T w e n t y S i d e d

The Escapist interviewed the guys from Double Helix games, the team behind Silent Hill Homecoming. (The movie begins with a skit. And some game footage. If you’re in a hurry, the interview proper starts at about the 2:20 mark.)

If you’ll remember, I actually quit Silent Hill: Homecoming without finishing it. This was partly due to frustration, partly due to the botched controls. I’ve since gone out and read the plot spoilers, and I really like what they did with the main character. I was worried that his background as a soldier and a war veteran would change the tone of the game by making the main character too much of a badass. That actually didn’t turn out to be the case. In fact:

Once I read that, I re-played some of the in-game conversations in my mind and saw that they’d actually very cleverly telegraphed this on several occasions. This information crops up in most conversations, but our expectations lead us away from the truth. Nicely done.

Jason Allen pretty much nails the central ideas behind Silent Hill: The game is usually deeply personal for the main character in that they work through internal issues as they fight through the gameworld. The developers then go on to talk about the controversy surrounding the the addition of the dodge move for the main character. But the real magic happens at the 4:40 mark when Eric Greenleaf talks about how you could spot reviewers who were already fans of Silent Hill and who (eyeroll) “Just wanted the same old Silent Hill.”

Me, out loud to the computer: You mean your former fans?!?

In case Double Helix ever reads this, let’s get down to why these changes didn’t work. It has nothing to do with people never wanting the game to change. It has to do with people wanting to preserve the key elements of the series. They might fear change because they don’t understand what makes the game so good for them, but if your new features preserve or enhance the experience, they will be embraced by fans. (And they will forever after insist it’s not a Silent Hill game without those features.) If Silent Hill veterans are rejecting gameplay elements, it’s because the game was no longer giving them what they wanted.

1) Quick time events have no place in a Silent Hill game. One of the conventions of the series is to have little or no interface elements on screen. You don’t get a health bar, a stamina meter, a bullet counter, or a mini-map. The lack of data is not to make the game harder (although it does add a modest level of challenge) but to make the game more immersive and less mechanical. But it does no good to remove all of that out-of-character data and all of those overlays if you’re going to spam the screen with colorful flashy “PRESS THIS BUTTON” popups. I’ve had my say on quick time events, but aside from their failings as a gameplay device, they really serve to remind you that you’re playing a videogame. This is detrimental to the atmosphere of many games, but uniquely damaging to Silent Hill.

2) The dodge move wasn’t heresy to me. My only problem with it was that I couldn’t seem to get a feel for it. There aren’t a lot of fights in a game like this, and there are very few low-risk fights where the player has time for training. I went out of my way to try to learn to use the dodge move, and it only got me injured in combat. It’s not like the monsters can coach you, “Nope. Too early, wait until your foe begins to swing. No, too late this time. Little faster.” I’d get nailed over and over without being able to tell what I was doing wrong amid the chaos of combat. Do I need to hold the button? Can I dodge while using this weapon? What did I do wrong there, why didn’t Alex dodge? Does dodge even work on this foe? Do I need to be able to use this dodge stuff, or is this just a “fun” thing that I’m wasting my time and resources on?

The dodge move made the game incredibly volatile. A player that can use them well can sail through a fight without taking a scratch. (I watched some YouTube walkthoughs after I gave up on the game.) A player that can’t will slowly run out of health and hit a wall. The game becomes either too easy or too hard. As implemented, it’s an unbalancing mechanic that pushes everyone out of the “just right” zone. The feature should have been easier to learn, more obvious in its proper use, and easier to execute. Greenleaf talks about how the old games were “hack, hack, hack.” That’s true, and he’s right that it wasn’t very interesting. It’s sensible to want to give the player some more choices in combat. But here it isn’t a choice, it’s a new skill to master, during combat, with inadequate feedback.

3) Difficulty levels exist for a reason. Once I’d reached the hotel, I’d consumed too much health trying to learn to dodge. I’d wasted all my bullets trying to shoot when down was up. I could have muddled through by bumping the difficulty down to easy until I recovered, but there was no easy mode. My only choice was was to go back to an hours-old save and hope that I could do a cleaner run at the hotel, or give up. I gave up.

4) Go easy on the monster counts. In a deeply immersive game, you don’t need crowds of foes to scare the player. You need one, and the uncertainty of the unknown. The three-nurse fight killed me twice, and that was miles from a save point. That much challenge after that much un-savable progress was a major mistake. Remember that it is not your job to kill the player, only to make them THINK you are trying to do so. The three-nurse fight was not frightening, it was frustrating. In the comments I’ve noticed I’m not the only person to give up on the game at that exact point.

5) Leaving out the ability to invert the up / down on the camera controls was madness. What were you thinking?

From reading the synopsis, I think they nailed the story. The main character was just right. His arc was fairly compelling. But the combat and controls created a perfect storm of failures. In the end, the dodge move made combat more frustrating than the previous games where the protagonist handled like a forklift in a broom closet. The lack of difficulty adjustment and the punishing three-nurse fight stopped my forward progress. And the lack of suitable controls convinced me to give up and move on to other games rather than return to an old save.

The good news is that combat is historically the easier problem to fix. Double Helix has someone in their employ who can write a solid Silent Hill game. That’s like finding out one of the busboys you hired is a Jedi. The game was not the “Masterchief goes to Zombietown” train wreck that I feared, and I’m happy to eat my words for suggesting that Double Helix was going to follow Resident Evil into idiocy and nonsense. Silent Hill requires a higher level of writing than almost any other game out there. It requires subtlety, imagery, foreshadowing, and carefully constructed dialog. And I actually think the dialog here is better than in any of the previous games. It relies less on cheap non-sequitur answers to direct questions in order to keep its secrets.

But the attitude in this interview has me worried that they’re going to dismiss these combat complaints as the ravings of mere fans (fans? who needs those?) instead of looking into what went wrong with the mechanics. Fans just might know what was loveable about the game in the first place.

Besides, it’s not a Silent Hill game unless the graphics suck! And bring back loading screens on every door! And the Engrish interface! And the old door opening sound! And bring back James Sunderland! And the two-by-four! And make a PsOne version!

I am a fan, listen to meeeeeeeeeeee!

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.