Silent Hill Origins
Psychological Horror comes to the PSP
Tags: Silent Hill Origins Categories: PSP Previews, Previews
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Oct 26th, 2007
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Silent Hill was a masterpiece, building upon the horror genre with a new depth to symbolism and psychological fear, and has rightly become a phenomenon. With three sequels, another in the works and a movie tie-in, the series seems to have lost some of the original feel. Silent Hill 0 isn’t exactly a remake, but it does recreate the original feel, and suffer from some of the same flaws.
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The PSP seems to be a perfect home for this game – it was designed to be played alone in a darkened room. Every corner is bathed in shadows, and developers used the more intimate nature of the handheld create a more nuanced atmosphere. The controls are exactly as you remember them in the original; scaled back from the over the shoulder shots of Origins earlier demo, and the more action oriented scheme of 2004’s Silent hill 4: The Room. You should ideally escape from danger rather than confront it head on, just like the original.
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SH:0 starts out similarly to the first two Silent Hill games. A trucker Travis Garby, finds himself driving down a dark road when he almost runs over a little girl. It appears to be Alessa Gillespie from the earlier games. After screeching to a stop, Travis gets out of his rig to find nothing. Smoke from a burning mansion drifts over the roadway, and Travis rushes inside to see if he can help anyone. Travis finds a girl burned alive, a’la the movie adaptation, and rescues her from the flames.
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Travis awakes on a bus stop bench. He goes searching for the rescued girl in the nearby hospital, and you find yourself in familiar environs. As soon as see the first Bubble Headed Nurse, you know that you’re in Silent Hill. We don’t know what psychological puzzle that Travis is unraveling, and we probably don’t want to until playing through the whole game proper. Origins began life as an adaptation of the Silent Hill movie into the game universe. Thankfully, that idea was squashed; but it still is supposed to be the beginning of the whole story.
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There is some expansion to the Silent Hill formula. In most of the earlier installments of Silent Hill, there is a random change between the normal world, and the “hell” world. In Origins the player can switch between worlds by using a mirror. This makes it easier to make sure that you have found every item. It is a small change but significant in a series with such a devoted fan base.
Silent Hill is an expansive franchise, but Origins is not developed by Team Silent (the original team behind the first four Silent Hill games.) Origins and the next console iteration are both being developed by outside companies. Longtime fans may be nervous about the future of the series, but Origins delivers the original game’s feel perfectly from what we’ve seen so far.
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Tags: Silent Hill Origins
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Oct 26th, 2007 and is filed under PSP Previews, Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
