Stifling an urge is much easier when you have access to your craving. Gaming is a vast landscape, filled with plenty of genres to tide over any number of gaming wants or needs. As time progresses, certain aspects of gaming shift and change, ebb and flow as if a mini evolutionary cycle were always occurring to thrive and adapt. With such a drastically changing landscape, some of gaming’s older habits or finer celebrations get left by the wayside, and survival horror is one of the biggest victims of neglect in recent years. Silent Hill: Homecoming marks another installment in the now classically running survival horror franchise and also is dealing with the horror of surviving in a day and age that would be as welcoming as the very residents of Silent Hill.

I’ve been a big fan of Silent Hill from the very beginning. Though I played and loved Resident Evil before Silent Hill even saw the light of day, Silent Hill came out to my surprised delight on the PlayStation in 1999, and it did so with a bang, not a whimper. The intriguing story, the atmosphere, the sheer audacity of fear the game tried to instill within you — as Resident Evil would move further away from in later years — and finally making the full transition to action game, Silent Hill would strive to shock and awe for years to come, while never veering from its roots far enough to shun embracing what makes nightmares a reality.

The character’s eyes through which you’ll be seeing the most recent incarnation of hell will be a guy named Alex. You won’t know much more until you get your self out of a decrepit old hospital and try to find the truth behind what happened to your brother Joshua and how Silent Hill reprises its roll as drama queen and tries to get in the middle of everyone’s problems.

There’s a laundry list of little details that have changed this time around, maintaining and improving the experience in a number of ways. First and foremost is the new engagement system. In the old days, we had to walk uphill in snow 15 miles to and from school, and if some undead nurse comes along and starts realizing you have some really unique brightly colored pins on your backpack, you would have to improvise a 2 x 4 right into her face and be done with things. No more, though; these kids have it easy, and the new-fangled battle system makes losing your life, or preventing the process, enjoyable. You can lock onto an enemy when they appear and switch between multiple targets. After the fact, you can duck and dodge out of the way, combine light and heavy attacks, and top off your arsenal with some complementary counters. The combat system is a nice new addition to Silent Hill and makes encountering and refusing any and all battles with demons from unspoken nether realms a more enjoyably bowel loosening experience.

The game does not take liberties when dealing with timing windows and will make sure a patient observer of enemy strategies and defense will come out on top in a fighting situation. Each monster will be sure to indicate what’s coming with their own versions of a Mike Tyson uppercut, complimentary of their version of winking. Fighting some wretched undead doberman? Wait till he curls back and dodge right to whack him in the jaw. Taking your chances with a Smog? Make sure to wait till he puffs up, and then pop him right in the chest for a get out of potential global warming jail free card. The series realized that catching up with the future meant utilizing gaming’s little luxuries, with a combat system topping the list. The addition is a needed one for the future of not only the character, but the series in general, and it is a good first venture into the territory without giving up the sense of insecurity that goes hand in hand with ... well, not being able to find anything to hold large enough to scare everything else away.

A page is taken out of the recently departed Resident Evil 4’s camera system at shooting moments. When Alex brings out his gun, he takes out a little Leon with him. Whether it’s a direct rip is up for grabs, but the impression is noted. The shooting is very decent, making sure you take your time with the shots, as bullets will be scarce. The one fatal flaw in the aiming system is the complete lack of inverted, which almost turned me off completely to the entire game. Why Double Helix would somehow be allowed by Konami to omit such a regular staple of control options seems beyond me. It is far from a little detail, but it is a major way to turn away a more than eager soul to take the dive.

Regardless of the lack in preferences, the suspense always holds up, and the game has some great misdirection when it comes to trying to make sure you never want to turn the lights off again. Whether it’s leading you through a darkened boiler room with metal scraping on all sides, making your way through a dark hallway of nurses or finding where the blood trail leads, Silent Hill will test your wits on more than one occasion. The game is pleasantly hard in the difficulty of the same name and really should be the way the game is played. The style and manner of running through the game and not airing on the safe side of caution will surely get you killed and will have you appreciate what the sun looks like if you had not given it the time of day beforehand.

With this recent wedding of game philosophies that Silent Hill strikes a tender balance with, I feel now that I’ve mentioned something old, something new and something borrowed, I should throw in something blue as well, to follow appropriate traditions. And blue you’ll feel, at least in the face from drudging through some of — nay, any part of — the game’s environments, whether you’re knee deep in what should be Alex’s familiar basement or checking out some janitorial-related prospects when bouncing through Shepherds Glen and the wonderful sewers systems they have to offer. Hell, you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Silent Hill decides to have a little fun with a warning siren and the town’s unofficial mascot (the dude loves helmets). You’ll never be short on beautiful locales or unconvinced that Silent Hill is the perfect place for a romantic getaway ... if it wasn’t for all that rotting flesh. The blood may be a factor. Or the death.

Not to say you’ll be blue in the face with disgust; it’ll be from paralysis. If that hasn’t overtaken your body yet, maybe just a nice off-white. Regardless of color shades in the face of danger, the reason Silent Hill came to successful fruition remains very intact, as the ambience, from the moody but subtle soundtrack to the disturbingly shocking subject matter, Silent Hill still stands as the benchmark for horrifying. And it does so in an effectively cerebral way, so as not to dilute the experience by holding your hand or dumbing down the romp.

While the production studio has changed under Konami and the team has shifted to a western handler, the game holds onto a lot of the same older game principles, and a fewer newer elements added feel more than justified in the face of preserving the old-school element of the game, and then some.

One of the few noticeable changes when it comes to the hemisphere the team is based in are some of the age-old differences in society. Homecoming is more prone to extreme gore and definitely is more visually explicit than past Silent Hills. Silent Hill 1–3 were especially tight-knit when brutalizing your imagination to extreme lengths; what the shadows refused to show, the mind certainly will. The thought of the less you see, the scarier serves as a unique but effective virtue to any manner of unconventional frights. Homecoming has more blood but serves the imagination less. It’s a flaw in some respects, but a minor setback either way in good horror storytelling virtues.

The fan service is greatly intact, with the game going up and beyond for impact references and little Easter eggs hidden every which way for little nods to the fans, whether it’s seeing an old-time foe in a familiar hallway, Robbie the rabbit chilling in a bloody little bundle of puppy fun, or very slight name mentions to those who have passed through before. Any long-time fan will be able to have a moment of clarity amid the chaos while enjoying Homecoming and still have a lot to look forward to as far as the unexplored and the hulking boss fights. As if the demented Siams, a combination of some bizarre demon ape with lady legs for a back, weren’t enough and after running from countless Schisms with their mangled bodies, Silent Hill will treat you to some pretty memorable scenes as far as putrid can take you. The bosses will do a great job of mystifying in the oblique.

The grotesque masses of symbolic disgust will test your wits with some pretty malicious intent. I know intent doesn’t seem painful, but you might not be familiar with Silent Hill’s version of the boogeyman. His intent is what pain is born from. The bosses follow a similar birthing process when it comes to destruction, and the introductory cinematic will maybe even leave you open for a hit, depending on how easily you spook. Rest assured, they will be satisfactory endeavors that keep the story moving in a very awesome way.

Overall, I’d say the few complaints would encompass a greater maturity for the game mechanics and storytelling. I’m not saying Silent Hill fails to encapsulate all of the elements necessary to be completely adult-oriented, but for a game that’s based around a town’s violent changes in tune with the main protagonists fears and deepest troubles, I feel a cinematic high note was still missed. No, I’m not talking about 20-minute long cutscenes, and no, I’m not talking about insanely high production values. I’m merely stating that Silent Hill had really spoilerific story moments that I felt hit really hard emotionally and was done better in this game than other games with the same attempt this year. I felt the piece should have been more reflexive; I wanted to feel a grip of losing reality, in a good way, through the entire game as I was at those certain moments. The ride was great, and at the end of the day, very satisfying, considering only a single-player experience was offered. But I didn’t feel helpless enough; I didn’t feel emotionally attached to the character. I wanted to have fun by feeling terrible, which is what Silent Hill is famous for.

The fact Alex has never been given face time is even more the reason to create a bond between the player and the avatar, as to make sure that in a moment of sanity, we would go directly to Silent Hill with him for his same reasons. The terror needed to be felt even more, and it needed to be done so through the threat of Alex’s life, and the danger needed to be even more immediate in that case. If the game had done any less in this respect, it would have fallen apart. Even with the surprisingly cool twists the narrative offers and the morbid characters you may meet, Alex is too comfortable and was not given a more treacherous situation — or reason to try to hold him back, out of care.

Survival horror is a dieing breed, and too many bullets means not enough screams, so a careful balance must be drawn. The object is to not forego certain elements just to create a more rigid environment to succeed in, but to embrace several new approaches and to make sure you get the most out of your lightless trips through Silent Hill. The glass ceiling needs to be broken for things that go bump in the night if survival horror wants a chance again, and it needs to brake fast. I don’t view Homecoming as a misstep for the Silent Hill series but more of a reminder that there’s scary, and then there’s what happens when the sirens start, and that should never become routine under any circumstances.

Afterthoughts: I want to take this time to clarify that I think Silent Hill: Homecoming is worthy of the moniker and that it had been sometime since I’ve been gratified as much as this from a standalone single-player game (complimentary with some out of this world unlockables). The problem is moving forward and doing so effectively. Silent Hill might be one of the best contenders in electroshocking Sir.Whore (survival horror) back into coherency. The stakes need to be raised, and the next one needs to be dynamite in terms of what is offered. Priority one should be beta testing, as one of the worst moments you could experience in Silent Hill is a loading hiccup, an elevation glitch, a clipping issue or, the worst of the worst, a game-ending bug (which is possible in Homecoming). Nothing breaks comfy immersion more than seeing the world come apart at the seams. It’s an important prospect of weaving an in-game situation you wouldn’t be able to just get away from by turning the power off.

Don’t mistake me when I say Silent Hill needs to be more real, because realism is not the point. The game needs to feel more real, and the difference in a beautifully crafted reality and the feeling of beautiful craftsmanship will have to happen if Silent Hill wants to move in a direction faster than Pyramid Head can take them alone. We don’t want to be desensitized to what wee see in Silent Hill; we want to be frightened by its deep symbolism, not its death count. As long as the creators avoid churning out Silent Hills in the future by injecting humor like an umpteenth horror movie (and have a protagonist that actually screams), Silent Hill’s future will remain as comfortably bleak as ever.