escape from captivity and get out of the woods before the hooded axe murderer catches you.
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This ‘fright simulator’ loosely borrows from the films to provide a few cheap jumps and puzzles. You control a girl that enters an abandoned warehouse to retrieve her wandering dog. Naturally it’s cursed, now you are too and you better start to work out how to appease the spirits of these spiteful child ghosts before they claims your soul, or something.
You navigate your way around the darkness in a first-person viewpoint with your wiimote controlled torch that works well when moving forwards but struggles to keep up if you try and turn too quickly. Poking around the chilling locations in the dark does feel quite immersive though as you are in direct control of what you aim the light at. Read more…