In 2006, the first Silent Hill game was adapted into a feature film by French filmmaker Christopher Gans, and while it was an overall critical failure plagued by many of the same shortcomings that are seemingly inherent to the video game movie genre as a whole, what I found interesting was how many of the elements of the film seemed to foreshadow the eventual future of the franchise. The way the film utilized its source material was full of a passion for the series' style & sound, but failed to utilize any of the iconic iconography that it paraded around with any real substance; a frankly nonsensical and masturbatory worship of recognizable figures like Pyramid Head for audiences to point to and go "That's the thing from the one I like!", and a focus on the series' legacy instead of its influences that would lead to the cyclical repetition of the series' Greatest Hits without any thoughts for the future, and there is no better representation of this phenomena than Silent Hill: Homecoming.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is Silent Hill gone direct to video, a foreign pastiche akin to Spike Lee's "Oldboy" that's less 'psychological horror' and more 'creature feature', a story less interested in isolation and character studies and more in wisecracking black guys who go "Ah hell naaaah!" & "Shieeeeet!". It's a game more interested in letting our boot boy protagonist utilize his 'epic' military training to dodge roll & combo hordes of generic monsters rather than indulging in any feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability. It's a game that's afraid of ambiguity and subtlety, where the all-American hero has to cock his shotgun menacingly at monsters and walk into the sunset with his generic blonde love interest, where the abstract is downplayed for the concrete, so the main plot has to be about specific human error instead of any institutional trauma or individual failings. A game that can't bear to leave you alone, so humans are always a hair's breath away, whether it be the NPCs you're always encountering for cutscenes with dialogue wheel options to choose from, or the generic human cult members you face during the climax.

A story about a war veteran coming to Silent Hill was ripe with potential for symbolism and interesting stories to tell, and Homecoming does have its moments where its presentation almost reaches the heights of its predecessors, but in Homecoming's attempts to improve upon its foundations, it reveals it's true form: a vapid and misguided entry that doesn't have a single original idea in its bones. Unlike Team Silent's wide array of influences, stretching from Dostoevsky's "Crime & Punishment" to the art of Heironymous Bosch, Homecoming's only frame of reference is Silent Hill itself, a capitalistic ouroboros of concepts and ideas regurgitated wholesale to sell recognizability. Much of this game's imagery and backstory is lifted from the film, in a way that makes the whole experience feel like a game based on the film's mythos more than anything Team Silent established. Monsters like the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head are dolled up and wheeled out for the equivalent of a money shot, and even the plot itself is a simple retread of Silent Hill 2's in a misguided attempt to re-sell success, telling a story about grief & loss that's delivered in the language of a B-horror flick that's about as subtle as a brick to the dome.

But Homecoming's biggest failing is that even without the historic legacy of the Silent Hill brand dragging it down, it's just a fucking boring game. It's an utterly generic, buggy and tedious survival horror experience that's trapped in a Catch-22: A game that would never be published without the name of Silent Hill attached, but one who's greatest failings are due to being saddled with the legacy Silent Hill entails. A game trapped in a hell of its own creation made of Pyramid Head figurines and Bubble Head Nurse pin-up posters.

Reviewed on Oct 22, 2022


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