Silent Hill: Homecoming (aka: Silent Hill 5) — videogame review
One of the things that makes Chris the perfect husband is that he gets me super cool, ultra thoughtful “everyday” presents like Silent Hill: Homecoming (aka: Silent Hill 5), and he says I’m the perfect wife because I play things like Silent Hill: Homecoming.
What sets the Silent Hill series apart from other equally awesome survival horror videogames is the patience you must endure. In Silent Hill: Homecoming, there’s the usual wandering and backtracking through fog, labryrinthic room and hallway structures (with and without maps), hidden goodies (weapons, healers), intermittent puzzles, a twisted familial storyline unraveling as you go along. Homecoming also portends the familiar formula entailing a barrage of enemies in one section, and back to a whole lot of nothing in another. With save points few and far between, you may be thankful; I mean, you do have a mystery to solve, don’t ya?
Silent Hill: Homecoming takes you back to where the madness began, taking cues from earlier games and even the movie Silent Hill. The lead character is Alex Shepherd, a soldier who returns to his hometown of aptly named Shepherd’s Glen to search for his missing younger brother. His oft estranged mother is no help, zoning out with grief; the only useful thing she can mutter is that her husband has gone on a trek to remedy… something… and that’s something you (as Alex) must discover on your own.
But what you already know that Alex doesn’t, being the savvy Silent Hill series fan/player that you are, is that when those sirens blare, the walls peel and bleed upwards (imagery thanks to the movie and not previous games), revealing a whole new universe of pain worse than Alex’s crappy childhood.
Unlike the annoying inextinguishable ghosts in Silent Hill 4: The Room, the common enemies in Homecoming are pretty reasonable, the Needler and Siam being two of the toughest. The Needler is like a four-legged spider with a human body and a humanoid head jutting out from its butt, with long sharp blades for arms/legs. It effectively uses the blades for longish range attacks, but can also gnaw you up if you get too close, but you have to get in close to slash it with your own knife. Okay, you could shoot it, but where’s the fun in that? If you do decide to shoot it, go for its belly. Whatever you do, just do it quick because it’s incredibly agile for something that looks so awkward maneuver-wise, and it’s over if a couple of them get you cornered. Needlers can also jump and hover on the ceiling (something I thought was a glitch) to pounce on you.
The Siam (above left) is a huge hulking beast that’s also surprisingly nimble. On first approach, it looks like a giant wrestler with flared tree trunks for arms, and two graceful yet lifeless human forearms bound together and flapping in front of its face, protruding from where its eyes should be. When it turns around, you’ll see he’s wearing a woman like a backpack, and those are actually her arms sewn and laced to his face. She’s wearing killer 6″ heels/spikes, forcing her feet in to an eternal en pointé. I’m sure she could take out your eye with one of those heels, but you need to slash her up in order to take the whole Siam down. Otherwise, a shotgun will do quite nicely.
The Smog looks like an armless charred person just patted down, whose ribcage bursts open to spew toxic flames, gas and ash towards you when you approach. He drunkedly stumbles along mumbling a mantra that sounds like “baby oh baby”, and that makes him creepy in a disco sort of way. Wait for the Smog to expose his lungs for an easy kill. He’s awfully slow, so you could even run right past him. The Schism (below) is a split hammerhead shark with a human male body. How can I tell it’s a male? Why, there’s a thick ink-black man-part dangling between its legs. It’s no glitch, and it’s really odd that out of all the monsters that fade away after death, the Schism and his man-part remain lying on the floor.
When you’re in or near water, the larval/lamprey-looking Lurker (above) will be waiting to sink its rusty rake claws into you. Sometimes he’s just sliding around on the street, too, though. Creep past the hot Nurses (top photo) with your flashlight off and they’ll be none the wiser. If you fail, worst case scenario is they corner you and go mad-slashy with a spastic rhythm, especially on Hard mode.
In addition to the usual skinless zombie dogs (Ferals, like the Groaners from Silent Hill 1), mutant jugular vein-lovin’ insects (Swarm), now you have psychotic Order-cult-following townsfolk to contend with, some with handguns. Shrouded in full-body coal mining gear and gas masks, it takes quite a few rounds with a steel pipe or knife to knock them out, but they are foolishly chatty so you’ll know exactly where they are. Some enemies can outrun you, some attack in pairs or multiples, some are on to your “sneak” technique, but, frustrating as they are until you learn their weaknesses, once you know how to kill them, it’s easy as cherry pie… splattered all over.
Oh, in Homecoming, you’ll also have to stick your arm inside enemies, and there’s a nice little confirm prompt basically asking you “are you really sure you wanna do that?”. Reminiscent of the Jackass cow insemination scene where Johnny Knoxville shoves his arm into a cow rectum… if the cow rectum could snap your arm off.
Now for the Big Bosses; there are four. The Sepulcher is a ridiculously large creature with an octopus head flopping black goop from its mouth, sporting lumpy lava-like keloids on his torso, and swiping long thin arms with abandon, smashing his fists down, causing shattered glass to rain down and injure you. Good thing there are these oddly sturdy bookcases to duck behind once you catch on to his rhythm. At first, he hangs upside-down from the ceiling along with some large (also lumpy) bloody sacs which will be your main target for now, as they act as his pulley-system counterbalance. When all the sacs are sacked, the Sepulcher will crash down. Infuriated, but unable to walk (no legs), he’ll crawl around and continue to punch the floor and grab you, and you’ll have to button-mash a given button in order to be released/thrown to the ground. When he punches the floor and misses you, he’ll get stuck and there’s your shining moment(s).
Scarlet (above) is a lumbering mega-tall doll, with marionette joints and a porcelain shell you’ll have to chip off to get to her next phase. Like Sepulcher, she has incredibly long arms and she’ll pound the ground to unleash a “bloodquake”, in addition to her bow-and-lunge dance. Chipping away her armor may actually prove to be a worse fate for you, as she becomes a spry agile fox, skittering spider-like on the floors, walls, and ceiling. Like the Needler, she will drop down on Alex from her ceiling perch if you’re not careful. Relatively simple to kill if you roll-dodge like heck and aren’t afraid to get a little dizzy. I had actually accidentally bypassed the final kill command several times at this stage, so I got a little dizzy.
Seemingly invoked by H.R. Giger (Aliens designer) and Clash of the Titans’s Medusa, Asphyxia (pictured left) has one of the most creatively disturbing introductions. After your compadre gets sucked into a mutated Cronenberg vagina in the wall, out pops Asphyxia, the most challenging enemy (for me, anyways). Multiple female bodies fuse together form her centipede style form, with hands for feet, hands clutching her breasts, and hands wrapped around her nose and mouth. Embodying the most precision of all the bosses, and encapsulated by the most petite fighting chamber, you’ll need to learn how to dodge her multiple cunning attacks (pounce, swipe, breath blast), lest you be (literally) bitch-slapped, as I was.
Ah, Amnion, the final big baddie boss. What a surprise, it’s spider-esque with robotic hydraulic legs and a bloated belly likened to a, well, amniotic sac I suppose, except it’s not a belly per se, but a bloody human body strung and hung by its appendages to the metal legs; the human face looked like Elvis Costello to me. In fact, because you unload all your bullets into this boss, it’s unmemorable, so basically all I can recall is thinking “I’m killing a pregnant Elvis Costello”. I’m not sure why, as it was supposed to be Alex’s mother, but that’s just how quickly this boss battle lasted until “pop!” goes the spiii-der.
Your ending, one of five possible, will further explain (or may not) certain key characters and aspects of the series and Alex’s persona, depending on which choices you selected at the three major pinnacle points throughout the game. For example, if you show no mercy at all three points (refusing to save both your parents and your comrade), you will be inducted into the Pyramid Head tribe, and you’ll get to play as a Pyramid Head when you rev up another gameplay. You only get the head though, no executioner apron nor beefy biceps nor eight foot tall stature, nope, just your regular khaki jacket and jeans. I may have an unhealthy crush on Pyramid Head, so that’s kind of a bummer to me. A plus, however, is that some monsters and Order members will avoid you in this mask.
Speaking of my favorite Silent Hill baddie, Pyramid Head is called the “Boogeyman” in Homecoming, just probably not to his face. You’ll see him in a creepy cutscene (above with tiny Alex cowering in the background), but you won’t get to fight him. Amongst the plethora of other classic Silent Hill references, you’ll see skewed versions based on Alex’s interpretations (i.e: Boogeyman is schlepping a giant military combat knife) and childhood memories, and revel in how these creatures may have evolved in past games (remember, this is supposed to be the precursor) and for whom. There’s an allusion to those creatures being anthropomorphic for a good reason… are they actually Mengele type experiments?
To complement the cool new look, is a cool new look: amazing graphics and angles that take Silent Hill to a slickness never before imagined… come on, admit it; the graphics used to be laughable and I never understood why they were seemingly behind their competitors. Thankfully, the story was gruesome enough to overcome it. In Homecoming, the love of choppy polygons are softened, except Alex looks a little like a deranged Nick Lachey or David Boreanaz with cartoon teeth, or maybe the lighting makes things appear to have harsher shadows and mossier hues than desired. Or maybe all the characters ate a lot of peanut butter and can’t quite close their mouths around their dialogue. Or maybe that’s the true horror of Shepherd’s Glen: crazy orthodontists.
The music and sound effects are genius, yet most battles are strangely completely silent… oh wait, I may have answered my own question there. The storyline always lends a sort of grounded bizarre quality that reminds you that Silent Hill is demonic only because people created it to be so. That’s seriously the creepy part.
I only have a couple of minor qualms with the game. When reviewing maps, the game isn’t paused, so while it’s more realistic to be standing there in the middle of monsters whipping out your map, it’s horrifying to players like me who absolutely have to ensure I’ve explored every single nook and cranny in the game, even during evil pursuit. It’s also a little irritating that the zoom locks, meaning you are either in or out of zoom mode; you can’t actively walk around and launch zoom/inspection mode willy nilly, but these are totally small blips and I’ll get over it… in fact, I’m over it already.
Even though it’s technically the sixth installment, Silent Hill 5 / Homecoming is an outstanding introduction to SH noobs. It may even enlighten longtime fans who haven’t yet seen the movie. Novice or pro, everyone gets a Circular Saw when you finish the game (it’s in the garage), an item that became reason enough to ban Homecoming in Australia, where they’re currently retooling it for release. Some squawk about Alex being sawed in half… powerdrilled in the eyeball… whatever. Welcome to Silent Hill.
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