Silent all these hills
Some horror-buff friends and I recently played through Silent Hill 2, them for the first time. I originally played SH2 way back in 2004, and stopped being freaked out in my own basement in 2009 or so. I had no idea if any of us would enjoy the game as much as I remembered enjoying it, but we actually did.
I’ve (apparently!) gotten used to horror-type games, so when I was holding the controller, I fought the creepy monsters like it was World of Warcraft and I had to kill seven Sexy Faceless Undead Nurses and collect their hats. Business as usual. Liz, on the other hand, would walk around, handgun at the ready, and empty a clip into any skulking horror that jumped out at “us”. That was the other emergent quality of playing the game in a group: James Sunderland sort of became an avatar of whoever was in the room. (“Do we have any keys that might fit that lock?”).
We played through the game in three lengthy sessions, but I still had Silent Hill fever (which I think is what James’ wife had), so when I was on my own I tried Silent Hill: Homecoming, more or less the fifth game in the series, but made by a different team than the one that made the first three. It was okay at best, and I basically have no opinion on it that wasn’t expressed by Yahtzee in his review:
The Escapist : Zero Punctuation : Silent Hill Homecoming
I will add one thing: Homecoming has a point where you go into a small, creepy medical office (good so far), check out a side room, and when you return, there are six Sexy Undead Nurses for you to gun down. That one encounter goes a long way towards ruining the atmosphere. Where were all those nurses hiding when I was on my way in? Did the developers think six nurses would be more creepy than just one? Because when I flatten most of the crowd with a blast from a shotgun, it feels more like Evil Dead 2, which isn’t what they were going for.
