Took a while to finally getting around to finishing this game after picking it up at launch but wow im kicking myself over not finishing it sooner. The game has a novel amateur look to it, choppy animations, static poses during dialogue and flat textures, but that doesn't stop the devs from making some of the most gorgeous areas and scenic pieces i've scene as of late. The story is another highlight, and while i wasnt moved as much as some other people praising this game, I can appreciate how the game tackles feeling outcast and the human connection among other themes. I was immediately hooked on the premise from the get go, the games world-building is nothing short of engaging, and long dialogue strings didnt feel as boring as I thought they would be. This game is certainly special, not only to the devs but to the people who needed to hear the heartfelt message the game touts "Is there a feeling worth getting incinerated over?"

my experiences fluctuated fairly wildly (while never actually reaching the level of I Think This Is A Good Video Game), but ended on a very bitter note (that last stretch! those endings! ack and augh!). thusly i feel extra un-charitable and will try to quarantine my non-terrible experiences in the first couple paragraphs. because despite everything, there was a solid stretch in the back half of the game where all my hatred had relatively mellowed. its entirely the result of having to Get Good at a badly implemented set of systems, meaning that every newly acquired strategy and trick feels less like an inevitable pre-designed discovery and more Intimate and Emergent...in other words, a sensation i might actually play a video game for! the learning curve was rough, but something that felt so frustrating and unusable for hours become something i could navigate with some level of mastery...thats not nothing, especially in the contrast. in some moments, you can see the more accessible, more boring, more "fun" next gen silent hill game they were trying to make...i dont like that as a goal, but its at least an understandable one, and resolves the baffled bewilderment from my first impressions.

additionally, i do genuinely want to give props to the story. in and of itself, its main flaws are terrible featureless side characters and at least one climactic revelation that is so bad its one of the first three or five cliches people think of for Bad Writing. the actual main contents though, the story of alex and his family and their connections to an offshoot denomination of the cult that originated in silent hill with slightly different beliefs and practices, is totally good for a silent hill game...a bit too derivative of past games in some elements, but on the whole it is an appreciably new story that is wholly sufficiently emotionally fucked up. even sitting here thinking about it, i dont feel Nothing, and im not interested in denying the game that credit just because i do not respect it on the whole. this is also, shockingly, perhaps the silent hill game most interested in extrapolating the already present subtext of silent hill as a conscious and menacing entity into something at least vaguely political. there is, in particular, a really appreciable tragic edge to alex picking up the mantle of Military Man inspired by his abusive cop dad who gave him no rational reason to want to be anything like him, other then he does in some way represent what an American Man is supposed to be. there is an interest in pieces of the state that are seen as legitimate in their violence, and i genuinely think it dovetails nicely with the eventual revelation of the rituals of the cult.

i dont want to oversell it (and you Do have a helpful and affable black guy cop buddy for several parts of the game), but what all this means in sum is that, in some universe, there is a version of homecoming that i am stubbornly contrarian about. it wouldnt be the first unintuitive unpolished unfun game i rly enjoyed! i proved myself able to deal with the awful animations that make it unclear where your invincibility frames are, or make it needlessly difficult to anticipate attacks on even basic enemies. i was able to deal with the dodge u seemingly have no control over the direction of, with the million ways to be stunlocked into oblivion, with the lack of a run button. i was able to deal with the fact that all my most consistent strategies (stunlocking with the lightning-fast starter knife and maneuvering to behind) totally destroy the vision for dodge and parry one on one duels. after a while, i was even able to deal with the knock-off resident evil 4 controls, which have neither the utility (no quick turn button???) nor the genuine weight and texture that came with the restrictions

half of the issue is that All of this moment to moment bullshit comes from a deeply condescending need to not merely change silent hill but "fix" it for a mainstream audience circa 2008, ofc. but what's really unforgivable for me is that while it is condescending to the previous games, it is also crassly cannibalizing them...just a totally noxious, rotten-to-the-core bit of artistic chemical reaction that absolutely nothing could recover from. its alessa's otherworld, it's james' faceless sexy nurses, its something that looks vaguely like the closer from sh3, its fucking pyramid head

u ever think about how literally all four team silent games have nurse enemies. u ever think about how different they are, how they were all approached from the ground up to fit their respective otherworlds and accompanying characters. somehow, with core ideas as malleable and creatively stimulating as silent hill's, team silent are thus far in the series still the only ones to actually take advantage of that fact. i dont know where blind copying out of creative laziness ends, where genuine reverence and unproductive fandom begins, or where corporate mandates from konami fit in the middle...but the end result is a game that is totally unable to express even its good ideas artistically...a total lack of aesthetic and emotional interest or cohesion

a story with some compelling ideas, a few cool boss designs, and a few good tracks from a very checked-out yamaoka is not enough to achieve anything close to the totally singular objects that are the team silent entires, especially when its drowning in a sea where the silent hill cliches are only outnumbered by the Video Games Circa 2008 cliches. past the conception stage it feels like every single creative decision was made on the path of least resistance, so little effort or discipline, so uninvolving even at its most inherently evocative. if i still dont totally hate the game, i dont wish to give it enough of a pass that would imply this shit is okay even for a standalone game, much less something riding on the coat tails of artistic giants. the type of suffocating myopicness that makes the whole world feel a little smaller for its existence. Moral Choice: Shoot Your Mom, Or Let Her Die Horribly In A Saw Trap