The rain was getting heavier, beating down on my back with the kind of persistent thumping a boxer usually reserves for his punchbag. Ducking beneath an iron archway I wound my way through the park, paying little attention to the discarded kites, radios, and crowbars that littered the area. Coming to a fork in the road, I headed down the closest path, praying the rustling from the bushes behind me was simply a squirrel after it's lunch and not something altogether more… sinister. Breathless, I found myself in a clearing, where an unused fountain took pride of place. I paused for a moment to reflect upon my reflection in the stale water. Who did I annoy to wind up here? A flash of lightning illuminated the area, and my eyes finally met the gaping mouth of the creature that had been stalking me through the woods. Towering a few feet away, a hulking marionette made of sausage meat, it staggers in my direction like a drunken friend. Startled, I jump, and flail at my assailant, hurling my fire axe off into the darkness in the process. "Damn", I think to myself, for reasons that aren't yet clear, "he must have pressed the wrong button again." As it clatters off a tree into the undergrowth, never to be seen again, the creature and I share a glance of mutual confusion. Seizing the opportunity, I punch the beast in the chest and sprint back to the relative safety of the subway. Just another day in Silent Hill…
Silent Hill Downpour, a "psychological horror" game places you in the prison overalls of Murphy Pendleton, an inmate who finds himself drawn towards the titular Silent Hill, a town that seems to call out to troubled souls and helps them come to terms with their past transgressions. In Silent Hill, nightmares and reality become harder to differentiate between, with hideous, deformed monstrosities lurking in the fog, postmen that appear, say something wise, and then promptly vanish, and paintings that come to life. It's up to you to guide Murphy to safety and unravel the truth about his past.
This guy is creepier than most of the enemies in the game. He pops up, gives you some hint about where to go next, and then disappears into the fog. Unnerving.
Like the Silent Hill games of old, Silent Hill Downpour allows you to set separate difficulties for the combat and the puzzles. While changing the combat difficulty will simply increase or decrease the amount of damage you take, and the amount of hits it takes to defeat an enemy, changing the puzzle difficulty adjusts how much thought you need to put into the puzzles throughout the game, and determines how vague Murphy's objectives in his diary are. As an example of how the puzzles change with the difficulty level, right at the start of the game, in the mines you have to traverse in order to reach Silent Hill, Murphy needs to push a series of colourful buttons in the correct order to start up a train ride, with his only clue being a poem found on a corpse just around the corner. On Easy, this poem names the three colours you have to press by name (red, blue, orange), while on Medium the poem uses more elaborate words for the colours (Cerulean, Emerald, and so on). On the hardest setting, the game does away with naming the colours entirely, instead requiring you to relate the various colours of buttons to objects mentioned in the poem (blood, fir trees, and other such vague items). This allows you to tailor your adventure through Silent Hill to suit you, but unfortunately you can't adjust the difficulties mid-game, so if you run into any problems (as we did, but we'll come to that later) you can't just knock the difficulty level down a peg and continue unhindered.
Downpour opens with Murphy being led to the showers by a prison guard for some alone time with a sequestered prisoner, Patrick Napier, a convicted child molester that Murphy seems to know (and hate) from somewhere. As Murphy sets about Pat, you take over, with the section serving as a brief introduction to the weapon based combat of Silent Hill Downpour, teaching the basics of attacking and blocking.
Anne really doesn't like Murphy...
An unspecified time after this attack, Murphy is transferred to a maximum security prison, under the watchful eye of Anne Cunningham, a corrections offer who always seems rather hostile towards Murphy. Unfortunately, the transfer bus doesn't quite make it to the other prison, careering off a cliff just outside of Silent Hill, leaving Murphy stranded in the middle of nowhere.
It's difficult to explain what makes the story of Silent Hill Downpour so good without spoiling it. All through the game, you stumble across newspaper articles, prison memos, and other little useful nuggets of information that help you piece together what really happened in Murphy's past - why he knew Patrick Napier, what he was doing in prison in the first place, and why Anne really doesn't like Murphy that much, with everything finally clearing up in the final few minutes. It's one of the few aspects of Downpour that seems remarkably well done.
In fact, as in previous Silent Hill games, how the story ends will be determined by the actions you've taken as you played the game - there are six endings in total, with one only being available during a second play through. At certain points during the game you're presented with a number of moral choices, such as deciding whether or not to attempt to save someone who's just fallen off a cliff, or attempting to talk down a man who's inches away from leaping to their death. With these sections, you're given the choice between two actions, one which is obviously good, and another which is obviously bad (in the suicide situation you can either try to talk down the guy, or taunt him, egging him on to take his own life). But these aren't the only moral situations that effect what ending you'll get. For some reason, killing enemies instead of simply "incapacitating" them will impair your moral score, although it's never actually mentioned in the game that when an enemy is squirming around on the floor they're not going to spring to their feet and attack you again. We spent the first half of the game taking out every enemy we had to on the off chance that they'd come back for us when we weren't expecting it, so we ended up with the second best ending without realising we were doing something "bad".
Once you finally reach Silent Hill, you're able to explore almost the whole area at will instantly, but this is something of a double-edged sword. While the more free-roaming approach to the game has allowed the developers to add side-quests to the world, which require you to seek out various people or places in order to activate them, in an attempt to try and flesh out the town itself, the fact that you've got an enormous area to explore means that it's very easy to get lost, and especially easy to lose track of where you're actually meant to be going in the story (occasionally, Murphy rings where he's meant to be heading on the in-game map, but there are times when for some, unknown reason he decides it's not worth it, so you've got to try and think back to the last conversation you had to try and remember where you should be heading next). The side-quests themselves are rather well hidden away, with it almost being entirely possible for someone to play through the whole game without ever coming into contact with any of them. We wouldn't advise doing that though, as some of them are actually scarier than anything found in the game's main story.
The first hint that everything is not quite as it seems about the town of Silent Hill comes when Murphy enters the Devil's Pit Diner, which quickly transforms into the Otherworld, a hellish alternate dimension. In previous Silent Hill games, the Otherworld was a more disturbing, deadlier version of the real world, full of monsters, puzzles and demonic symbolism, to ramp up the tension and unnerve the player. In Silent Hill Downpour, however, all that goes out of the window. Here, the Otherworld is only ever used as a glorified chase section, as Murphy flees from an all-encompassing black-hole-alike apparition known as the Void through a series of claustrophobic corridors. With next to no exploration allowed and little opportunity to actually take in your freakish surroundings, these sections end up being a rather bland misstep, with the feeling of horror that they're presumably intended to inspire within replaced with a feeling of "Man, when will this be over?"
That big red mess is the Void. Let it get too close and it'll start sapping your health, so make sure you've got a load of health packs ready.
Sadly things don't improve once the Otherworld section is done with, as Murphy encounters his first real enemy, the imaginatively named Screamer, a beast that resembles a homeless woman with Wolverine claws. As you might guess from the name, one of her main tactics is to let out an incapacitating scream, which then requires you to shake the left stick as fast as you can to snap Murphy out of it.
Enemies appear more frequently in the rain, so take cover inside when the heavens open.
While you're busy shaking the stick, Murphy is completely defenceless, allowing whatever enemies are still around to get a number of free cheap shots in.
It's a fairly well documented fact that combat has never been the focus of Silent Hill games, with the plot and puzzles taking centre stage, leaving the combat as almost an optional feature, for those who want to simply enjoy the story and brain teasers. While this is occasionally true of Silent Hill Downpour, as there's the option of outrunning any enemy you encounter in the streets, there are far too many moments where you've got to wrestle with the horrendous controls against a number of enemies to try and continue through the game. In the final sections the game makes a habit of throwing three or more enemies at you in cramped, enclosed spaces, and while one-to-one combat in Downpour is just about manageable, trying to fight a group of enemies is unbearable. There's a section towards the end of the game where, after fighting a trio of frustrating wolf men you've then got to explore a workshop with a UV flashlight to try and find a code to unlock a door. Take too long figuring out what to do and one of the machines in the workshop will turn on at random, with the noise summoning another wolf man to the room to investigate. Take too long killing that enemy (or just attempting to avoid them and solve the puzzle) and another machine will turn on and summon another wolf man, creating an endless, irritating loop of rubbish wolf men.
Another issue that plagues the combat is that of the weapons. While Murphy can pick up and wield an extensive array of household objects to defend himself against the monsters that populate Silent Hill (chairs, frying pans and shovels can all be used as weapons), some of the more effective weapons are also tools that need to be used outside of combat situations. This doesn't sound like a huge problem, but the weapons in Silent Hill Downpour don't last forever. Use them to defeat more than a few enemies (or in some situations a single larger enemy) and they'll break, leaving Murphy with only his fists to see his assailant off - and sometimes leaving you without the thing you need to solve a puzzle.
As you take damage, Murphy's shirt will get progressively bloodier and he'll hold himself and begin to limp around.
Before you actually manage to reach Silent Hill, you need to travel through a collection of disused mines, abandoned by the miners that used to work there due to reports of monster sightings. These miners hastily evacuated the caves, boarding up a number of passageways to try and keep the monsters inside. For some reason, these boarded up passageways can only be passed by using an axe, a tool that, in the world of Silent Hill Downpour, is rather rare. The problem here is that, as well as being rather rare, axes are relatively effective weapons against the enemies that live deep in the mines. Break the axe before you manage to break through the boarded up door and you'll have to backtrack through the cave system to find a replacement, because Murphy is seemingly incapable of removing a few planks with his bare hands, or indeed with any of the other weapons in the area (other planks, rocks, and even crowbars are all useless against the boarded up passage). Surely a crowbar, a tool specifically designed for removing nails hammered through planks of wood, should be capable of prising the beams apart? Not in Silent Hill. It's a problem that could have been so easily removed with just a few minutes more thought by the developers.
Unfortunately this lack of thought sours almost every aspect of Downpour, and ruins what could otherwise have been fantastic game. With a deep story that keeps you guessing until the last minute, and a few fairly ambitious new ideas (the side quests are a particular highlight, although they're not as well realised as they could have been), Downpour could have been one of the best Silent Hill games in years, had it had a bit more time and attention spent on it. Because the plot is focused on Murphy and his backstory, and doesn't get too tangled up in the cult-filled lore of Silent Hill itself, Downpour is fairly easy to pick up for someone who's never looked at the franchise before, but we'd still recommend the HD collection over this.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
