Horror Games

Okay. Downloaded demo. Played demo. Uninstalled demo. Purchased full game.

Fuck me this is the closest to old school Resi and Silent Hill I've seen in a long time. Can't believe I'd never even heard of it.

I do fancy Tormented Souls. Played the demo and it's definitely got that old school vibe. Think I'm going to leave it nearer to mid-late October though. Mind you I never finished Silent Hill 4 that I started last October after going through SH 2 & 3...

I was pleasantly surprised by D back in the day on Saturn. Short and easy but Warp games were usually fun.

Wonder if this year I can finally finish Project Zero 4 . Got Maid of Sker sitting there too and that should be fairly short...

Evil on the normal difficulty though with limited saves AND loads... Didn't quite finish it and mean to go back to it one day...

D reminded me a lot of the eariler Mansion of Hidden Souls. That game also had no HUD, relatively simple puzzles that relied on getting items from one place to the other, occasional instant death events, and even the same two hours timer. It's also a much more charming game overall, even if the FMV quality is absolutely terrible today (there is seemingly no compression at all, so you are looking at videos that run at maybe 5fps).

I actually finished a TEW2 playthrough quite recently. I loved both games, and the IP in general, though Cappy's criticisms of the first game there are perfectly valid. I also seem to recall it suffering from an obscene difficulty spike at one point around Ch.12-13, if I recall correctly, which was just brutal/tedious at higher difficulty levels.

The second game is definitely superior, and I also thought the semi-open world setup worked well. They've added an NG+ and a few 'cheat' toggles in the menu since launch, which enables you to start again with all your unlocked powers and weapons, as well as toggling off stamina depletion, enabling God mode, and one-hit kills for regular mobs, which may all sound like super cheese, but is actually immensely satisfying for subsequent playthroughs (especially if you just happened to miss one fucking lore Slide!).

Really hope we some more entries in the series.

Was that on console, Wunty? I played on PC and didn't have too much pop-in, but yeah it definitely does exist.

The more annoying thing I had was at 1440p the game didn't seem to want to render the document/item description text clearly, but dropping down to 1080p fixed that issue. Very strange. There is undoubtedly a lot of clunk about the game as well, to be fair. Still love it though

Anima? Haha, yeah. She is genuinely fucking terrifying, in both the scripted and random encounters.

That eerie version of Clair de Lune she hums is absolutely haunting. She was a great addition.

Anyway tonight's game is Silent Hill, the plan is a different game every night through October but that may be too much.

Yeah PS4 version on PS5. It's genuinely so bad the open world bits just looked awful.

How absurdly wide are the streets of Silent Hill? Let's find out.

Harry Mason seems to be an average size human male, using an average human male pace I'm getting 16.5 Metres or approximately 54.1 Ft. That's enough for a four lane dual carriageway with a central reservation based on UK standard road widths.

Everything really is bigger in the States. I was wondering if it was a way of offloading rendering but the engine seems to handle the considerably narrower alleyways just fine, I guess it was an artistic decision to enhance the feeling of being lost and disorientated.

I was on a forum once where someone was trying to determine how fast the Far Cry 3 protagonist could run 100m.

There's definitely something oppressive about the first Silent Hill, each of the earlier games builds it's own atmosphere. There's something rather harsh and abrasive about the original. Under the original director, Yamoaka's soundscape is much more restrained, a lot of the time it's silence punctuated by unsettling drones leaving the environmental sounds at the forefront.

Enemies are a real handful, often because of the controls, unless you devote a lot of time to 90s games you'll be totally out of practice with tank controls. They can be a real challenge in Silent Hill which has lots of wide open spaces with an extremely mobile enemy type who can attack from any side, I wish I'd started on normal difficulty.

I've heard survival horror purists maintain that Silent Hill games should only have tank controls. I'd say it's the opposite the game only has a fixed camera for a fraction of the time, it's too unlike Resident Evil for it to work comfortably, Resident Evil is all tight environments with limited pathways and slow enemies so even today, playing something like RE Remake isn't too much trouble for the average person.

About an hour in you're reaching the school, there have been no jump scares and little in the way of gore set-pieces but the atmosphere just starts getting to you, this is a place you don't want to be. The enemies may be crude masses of polygons but you don't want to be anywhere near them, the radio static and drone start to drive you to paranoia. You can barely see but now you've got to turn off the flashlight too, it's drawing them in. Near blind in the dark with static telling you you're not alone you pray the door ahead isn't locked whilst also dreading what may be on the other side.

Even after all these years it still works.

Unfortunately the outdoor enemies in the original Silent Hill are not slow at all. The Dogs can be outrun eventually if you're not cornered or in a tight space but the flying enemies can match your speed, swoop over your head into fog or darkness and seem to be coded to blindside you. If you do hit them they'll often retreat, sometimes hide and then return to blindside you again.

Since running leads to dealing with multiple enemies I don't think it's just the tank controls that are challenging, team Silent built the game for an audience that had been using them for years. As I'm playing I realise I should have pulled out one of my original copies so I could read the manual, it's strictly old school with little in the way of tutorial or instruction, there's no 'cut off their limbs' here.

I recall now that the game has hidden stealth mechanics and you need to be aware of things like how much noise you're making.