Silent Hill 8: Downpour

Release day: October 25th, 2011
Rating: TBA (probably mature 17+)
Platform: PS3, Xbox360
Website: http://www.konami.com/games/sh/

Features:

• All new and updated Silent Hill experience that visually stands on its own with the current competition. Utilizing Unreal 3 technology, the game brings the town of Silent Hill, its characters, the creatures and the alternate hell world into vivid and spectacular display.
• Free-roaming and deep exploration that will take players into all-new 'Side Quests' unlocking areas within the game, special items and bonus content.
• An ever-changing game world including day and night 'Normal' world and 'Otherworld' world, all manifested and sourced from character actions throughout the game.
• First-time ever 3D technology will bring Silent Hill a step closer to the player with three-dimensional immersion.
• Renowned story and music talent attached to the game including:
• Silent Hill comic writer, Tom Waltz
• Original music directed and composed by renowned composer, Dan Licht, of the Showtime series, Dexter.
• Theme song performed by hard-rock multiplatinum group, Korn.

I’m pumped about this game. Not just because it’s a game that takes place in Silent Hill universe, but because it would seem like Kanomi is looking towards what the next step is in not just the survival horror genre, but in the gaming industry in general. To me it seems like you can expect your favorite games to never step to far away from their formula so they don't spin their flagship titles to far away from where the player base wants them to be.

It’s always risky to change things up with a franchise like Silent Hill. It has been done with marginal success in a lot of franchises, like World of Warcraft or the Final Fantasy Franchise, and in those cases, while there was a some customer retention problems, in the end the changes made the player base even larger than it was before, making the lost customers casualties of good business. But in other games, like MW: Black ops, a lot of fanatical Modern Warfare pretty upset with some of the strange changes. We’ve learned (the hard way in the cases of MMOs) that the more things change, the less a pocket of fans will like the game, even though it pulls a new player base into the fold. This installment of the Silent Hill franchise will most likely tear out the hears of some die hard Silent Hill fan boys, but in that scenario, this game also has the chance to be someone's first enjoyable experience in Silent Hill.

Adding into silent hill the “free-roaming” environment is a large diversion from the previous titles, believe it or not, there are people who love linear story telling. The free-roaming element will make them second guess this title, even if they loved the first seven games. Free-roam environments coupled with the promise of a 3D environment that will make the game more immersive (since 3D is still widely considered a ‘gimmick’) is a risky combo. People really toe the line with 3D; willing to say that a 3D movie is good, and fun, but still unsure about 3D gaming.

When Toy Story 3 came out, 60% of it’s 110 million dollar profit was from 3D ticket sales. My response to this was, at first, of course it was, Toy Story is a kids movie, and kids love 3D, but when you get older you don’t care too much for it. The numbers said I was wrong though, only 56% of ticket sales were people <25 years old. While that is a majority, it is not so large of a majority that the other 44% of 26+ year olds should be ignored (taken from Box Office Mojo.com ). I think that 3D, at the rate of developing technology, and upon consumer demand, will be exactly where gaming goes, and I applaud Kanomi for taking this step in putting 3D into a non-experimental franchise.

I can’t tell you anything about Downpour that you didn’t see in the videos, but I can tell you that based on what I know about the previous silent hill titles, this one looks unique on a few fronts; Primarily the graphical leap, that’s something you can see from a trailer. From Silent hill 7 (homecoming) to 8(Downpour) It looks like Kanomi put a greater focus on character realism than they have in the past. I can already identify with the characters in the story just from the trailers I’ve watched, I cannot say the same about previous Silent Hill games, even after completing the game.

As with most cross-platform games, it's become a trend to build the game for the lower performing machine. In the case of this game, I don't really care, the game looks beatiful on both systems, and if there were not pictures in the corners of these two examples, I very easily could have gotten them confused.

We already know that the story is going to be great, and we know that the game is going to be creepy, what we are waiting to see is if Kanomi can pull of the Silent Hill experience with these new elements intermingled. If they can, we may have something uinique and ground breaking coming our way in the near future.

Your Master of Crit,
Z. W. Van Kleeck