The end of the beginning of the end.

There was a stench that lingered in the air. The first to emerge from the miasma, sick and shambling, was Silent Hill: Origins. Middling at its highest points, Origins was unwell. A gaiden game though it may have been — as was the refrain from fans, all collectively bargaining for this to be a singular misstep and nothing more — it warned of worse yet to come. Silent Hill, no longer in the hands of its rightful creators, had been set loose. As a pig breaks from its enclosure and becomes a feral boar, Silent Hill slipped through the fence posts and morphed into something foul.

The stench got stronger. Eyes watered. The tolling of the final bell marked the way that all would be for the days to come. Blood and shit and rust and slime wept outward from within its confines. What little hope still remained would have been better left abandoned. Silent Hill: Homecoming had at last arrived. Marked not by any ceremony nor celebration, Homecoming was the darkened star that shone over all, calling to consciousness a single truth: everything you hold dear can be taken away.

Its kingly ambition had been betrayed early, having the gall to call itself Silent Hill 5 before release. No longer intended as a simple spin-off, Homecoming was an explicit continuation of the series; the franchise being stripped from Team Silent and sent overseas to be repackaged into something with more mass market appeal. Everyone within Team Silent had been kicked down from higher positions within Konami; underdogs who warred back against the company’s internal bureaucracy to create on their own terms. Silent Hill was the end-product of years of gnashing teeth and desperate cobbling-together, the act of creation as a tool to be wielded against those who had pushed them down.

Now, it was no longer theirs.

Homecoming is a strange and unnerving amalgamation, influenced not by prior games but by movies based on them; the overuse of Pyramid Head, the sound design, the increased and ill-advised focus on “the action” over building atmosphere. The once-universally praised narratives to be found within the series, tackling impressively difficult subjects, have now been swapped out for little more than a hollow video tour, whisking the player from spooky setpiece to spooky setpiece with all the thematic depth and implication of Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride. Homecoming has nothing to say, because Homecoming does not exist. Homecoming is a few other games and movies standing on each other’s shoulders in an overcoat.

There is no imagination here, no understanding of dread. Enemies shamble towards you, lit from all angles despite the entire game taking place at night time, loudly shrieking or gurgling or barking as they charge. Too slow to be a threat, but too fast to evoke Romero-esque monsters, every enemy manages to hit a perfect balance of being both bland and generic. Left 4 Dead has more clever monster designs, and those aren’t attempting to evoke a specific character’s fears simply because that’s what Silent Hill 2 did. The meat-dogs in Homecoming stand as the strongest possible condemnation of the game’s artistic decisions; no longer lit in inky shadows, seemingly dripping through the darkness to reveal themselves, the new meat-dogs are bright-red, flayed canines who do little more than sprint shrieking at the player and bite them for very little damage. Americans think horror is when something is loud.

An utterly insipid narrative rounds out the combat-roll, knife fight gameplay, bending itself in knots in the hopes that the attempt will be enough to distract from every other element. Alex is a combat veteran, but not really. His brother is alive, but not really. His dad is a cool guy, but not really. Events seem to happen arbitrarily, perhaps each one marking a spot where the developers thought players would be getting bored; sudden black-out stage transition sequences of drunk-tank escapes and county jail gate puzzles pepper themselves through long sections of walking that were used in prior games to establish a tone, and are used here to disguise loading screens. Homecoming can only be defined by its limitations, because it makes no efforts to overcome them. It coasts on its reputation, like a bad student whose father is alumni.

This is what I despise most about Homecoming. It’s a game that’s wholly content to ride the coattails of work done by better, more talented, more passionate artists, and it’s one that was rewarded wholly for doing nothing by being gifted to a no-name studio by Konami. What did The Collective do as a studio to be handed this franchise without seemingly any publisher oversight? Was Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the Xbox that much of a hit? Did Konami believe that their seminal 2006 movie tie-in game The Da Vinci Code was evidence that they were going to handle this series with respect? Or did Konami simply sell off the rights to the lowest bidder just so they could get a quick buck off of a franchise they didn’t respect, made by employees who they loathed?

It's a despicable creation, and stands as a putrid reminder that concepts like "merit" and "self-expression" are air. Here, there is nothing besides what is most profitable for the parent company.

A foul cloud hangs over Homecoming. May it never thin.