Silent Hill Downpour Review

Eternal_Lament

New member
Sep 23, 2010
559
0
0
PrototypeC said:
Just wanted to agree/dis-agree with a few things

1) in regards to the health system, only really 4 and Homecoming had health bars (Origins didn't either, but it had the limp system), while the original 3 didn't even have health bars or signs they were damaged. You could only tell ther current state by looking in the main menu. Further, I'm not sure where this "No sign of injury" thing comes from, since the intensity of blood on Murphy's clothes show how much damage he's taken. True, there is no indication on precise amount of damage, but than neither did the previous games, it was more of a best estimate thing

2) the lack of blood didn't bother me. True, I found Silent Hill 3, a game that brought a whole new meaning to "bloody", to be the scariest in the series so far, but I felt that the lack of blood and more "blue" tone was in line with both SH 2 and 4. I wouldn't say there was "nothing" creepy or scary, but admitadly in this day and age it's a little disapointing to see it lacking. I do however completely agree that the game did feel too bright, and would've loved it if during the rain sections it also became really dark outside (like the otherworld section in SH 2)

3) I'm mixed on the location thing. On the one hand it was odd that there seemed to be an entire other area that didn't seem to fit into the main map, but then again I still preferred it to either a) the Homecoming route where parts of the area are spontaneously changed for no reason or b) visiting the same areas we've already visited and explored in previous games

4) I'll be the first to agree that Downpour droped the ball on the monsters. They could've worked if the designs weren't too similar. I appreciated what the monsters symbolised, and did think that the Dolls were unnerving on a high level, but it just seemed like so much could've been done. The Void is further disapointng, because in earlier builds it did look like a black cloud with faint siren lights, which was a hell of a lot scarier than what they stuck with.

5) I guess you're alone in the weapon system department. I thought it did add a certain tension not just because the weapons broke, but because it really felt like I couldn't just dick around with the battles and actually had to make a serious descision on whether or not to fight

Just a few things I felt about your thoughts

Back on topic:
Yeah the game isn't up there with the best of the series, but it certainly is leaps and bounds beyond the previous failed attempts. Better monster designs and a better atmosphere would've really helped, but as it stands its still a decent game, and certainly a relief compared to what everyone thought it was going to be. The two things I'm surprised you didn't bring up in the review was the sound (in that VA was good and the new composer certainly did a decent job) or the graphics (in that the frame rate drops and textures would sometimes pop in and out)
 

PrototypeC

New member
Apr 19, 2009
1,075
0
0
Therumancer said:
Clever musings
This guy has the right idea, spot-on. I would add that the Otherworld, besides being a misnomer, is more or less the regular town but with a layer of confused malice. When a whole damn prison materialised out of nowhere in Silent Hill 2, it took me until the second playthrough to realise that there was not a literal prison that the Historical Society was built on top of. It was like the town trying to sneak in a place that doesn't exist anymore, slipping the supernatural circumstances past the radar. The huge "Otherworld"ly environments in Downpour are such big mindfuck kind of places that I lose all sense of human scale... the final boss in particular took place in an area that absolutely, positively could never exist in our own reality. In Silent Hill 2 the final boss took place in a burned-out shell of a building, not a magical space realm where there are no laws of physics.

Sometimes Team Silent were being somewhat facetious and not taking their own game super-seriously, like the haunted house in SH3 which Vatra seem to have adopted thematically for some parts (the Disco Ball chase scenes in particular). It's like telling someone a joke, but they don't quite get it, and then they try to tell someone else the joke. It's messy.
 

PrototypeC

New member
Apr 19, 2009
1,075
0
0
Eternal_Lament said:
*Nuanced opinions*

The two things I'm surprised you didn't bring up in the review was the sound (in that VA was good and the new composer certainly did a decent job) or the graphics (in that the frame rate drops and textures would sometimes pop in and out)
I wasn't being totally in-depth with the damage thing. I was talking about that little TV screen in the corner SH1-3, letting you know how you're doing by how static-y or (god help you) red it was. The damage system in Downpour isn't actually a big problem, so just ignore that part as the old man afraid-of-change ramble that it was.

The main problem I had with the canyon is that I wanted to include Downpour into the actual canon of the series, but that location makes it very hard to do. I'd have to come up with some pretty wacked-out reasons why we've never heard of it before in order for it all to make sense. I'm letting it go though, because even other die-hard fans don't find it to be that big a deal. Homecoming tried to bulldoze half the town and Origins inserted new and nonsensical pieces, and that's way more distressing.

Since I've looked on The Escapist and elsewhere, it turns out that a lot more people agree with me about the combat system than I thought, but for lots of different reasons. It brought me out of the experience, but I don't think it will for everyone. When it comes to the whole "fight or flight" thing Vatra tried to make a selling point, I don't want to be the one to tap them on the shoulder and explain that mini-choices like that are being made by the player's mind anyway with every encounter. Indeed, generally that has been the case throughout the whole series.

As for everything else, well, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. As unfair as it is, I can't talk about all the good parts because I A) didn't notice most of them because they were overshadowed by my expectations and the bad stuff, and B) there are a whole lot more good things than bad things and explaining why all the good stuff's good would take about a hundred more paragraphs and I have a good essay and a half going already.
 

Eternal_Lament

New member
Sep 23, 2010
559
0
0
PrototypeC said:
The only excuse I could make as to why no one heard of the canyon would be because of "the accident" (in which case JP certainly took his sweet time brooding over the entire thing). I guess though its things like this that really show how precise and how in depth the original creators got in that essentially other teams would need to work around the town design rather than add to it. Makes me more convinced that a Silent Hll editor should be released someday, get all the experience without worrying about the canon.

Very true in regards to the combat. Even in previous games where weapons wouldn't break running away was still the preferred option. I guess it didn't bother me as much is what I was getting at. I'm curious to know what you would change, if only to get a sense of where things became problamatic.

I wasn't expecting to only discuss the good parts, and again the criticisms you brought up on the game were things I would've if you hadn't already said them.

Captcha: steam punk
As I think about it, a steam punk Silent Hill isn't out of the question. Just set it as the otherworld for some gentleman in the 1800s
 

Grey Day for Elcia

New member
Jan 15, 2012
1,773
0
0
I think the survival horror genre is all one big failure. How can pixels ever be scary? No amount of atmosphere or monster closets can change the fact you are sitting on your lounge, holding a controller and playing a video game. You aren't in the game, it's not real and it all goes away with the flick of a switch. You can be as immersed as you like, but you are always controlling an avatar in a digital world that holds no harm for you; you don't feel the hits, you don't feel the cold, or the wind, you don't live in that world and you know none of it is ever going to happen.

/rant

OT: Silent Hill gets a lot of praise for the early games (really only 2 and 3) but I've never understood it. Sure, 3 had a great story--one of the best I've heard or experienced in any media, even--but the controls were shit, the camera sucked, the art was cliche, the voice acting was horrendous. These aren't things that save a video game from not sucking. Tell the best story in the world, but do it while punching me in the face and you will fail to keep my attention for long.

Not surprised they are still failing.
 

Mahorfeus

New member
Feb 21, 2011
996
0
0
I'm loving the story so far, but by God, the combat is horrible. Homecoming was crap IMHO, but at least its combat system was pretty fluent (if not totally twitch-inducing; i.e. the fight with Scarlet).

I admittedly jumped a few times. The only major thing that scared the crap out of me was in one instance where I was in a basement before getting the UV light, and had to face a doll before even being officially introduced to the enemy. I could barely see (no normal flashlight either), had no idea that it had a "real" body, and had no idea what was attacking me throughout.

Anyway, just ignore me, because The Room was my favorite game in the series. Haters gonna hate.
 

Therumancer

Citation Needed
Nov 28, 2007
9,909
0
0
Aphantas said:
PrototypeC said:
I dunno, I think an unknowable thing is much more knowable and less fear-enducing when you know you can FALCON PAWNCH it in the face. I can't imagine putting my hands on a Lying Figure from SH2 or those crawling Slurpers from SH3... I just think it was scarier when you were aware of how ineffectual each weapon was but it was all you had and you damned well better use it, rather than chucking it into the sky while you grab a fucking table leg or bottle to finish the job.
I agree with you on most points. Its seems that they have forgotten that combat with a monster will make it less intimidating, especially when you can defeat it fairly easily. The scariest monsters tend to have a trait in common, you either cannot kill it, or it is extremely hard to do so.
Monsters are at their most frightening when you know that they are after you and you are powerless to stop them. That is why Pyramid Head was scary, why Amnesia's monsters, especially the water creature, was scary. And why Homecoming's were not (comparatively).
Horror games must go out of their way to make the player feel vulnerable. Making a player able to fight monsters effectively only empowers the player and works against making a player vulnerable.
This of course all opinion, fear is different for everyone after all.
I will probably try downpour out anyway, I really need my survival-horror fix.
I tend to disagree because monsters that are totally invulnerable are kind of silly in most cases, they made more sense. Basically if something is solid enough to hit you, hitting it hard enough is going to hurt it. When you start forcing the player to react in an unrealistic fashion by say removing character options, the game ceases to be scary or immersive and instead turns into a very annoying forced stealth section.

The thing is that horror games have to walk a fine line here, it is difficult to create scary monsters that can also be fought, and really that involves a lot of good atmosphere, writing and design. So few games have done it right, that it's hard to find examples... but the early Silent Hill games are a good example, there were numerous cases where combat didn't work at all, but they were exceptions rather than the rule. Rather they game managed to create an enviroment where combat was a viable approach, but it was actually more effective, and easier to run away and conserve your resources for where you really needed them.

Jericho, for all it's failings, also stands up in my mind for being one of the few cases where a game has managed to definatly be horror, but involve protaganists who are themselves very tough monster killing machines (a whole squad of them, loaded with weapons and freak powers) by creating an atmosphere, and scenario that was just... amazing... even if the delivery was lacking.

I don't think that the combat in the later Silent Hill games can really be blamed, so much as the atmosphere and a game design that sort of made it so you didn't feel any compelling reason to want to avoid fights. In homecoming I rarely ran into situations that I couldn't handle with my knife, and they made it so it was more conveinent to dispose of monsters constantly than try and avoid them, which is sort of counter productive.

Of course again part of the design problem was making it so the monsters were hard to avoid so they basically had "you have to kill me" signs on themselves. If I'm caught in a really confined area with a couple of nurses there that I can't get around, and a bunch of weapons, of course I'm going to fight them, if it was more practical to run past them or otherwise avoid them I would, but I don't generally have the option. All of the games had their claustrophobic enviroments and tricky bits with monsters, but the last few suffered due to making combat the only viable choice turning the games into pseudo-brawlers. The combat shouldn't be removed, or made less effective and fun to use, just not be put in the forefront with so many situations where you pretty much have to fight.

To mention a couple of exceptions however, there is an excuse for you to not be able to fight ghosts and other incorpereal monsters. Not to mention I kind of thought the idea of possessed objects in Alan Wake was an interesting idea that could be followed through on, if you were dealing with encounters involving things that could possess anything and destroying the host object simply caused it to jump to another one, well that's a situation where your both going to defend yourself and be compelled to run. A bit of creativity and that idea could go a long way. "The Room" used the incorpereal monsters as a way of mixing things up, and honestly I was a bit surprised that despite the non-silent hill origin of that game's initial development plan that we haven't seen more of those in Silent Hill, including the eventual "pinning" mechanic.

I'll also say another game that had combat and managed to be totally freaky just the same was the "Fatal Frame" series which on a lot of levels I consider the best survival horror game series of all time... as goofy as a game about a cute Japanese Girl fighting ghosts with a Camera could be, the games managed to be anything but.

While the implentation was borked to an extent, I'll also say that the "Obscure" games deserve a bit more attention for breaking up the conventions, including having a large cast of playable characters with slightly differant capabilities that you switch between. Honeslty I think those, especially the one on the PSP, actually managed to get the whole "college kids in horror" tropes pretty much right while still being a pretty solid game with a varied collection of monsters compared to most.

I do not consider "Dead Space" to be much of a horror game, it's atmospheric, and the bad guys are gross, but even with the mind trippy stuff it still basically comes down to an Aliens clone to me. See, I believe fighting monsters belongs in horror, but Issac is so bloody good for it, walking around in a truely awesome looking soot of armor, with a collection of "tools" that are better than the military grade weapons in most games (and let's be honest, if a plasma cutter can do all that, why do the soldiers even bother with regular guns?) it gets really iffy really quick. I mean beating some nasty thing to death in a game can still be part of horror, but when you walk into a room with an Arc Gun that like rips 6 monsters apart per shot, and you have 3 other equally nasty weapons at most times, plus "tools" that can freeze time on things locally (statis) or allow you to perform feats of telekinesis on part with most Jedi Knights/Biotics/Psychics including the abillity to kill most monsters by throwing pieces of their buddies at them... and really all pretensions of horror are kind of gone. I suppose with brilliant writing it could have still pulled it off sort of like Jericho (where you had a dude with a pet Fire Elemental in his arm for example) but they never really achieved that. I basically went through the usual "aliensesque" interior space enviroments, following some very basic tactics for checking the enviroment and systematically wasted everything I ran into. Writing aside, I felt like I was on a search and destroy mission for them than I was their prey... excepting when I ran from the hunter in certain scenes, and that was less scary than annoying because it was less about running like a bunny than mastery of game mechanics to slow it down... and really I kind of just kept freezing it and/or blowing it's legs off when you get down to it.
 

likalaruku

New member
Nov 29, 2008
4,290
0
0
I guess there's not much to say when the most captivating thing in the game is enjoying the landscape design & textures. Then again, I have ADD. That red vortex thing is f**king annoying.
 

Eric Morales

New member
Dec 6, 2011
116
0
0
I'm a sucker for good creature design, even the more recent and not terribly good Silent Hills have had plenty of surreal looking monsters. Downpour is really disappointing in that regard.
 

KoudelkaMorgan

New member
Jul 31, 2009
1,365
0
0
Its actually kinda funny how after SH3 most people say the series has gone downhill and just needs to end. To die with what little dignity remaining to it. I used to agree with that until I played Downpour.

I started Downpour with VERY low expectations. I was ready to hate the music since it wasn't (for the first time in the series) done by Akira Yamaoka. I ended up liking the music, it was rather unobtrusive and low key for the most part. I especially liked the smattering of all the licensed music they had on those radios and at the end. I was also glad that the Korn song was only ever played if you left the Press Start screen going for like 3 minutes and briefly at the end before 2 better songs played all of which you can skip.

I loved the graphics, and overall themes of the game. I loved the characters, easily more than any others in the series since SH2. The plot, in the end, is rather simple. However the journey and the few twists along the way were good enough that they were foreshadowed yet genuinely unexpected. As SH2's plot was spoiled for me before the game was out a week it was a good thing. I have only gotten 3 of the endings so far. Truth and Justice, Reversal, and Surprise! so idk if they other 3 endings totally mess up the story that had been laid out beforehand or not.

The pacing was great. Started off very linear then became very much like SH2 giving you most;y free reign to go where ever you want until an obvious PoNR where it gets linear again. You WILL find all kinds of hidden things if you explore. Even a nice easter egg for SH4 fans. I still haven't found all the mysteries (journal items/notes) yet. The side quests are optional but easily the best parts of the game. The one in the bank is kinda stupid though. Aside from that they are where most of the good puzzles are. Rewards are often a few health items or a gun, though one gives you a cool weapon I won't spoil. Another apparently gives you a tomahawk but I finished it and never found it. I was like...yay one first aid kit after all that.

The game is not overly challenging. You are given like 50 first aid kits which heal you significantly it you bother to look for them. Enemies on easy are jokes. On normal they are much more challenging. Haven't played hard yet (at least aside from the separate puzzle difficulty) but no matter what running is an option. You don't need to actually kill any enemy. You also find guns all over the place if you bother to look around. Ammo isn't as scarce as you might think either.

At the end you will have plenty of shotgun and pistol ammo to go around if you aren't blind. Also there are a few places where you end up loosing ALL your items. So saving up healing items and ammo is pointless. That being said its not like you won't find more shortly.

Other than frequent issues with drops in frame rate, the actual enemy design is the weakest thing about the game sadly. The ones listed in the trophy list are the only ones in the game so they are rather limited in variety as well. Not that any game in the series has had an abundance but 5 is kinda low. If its any relief they all can easily kick your ass one on one if you fail at blocking (which hurts your weapon even as it saves your health) and if you see 2 or more (you will) running is advised if you don't have ammo. Even if you have ammo, actually aiming and hitting them can be tricky if they get too close. Luckily you can use your gun as a melee weapon. Idk if guns can break if you keep doing that but they never did for me and I had to resort to that often. Basically you want to have a fire axe 90% of the time, as they rock and last well.

Now, its kind of bizarre. The fans for the most part after hating the series' last few installments seem to love Downpour. Sadly this goes right over the heads of many reviewers that are only too ready to write it off as another bad game in a mediocre franchise that is known for putting out crap games (see: anything Koei has ever put out). So there is now this following of people that for the last several years have been bitter about something they love going to hell (yes, I know) and now that its suddenly good again they have the uphill battle of trying to convince people that its good again. Or at least it doesn't outright suck like Shattered Memories.

Which is made all the more difficult due to 2 things

First, the prevailing narrative in gaming journalism of SH games being easy to review. "Oh, a new SH game?" "Its not as good as SH2. It didn't scare me." *obligatory 3 out of 5*

i.e. the cop out "I could be reviewing ANYTHING and have had ANY opinion about it, but I'll just waste your time by giving it a completely safe and mathematically neutral score devoid of anything resembling a human opinion regardless of what praise or criticism I may have actually written in the bulk of the review" review.

If you liked what you played, and think it had some real merit to fans and newcomers, then why not give it an arbitrary score higher than the fucking default? If you thought the opposite then give it a lower score. As long as you accurately justify either opinion you will still have a job I'm sure. I'm sure that not all companies out there get compensated based on metacritic scores like those idiots in that recent story.

And secondly Konami themselves putting out the completely inferior, and according to the former art director of the games in question, embarrassing SH "HD" "collection." I was actually really excited on getting the chance to play SH2 again. SH3 not so much. And in HIGH DEF. Whoooo! But after watching a comparison vid of the ports I immediately cancelled my preorder. Very glad I did as the games not only have graphical issues but control issues too it seems. Even beyond them being severely outdated, the just don't work for a lot of people wishing to actually make their character move forward on a continued and regular basis.

I thought SH4 was ok. At the time I liked it enough to get all the the endings (which I don't remember) and to the one weapon mode etc. To this day I'm not sure I could tell you anything about the plot other than Walter went to great lengths to see his "mother" again. The ghosts were annoying. Extremly limited item management blew as well.

Origins was good, I haven't played it in a while as my old ps3 died and I can't. Enemy designs were interesting, and due to the weapon system you felt a little on edge. Was also good that unlike SH4 you didn't spend the 2nd half going through the same levels in reverse.

Homecoming I made myself believe I liked it long enough to get all the endings. Enemies were cool looking. Best bosses in series I think. Was nice after there not being almost any in SH4. Best looking/animated nurses by far. What killed it for me was the combat. If you didn't have perfect timing with dodges and counters you basically get slashed up by those same nurses. Some enemies liked to turtle up for minutes at a time. Plot wasn't that interesting to me. I never gave a rat's ass about the main character whose name I can't even remember. I was more interested in Elle, but the last area from the moment you wake up in that chair till the end was just lame.

Shattered Memories was one of the WORST games I've ever played. Not just the worst SH game. I hated everything other than a few clever puzzles (the art room shadows) and the chase sequences in particular. Not because they were scary, or that a good chase isn't a nice thing from time to time, but because they went out of there way to make them truly awful. They aren't like In downpour where quick thinking and instinct will serve you well and you are in a somewhat confined area with some sembalence of a direction or 3 to go in. Unlike in downpour they aren't 1-2 minute affairs with a beginning middle and end.

No, in SM they let you loose in what is basically an ice level the size of one from a metroid game, with no way to look at a map to find your way out of the fucking labyrinth due to being chased by an endless wave of small pink monkies that run way faster than you and glom on to you totally unopposed as you go around in circles looking for the one unmarked door out of 14 that is indistinguishable from the icey background half the time so you can (after about 20 minutes) end the god damned chase. The plot and psych tests did absolutely nothing for me. The big surprise was made insignificant because the game leading up to it sucked so bad. I didn't even bother to play it a 2nd time. I got the good ending I think. Or at least the non pervy one. I kept the free soundtrack and traded it in practically the next day and assumed that the series was dead.

Now after playing Downpour I have to ammend that. The series is very much alive, despite that fucking rediculous Diablo-clone called "Book of Memories" they may or may not actuallly release on the Sony abortion called the Vita. Scion of a long line of Sony portables that failed to make anyone I know excited. If you can manage to get them off playing with their damn phones and FB for long enough to show them WTF a Vita is of course.

EDIT: There actually were several parts of Downpour that actually scared me. Both the jump out scares and also the more build up kinds. You actually get a little of both in the Dead Man's Hand side quest. And your gradual realization on the OTHER and perhaps MAIN reason you are in that town was handled nicely. For me at least.

Still not as scary as Fatal Frame's constant "I'm about to get jumped by every kind of ghost I especially hate annnny moment now" or siren's "wtf just happened?!" every other mission. At least it isn't like Kuon, where the only scary thing about it is how hard it is.
 

RJ Dalton

New member
Aug 13, 2009
2,285
0
0
The latest Silent Hill series fails to be scary? Color me surprised; the last few new SH games totally didn't prepare me to expect that.
 

RelexCryo

New member
Oct 21, 2008
1,414
0
0
This reviewer claimed that he never felt scared because he could easily escape trouble or fight it. Silent Hill 2 was one of the best horror games of all time, and also one of the easiest videogames, period. You could just ignore most of the monsters and run past them in SH2. Killing them was also easy. Combat is much more challenging and difficult in DP than it was in SH2. And quite frankly, this game doesn't do combat right. This is one of the chief complaints on the Gamefaqs message boards. This is one of the worst reviews I have seen.
 

Char-Nobyl

New member
May 8, 2009
784
0
0
WMDogma said:
It certainly starts off that way. Takes a good chunk of time before you actually reach Silent Hill itself.
Oddly enough, I like the sound of that. It gives the impression that Silent Hill is less of a trap-door spider that pulls you in when you get close enough and more of a Siren: it lures, and the people that it draws don't need to be imprisoned. Most SH protagonists have a very understandable reason for remaining in the town, whether it's lost family or simple despair, though nothing physical is stopping them from leaving.

But, more to the point. This game...damnit, I had such high hopes. The last prison-based horror game I played was The Suffering, which was a whole lot better than its popularity indicated. It had a wide array of enemies, and each of them fit the setting. Most of them were manifestations of the cruelties that took place on the island where the prison was located, and they were just as much in conflict with one another as they were with the humans who were still alive.

That being said, it placed much greater emphasis on action than on horror when compared to a Silent Hill game with similar goals. With that in mind, I expected Downpour to be a game where your background as a combat-hardened convict would be much less of an asset than you'd think. After all, Silent Hill has always been about tailoring its nightmares to each resident. Characters in the same room as one another won't always be seeing the same things. So for Murphy, I would've thought that the sort of nightmare Silent Hill would cook up would be one where his physical strength and combat prowess couldn't carry him like it did in prison. Enemies might be able to become tangible and intangible at will, creating very narrow windows in which you can attack them (and they can attack you), and this would rob him of the most basic element of combat: a reliable enemy. Punch someone and you expect the punch to hit him if it's on target, but what if it drifts right through? Pretty goddamn disconcerting.

But instead...corpses. Or at least corpse-looking things. I'm glad that they didn't bring back the nurses (finally), but Christ, the way most of these monsters look, you could pull off one of their 'faces' and reveal that it was just Old Man Jenkins trying to scare people away so he could sell the property for a massive profit.

It's a common enough trope, so why didn't Konami use it? A horror feature with a young woman or a child usually sets 'helpless protagonist' as par for the course, but compare that to 'Aliens' or 'Predator.' Assumed helplessness is never as effective as learned helplessness. In the former, you're weak from the getgo. In the latter, you're a stone-cold badass who gets hit with the realization that everything that makes you a stone-cold badass is completely useless in this situation. It's not that you're weak: it's that all your strengths can't help you.

Aphantas said:
I agree with you on most points. Its seems that they have forgotten that combat with a monster will make it less intimidating, especially when you can defeat it fairly easily. The scariest monsters tend to have a trait in common, you either cannot kill it, or it is extremely hard to do so.
Monsters are at their most frightening when you know that they are after you and you are powerless to stop them. That is why Pyramid Head was scary, why Amnesia's monsters, especially the water creature, was scary. And why Homecoming's were not (comparatively).
Horror games must go out of their way to make the player feel vulnerable. Making a player able to fight monsters effectively only empowers the player and works against making a player vulnerable.
This is pretty similar to what I was trying to put across: the ability to fight with a reasonable chance of triumph deflates a scary atmosphere like nothing else. Enemies that are effectively invulnerable in the way I mentioned not only make each encounter dangerous and nerve-wracking, but it robs the player of the initiative. You can't throw the first strike, and you have to let it attack you if you want even a prayer of defeating it.

Therumancer said:
I tend to disagree because monsters that are totally invulnerable are kind of silly in most cases, they made more sense. Basically if something is solid enough to hit you, hitting it hard enough is going to hurt it. When you start forcing the player to react in an unrealistic fashion by say removing character options, the game ceases to be scary or immersive and instead turns into a very annoying forced stealth section.
Not to bang my own drum unnecessarily, but it seems like making them phantoms of some sort would solve that problem. Note the child Crusader in the Jericho cinematic trailer. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqPSjh7py1s] Sure, it's gruesome and horrible like plenty of other monsters, but when it ceases its attack, you can't do anything to it. It effectively turns the armory you've got on your back into a reminder of your enforced helplessness.

Therumancer said:
The thing is that horror games have to walk a fine line here, it is difficult to create scary monsters that can also be fought, and really that involves a lot of good atmosphere, writing and design. So few games have done it right, that it's hard to find examples... but the early Silent Hill games are a good example, there were numerous cases where combat didn't work at all, but they were exceptions rather than the rule. Rather they game managed to create an enviroment where combat was a viable approach, but it was actually more effective, and easier to run away and conserve your resources for where you really needed them.

Jericho, for all it's failings, also stands up in my mind for being one of the few cases where a game has managed to definatly be horror, but involve protaganists who are themselves very tough monster killing machines (a whole squad of them, loaded with weapons and freak powers) by creating an atmosphere, and scenario that was just... amazing... even if the delivery was lacking.
I didn't even read to this part when I was pulling up that Jericho vid. At the risk of sounding like I just want to compliment myself, "Great minds think alike," I guess.

Therumancer said:
Of course again part of the design problem was making it so the monsters were hard to avoid so they basically had "you have to kill me" signs on themselves. If I'm caught in a really confined area with a couple of nurses there that I can't get around, and a bunch of weapons, of course I'm going to fight them, if it was more practical to run past them or otherwise avoid them I would, but I don't generally have the option. All of the games had their claustrophobic enviroments and tricky bits with monsters, but the last few suffered due to making combat the only viable choice turning the games into pseudo-brawlers. The combat shouldn't be removed, or made less effective and fun to use, just not be put in the forefront with so many situations where you pretty much have to fight.
Yeah. Because when you force a player into combat, it almost inevitably ruins the horror of the situation. A game trying to be almost pure horror should never, ever put a player in a fight-or-flight situation and seal off the exits to force combat.

What did players do in Amnesia when they encountered the monsters? They ran the hell away, that's what. The monsters remained scary and felt unstoppable because players had absolutely no reason to stop and see if they could actually be stopped. It helped that there were no combat mechanics, but if you've got multiple terrors from your deepest nightmares bearing down on you, and all you have is a knife or, hell, even if you have a gun, your first instinct is to flee. Why should a horror game say otherwise? "Facing your fears" is probably the most quoted method of overcoming fears, and horror games that force combat are effectively destroying the scary elements of your foes while trying to make them scary.

The easiest way to make someone afraid of something is to let them keep running from it.

Therumancer said:
I'll also say another game that had combat and managed to be totally freaky just the same was the "Fatal Frame" series which on a lot of levels I consider the best survival horror game series of all time... as goofy as a game about a cute Japanese Girl fighting ghosts with a Camera could be, the games managed to be anything but.
And a big part of that is the weapons, or lack thereof: the Camera Obscura isn't a gun or a sword. It's...just a camera. Alan Wake (which you brought up) does something similar with the flashlight and possessed objects, and it worked really well then, too.

Hand someone a gun and tell them to fight monsters, and they'll probably do it. But hand them something that isn't a weapon and tell them that it's the only thing that can defeat the monsters? Goddamn, that's scary. As animals with thumbs, we're practically hardwired not to consider things that aren't weapons to...um...not be weapons. We're really, really slow to trust something that isn't normally a weapon to be the object we rely on for defense.

Therumancer said:
I do not consider "Dead Space" to be much of a horror game, it's atmospheric, and the bad guys are gross, but even with the mind trippy stuff it still basically comes down to an Aliens clone to me. See, I believe fighting monsters belongs in horror, but Issac is so bloody good for it, walking around in a truely awesome looking soot of armor, with a collection of "tools" that are better than the military grade weapons in most games (and let's be honest, if a plasma cutter can do all that, why do the soldiers even bother with regular guns?) it gets really iffy really quick.
I'll address your main points in a sec, but I might as well pause to address the plasma cutter > assault rifle issue, because it's a common (and valid) one.

Basically, the reason why a trained Marine couldn't beat what Issac could breeze through in a few seconds was training, and lackthereof, respectively. A trained soldier almost always shoots for the center of mass, which is next to useless against a necromorph. And since a lot of training is based around making that sort of thing second-nature, in a combat situation it's very, very hard to do things that basic differently. Similarly, guns are designed to kill people. Emphasis there is on 'people' and 'kill.' Trying to dismember someone with an assault rifle is marginally easier than trying to decapitate them with a laptop.

Issac, meanwhile, is armed with a wide array of devices that aren't designed to kill people, but if they're not working with safety protocols in place, can sure as hell take off limbs. A military armed with plasma cutters and rippers would be A) not a very efficient military and B) a walking war crime.

Therumancer said:
I mean beating some nasty thing to death in a game can still be part of horror, but when you walk into a room with an Arc Gun that like rips 6 monsters apart per shot, and you have 3 other equally nasty weapons at most times, plus "tools" that can freeze time on things locally (statis) or allow you to perform feats of telekinesis on part with most Jedi Knights/Biotics/Psychics including the abillity to kill most monsters by throwing pieces of their buddies at them... and really all pretensions of horror are kind of gone. I suppose with brilliant writing it could have still pulled it off sort of like Jericho (where you had a dude with a pet Fire Elemental in his arm for example) but they never really achieved that. I basically went through the usual "aliensesque" interior space enviroments, following some very basic tactics for checking the enviroment and systematically wasted everything I ran into. Writing aside, I felt like I was on a search and destroy mission for them than I was their prey... excepting when I ran from the hunter in certain scenes, and that was less scary than annoying because it was less about running like a bunny than mastery of game mechanics to slow it down... and really I kind of just kept freezing it and/or blowing it's legs off when you get down to it.
But yeah, I understand your point: Dead Space wasn't the only horror story to give its protagonist a heavy arsenal, but it failed to give an environment and enemies that remained scary in spite of that arsenal. Dead Space might be horror, but it's sure not survival-horror.
 

KoudelkaMorgan

New member
Jul 31, 2009
1,365
0
0
Just watched my first and probably last Jimquisition, on Konami. Could have saved some time on my earlier post had I watched it first and made reference to it as it pretty well sums up the state of Konami these days. Lucky Downpour wasn't developed by Konami at least.
 

Therumancer

Citation Needed
Nov 28, 2007
9,909
0
0
Char-Nobyl said:
destroying the scary elements of your foes[/i] while trying to make them scary.

The easiest way to make someone afraid of something is to let them keep running from it.

.

I agree with you on everything pretty much, except for this bit. See, I'm one of the few horror gamers that thinks that for all it's potental, Amnesia was a poorly designed turd that failed for largely this reason. To be honest the point I'm making is about how combat needs to be a viable option but needs to be balanced by the atmosphere and the options present for this to work. Amnesia is as big a failure as horror games that routinely force combat because its not an option and makes the need to flee or hide exclusively something that breaks immersion, it pretty much turns the game into a giant forced stealth section every time a monster shows up, and that's just as bad.

See, the thing to understand is that humans are the most efficient predators on our planet. We dominate the world because we're aggressive, highly intelligent(a dumb human is smarter than pretty much any animal out there), and we have opposable thumbs to make and use tools. We aren't the strongest or the fastest but those advantages make us nearly unstoppable. For all the situations people die in, people also tend to surprise in incredibly hostile situations despite the odds civilization teaches us to believe in because people generally don't realize what horrendously nasty creatures we are when you get down to it. Heck, you even have little kids surviving in the wilderness for years purely on instinct.

The point here is that we do run away, the fight or flight reflex includes "flight" for a reason, but we also don't tend to leave things that are dangeorus to us alone, being smart tool users when we run into something we can't beat, we set traps for it, or create things to give us an edge. This is how humans have been taking down vastly more powerful creatures on a physical level since the dawn of time.

The problem with Amnesia is that running away makes sense in some cases, but even if I can't outmuscle the monster, in certain situations there is a lot I am going to be able to do, and in that game (as far as I played it) and a few others it occured to me that the situation was getting stupid because there were plenty of things I should have been able to do with the enviroment or what I had on hand that would have made life alot easier.

It's one thing when there are no oppertunities present, but quite another when I'm say sitting on lamp oil and matches and am left with perfect oppertunities to light some annoying creature up like a torch, or heck... just to drop really heavy things on them.

This is why I think the type of monster is important, and why in some cases it doesn't work. In Amnesia your enemy for most of it basically amounts to some big, ugly, mook, that is apparently as dumb as a rock and doesn't exactly have any superhuman senses or anything. Okay greanted, your not going to win a dust up with a club, a makeshift spear, or whatever else, but if I push say a 400 pound crate off an edge using a lever onto it's head, or cover it, or say close a barred door and lock it so it cant get through, say "over here" douse it with lamp oil trough the bars and toss a match on it and laugh... yeah that would work, and makes a lot more sense than simply hiding constantly once you know for sure it's out there. Since there only seems to be one real monster for a good part of the game, think about how much easier and much logical things would be if you just took it out.

Now granted, there might be some very good reasons why this wouldn't work, depending on it's exact capabilities, but there is no knowlege I have for most of the game that explains why I wouldn't try.

Even in horror where your a relatively ordinary guy, I tend to frame it in the sense of what I would do in real life, and by "real life" I'm talking about what I can actually do (where I'm sub-average now actually) as opposed to some nerd fantasy. See, I will run away from something that scares the crap out of me, and might not go looking for something obviously more dangerous than I am with an improvised weapon, but will I take an oppertunity to turn the tables on it? Would I set a trap for something stalking me? Hell yes. Even as I'm running or hiding I'm going to be thinking about ways to get rid of that thing, and given an oppertunity that seems viable I'm going to take it.

Immersion can be broken by making the character too ineffective and incapable of action to be believed, and that can ruin taking horror seriously, just as bad as simply walking around and pwning everything that gets in your way with improbable levels of superhuman fighting abillity.
 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
Legacy
Jul 18, 2009
19,568
4,372
118
A Silent Hill game not developed by the original team, that isn't scary.

Boy, who couldn't have seen that coming?
 

Proverbial Jon

Not evil, just mildly malevolent
Nov 10, 2009
2,093
0
0
WMDogma said:
Silent Hill Downpour Review

Bring an umbrella.

Read Full Article
I have been trained to believe that EVERY corpse in EVERY game I play will rise up and try to eat my face so I'm somewhat dissapointed that Vatra thought that was a viable scare tactic.

Thanks for the review Paul! I've been eagerly awaiting this game, however my anticipation was laced with a certain amount of hesitation. I'm sorry to hear it's just not the game Silent Hill fans have been waiting for. Still, it sounds better than Homecoming and in my books that's certainly a good thing.

Doclector said:
Y'know, I'm that desperate for survival horror that I might pick it up anyway.

If Konami ever ships a decent amount of copies to the UK. I haven't seen it ANYWHERE, and I could swear it was meant to be out by now.

And it really does look like alan wake. Seriously, watch the video again, and at the end, say "My name's alan wake, and I'm a writer." Fits right in, don't it?
Amazon.co.uk says that it's out tomorrow (30th March) for the UK. I've been watching that date for a while now, especially after its release was delayed from October last year.

So ummm, why does this game look to be set in Alan Wake's Pacific North West when the town of Silent Hill is purportedly located somewhere in Maine, New England?
 

Doclector

New member
Aug 22, 2009
5,010
0
0
Proverbial Jon said:
WMDogma said:
Silent Hill Downpour Review

Bring an umbrella.

Read Full Article
I have been trained to believe that EVERY corpse in EVERY game I play will rise up and try to eat my face so I'm somewhat dissapointed that Vatra thought that was a viable scare tactic.

Thanks for the review Paul! I've been eagerly awaiting this game, however my anticipation was laced with a certain amount of hesitation. I'm sorry to hear it's just not the game Silent Hill fans have been waiting for. Still, it sounds better than Homecoming and in my books that's certainly a good thing.

Doclector said:
Y'know, I'm that desperate for survival horror that I might pick it up anyway.

If Konami ever ships a decent amount of copies to the UK. I haven't seen it ANYWHERE, and I could swear it was meant to be out by now.

And it really does look like alan wake. Seriously, watch the video again, and at the end, say "My name's alan wake, and I'm a writer." Fits right in, don't it?
Amazon.co.uk says that it's out tomorrow (30th March) for the UK. I've been watching that date for a while now, especially after its release was delayed from October last year.

So ummm, why does this game look to be set in Alan Wake's Pacific North West when the town of Silent Hill is purportedly located somewhere in Maine, New England?
I never knew silent hill was located there (although I did notice it looks siginifcantly different to the other games)...What the hell is it with maine!? Stephen King seems to bring some unholy event upon it a few times every year, and now I find out it's home to silent gorram hill!?