In Third Person

Despite all the negative things I've said about Silent Hill: Homecoming over these last few posts, I was ready to let all that slide. I was already over half way done the game, and I thought I could put up with the game's faults for a few more hours for the sake of completing it. That will never happen now. Or ever.

In my last Silent Hill post, I said I would continue playing it until the game committed a heinous act against fun. It just did.


I played the game for about half an hour just now, and I got to the puzzle pictured above. The only picture I could find was of the completed puzzle. When you start out, the pieces are all scrambled and you have to slide them around the space to create that emblem. No big deal, right? These types of puzzles have been in thousands of video games before, and can usually be beaten if you slide the pieces around enough. Not this time. I tried it over and over again, but there was one piece in particular that would be stuck on the opposite end of the board. I normally don't have the patience for these types of puzzles in games, so the moment I get stuck, I hit a guide.

To my horror, the very first step in every guide I found said to move the double block in the top right hand corner one space to the left. I looked at my screen and realized that my screen didn't have a double block in that position. I watched video solutions on YouTube and realized that my blocks were laid out completely differently from what everybody else got.

Dude, what?

So in fact, the puzzle the game gave me really was impossible to beat. I did more research on this, and apparently I'm not alone. This IGN forum user ran into the exact same problem as me. The only solution for her? Restart the game from the last save point. In this GameSpot thread, user peetowser said he wasted 3 hours of his life trying to solve this glitched puzzle until he realized it was broken. When he reloaded it, it worked fine. For those forum users, maybe their tolerance towards the game's deficiencies are higher than mine. But for me, this game ends right here. I've been force-feeding this experience to myself since the beginning, and if the game requires me to go back 30 minutes into the game just so the puzzle pieces can reset, it can go to hell. I am not giving that game any more of my time.

Even if I pass that, there's a chance that the game's next set of puzzles might glitch out for them too, just like it did for these people. Just like with Fight Night Round 4, I refuse to support games that are broken to the point that they actually prevent you from finishing them. I don't have any immediate plans on checking out any of the other entries in the Silent Hill series, but if they're as janky as this, I'll dedicate my gaming time towards other things.

I've only been playing this game for about four hours. At this moment, what's another four hours? I could still get to experience what is good about this game, if I can bear with its weaknesses. There are also achievement points to be had, which seem to be coming at a decent rate. Ultimately though, I should be playing games because their fun, right? And there are definitely other games I could play that would be more fun. But maybe this game will be fun enough for the four more hours I'll need to beat it.

Maybe I'm just a game snob, but I don't like having to think about whether or not I want to continue playing a game. If it's good, I'll keep going. If it's not, forget it. But when you play a mediocre game and already have invested some time in it, the choice of whether or not to play it gets murkier than it really should.

So what am I to do with Silent Hill: Homecoming? I have decided to play it through to the end on two conditions. One, I will only play from one checkpoint to another. I don't ever want to get stuck want to quit between checkpoints ever again, and I won't know when the next one will arrive. The other condition? If this game commits another heinous crime against fun, then I'll bury it once and for all.

Last time I spoke about Silent Hill: Homecoming, I focused mainly on how freaked out the game made me. It took a lot of will from within for me to overcome my psychological shortcomings to get through that opening sequence. As a survival horror game, I thought it started out really well.

Unfortunately, my mental fortitude hasn't been pushed nearly as hard since. Part of that has come from growing familiar with the world. But most of my growing weariness towards the game comes from the game's design faults and squandered potential.

I guess before I talk about the game it could have been, let me preface this post by saying that I'm still far from finishing it. I've only gotten to the Grand Hotel, which should be enough of an indicator for those that have played it and not enough of a spoiler for those that haven't. Also, let's start by talking about what I think is still good about the game.


Sound-wise, this game is spectacular. The music is appropriately haunting all the time. During action moments, it does a wonderful job of making your toes curl in fear. On the other hand, during down-time, the game's music does just enough to make you not feel comfortable. Sound effects are also equally appropriate at accomplishing tension. I consistently get freaked out when I walk into a random object in the world and hear it fall over. For a game released in 2008, the visuals hold up fairly well, particularly during the "nightmare" segments. The visual filters do a great job if making the game look "gritty".

It's past that where the game really begins to unravel. When I got past the "nightmare" segment and into the desolate city, the world of Shepherd's Glen and Silent Hill so far come off as boring rather than creepy. A lot of the tension is lost when you're walking around a foggy and plain-looking city.

I enjoy the game's more "traditional" approach to survival horror, but it also takes with it some really annoying design elements. I hate having to wander around each and every inch of the world, constantly hitting the "A" button to make sure I don't miss an item. If I were in the shoes of the character, there's no way I would be carefully scouring through my environment looking for stuff. I'd be doing everything I could to get the heck out of there. Due to the nature of the world's and how the developers want to lead the player down a certain path, there are a number of locked doors and closed off pathways. This wouldn't be a problem if the game wasn't designed to be explored. In turn, this forces the player to check every single door in the game, of which 80% of them are "locked" or "jammed" or whatever other excuse the game gives you for not letting you go beyond the door.


None of this though is as offensive as the game's fundamentally-flawed and arguably broken combat. In any survival horror game, the biggest fear you should have as a player is physical fear. The fear that something or someone is going to kill you. However, the moment your health is in danger, all you can think of as a player is, "Crap, I need to go through this combat junk."

The basics of how combat works is that the majority of your confrontations are (to this point in the game) one-on-one affairs. You hold the left trigger to lock onto your enemy, then you have the choice of attacking with a quick or strong attack. The problem with the trigger is that it doesn't always center the camera or your guy to the bad guy. I've had the game both not center the camera on the bad guy and not even adjust my character to face the enemy, which leads to me wildly swinging my weapon in the wrong direction.

Even worse than this is the actual act of combat. Neither of your attacks feel good to execute and neither of them feel like they have any weight to them. The combo system is also a joke, which boils down to you hitting two quick attacks and one strong attack repeatedly. You have the ability to dodge attacks when timed correctly, but I have yet to make this work with any sort of consistency. During my last playthrough, I got a gun, which has been pretty useless thus far. The weight and impact of your shots isn't there, and it seems like it takes a whole clip to take anything down. In a game where you only get 10 bullets every 30 minutes, that isn't going to cut it. Regardless of what you do to kill your enemy, it doesn't feel like you do anything more than stand in front of your enemy and hit buttons until your enemy dies. All of the tension and fear is lost when it just looks like you and your enemy aimlessly flailing at each other. I've heard that combat in the Silent Hill series has always been an Achilles heel to the point that the latest version of the game removes combat completely.

I'm at a crossroads with this game. I love the music and am intrigued to find out where this game's story goes. But is that enough for me to bear with checking hundreds of doors and having a horrible time beating up zombies and other monsters one at a time? Maybe it's best to cut this homecoming short.