I have the special distinction of being "down" with Silent Hill since Day 1. This is a fact I gladly lord over my other video gaming friends. I say things like "If only you had picked up Silent Hill 1 and known the fear and anxiety it caused when you were still innocent." Silent Hill 2 is by far one of the most amazing games in history, so we won't even waste more characters going there. Silent Hill 3 lost me partway through the beginning and I never bothered with 4, but now that I have a next-gen console it was only a matter of time before I picked up SH:H, or 5 as it was once known.
Enter local bad-ass and protagonist Alex Shepard.
The guy has problems, like all other SH main characters, only Alex isn't some chump that crashed a Jeep at the city limits. Alex is an ex-soldier (or so he wishes) who must have been in the U.S. Army's Special Ops unit that specialized in killing fucked up looking monsters. Never has a SH character been able to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee like Alex. And it works. I am confused when I hear fanboy purists (Note: I am a fan of the series, different from "fanboy") saying that shitty fighting abilities was part of the scary package of Silent Hill. There is nothing scary about lining up James Sutherland with a slowly approaching nurse then holding the bash button so that you time the head smash at just the right second. Sure, Alex is a good fighter, which takes some of the bite out of the monsters, but once you had figured out the monsters in the other games it was the same easy process of beating each of them with a steel pipe or whatever. Everyone shat their pants over the dodge function in combat, but what the hell? Am I to believe that everyone that plays SH games prefers a clunky combat system in this day and age? Do they not play any other games and they get confused and scared when something new like a dodge function comes along? These people are scared of change.The story is really good, but again, when held up to one of the world's greatest games (SH2), Homecoming is obviously inferior. But so is having sex with girls, winning the lottery, and eating a bacon sandwich covered in bacon when compared with SH2. You aren't going to get the deep imagery with each monster that you had in SH2, but these monsters have some significance to the story. What keeps blowing my mind is that people get confused by multiple non-linked endings, but this existed in SH2 as well.
So, fuck, maybe it was all in his head, maybe he actually escapes Shepard's Glen with Elle and the whole thing was real, the thing is not that the endings depend on what you do in the game in the interpretive sense, but they only make sense in the context of the choices you made. I thought I was playing it the "good" way and got the "hospital" ending. Point is, this ending makes sense given I didn't put Alex's mom out of her misery when she was being tortured, mostly because she was so unhelpful earlier I thought she should pay for her silent-chair-rocking and nonsense responses to Alex's reasonable questions. "Reality AND responsibility", with the emphasis added, means you know what's true, but you can't do what's right. This is completely independent of the other endings. On the topic of writing and voice acting, the conversations are way more "natural", in the sense that Alex will shake his mom and be like "What the hell is going on?" instead of just carrying on with the conversation as if she isn't acting like a complete weirdo.I am not going to embark on a detailed plot analysis this post, maybe later, but I am going to stand up here and say there is nothing wrong with SH:H from a series contintuation point of view. From what I have heard/read the series was in a tough spot after 4, but I feel Homecoming brought it back to its roots with a personal focus and an environment that reflects the key players in the story, not just some random mismash of imagery meant to impress your Affliction-tshirt-wearing mouthbreather. SH:H is good for the series, is a great interpretation of a new line to the story, and cultivated a similar sense of dread in the player that 1 & 2 accomplished (maybe even better, since you can't carry 100 shotgun shells and just mow down everything in your path as in 2.) Seriously, everyone was sick of the "ALESSA IS PISSED" storyline, and that cult still kind of featured, but it was in the background. I dunno, maybe the father-son motif summoned up some deep-seeded feelings I have never dealt with, but SH:H doesn't deserve the bad rap it is getting. The switch to American developers didn't change everything, as most forum posters assert.
The one problem with the game was these damn penis-head monsters were tough and fast and annoying. Fuck those monsters.
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