Silent Hill: Homecoming is a strange game. Not because of the gross-out enemy designs or the peculiar environments and characters you’ll meet, or the oppressive fog that invites you to explore and simultaneously warns you to not take a single step further. It’s not strange because of the relentlessly creepy mood set by the intense and haunting music and sound effects or even the plodding, convoluted story.

No, Silent Hill: Homecoming is strange because it seems at odds with itself, trying to deliver an atmospheric, deliberate horror experience while also trying to provide an up-to-date action game, with a combat system that, for the most part, works hand-in-hand with the pace of the game, but still manages to frustrate and appear archaic in a world where survival-horror has successfully transitioned into the realms of action-orientated horror. Fans of the genre may be left cold as the game tries to invite newcomers by making the experience slightly more accessible, but muddies that experience along the way, failing to approach anything that resembles the kind of reinvention and reinvigoration that a game such as Resident Evil has achieved.

In Silent Hill: Homecoming, you take control of one Alex Shephard, returning home from military service and a brief stay in hospital, only to find his home largely abandoned and overrun with an evil presence and strange, unknown creatures roaming the streets. You’re soon sent on a quest by your seemingly hopeless mother to find your missing brother and bring him home. Things take a turn for the worst, however, as you discover that things are not as they seem, as they rarely are, delving deeper and deeper into the mystery while uncovering sights of a highly disturbing nature.

Unfortunately, the story of Homecoming is pretty convoluted and is related to players clumsily, plodding along from one plot-point to another. Voice acting is passable and motion-capture is good, but everything feels stilted despite (or maybe because of) an attempt at creating a truly creepy, horrific process of discovery through character conversations. Every human character you meet seems oblivious to what’s going on and there’s no real sense of urgency from inhabitants, despite the complete collapse of the town and the monsters emerging from the dark.

The developers should have instead left all of that horror work to the amazingly dense and foreboding music, which creates a consistently sinister atmosphere, almost telling players just to give up because this challenge is too much for them. Horror fans will thrive on the mood set by the music alone, but less hardcore players may indeed find it a bit much, instead retreating to something a bit happier and colourful. In a third-person survival-horror game such as Homecoming, though, it’s pitch-perfect, and a study in how to create such an intense environment with sound, and specifically, music.

You’ll need to wade through this atmosphere somehow, and Silent Hill: Homecoming provides players with a good combat and movement system to ensure you feel well equipped to deal with any challenge that pops out of the fog outside, or from around the corner of a corridor indoors. With a range of melee weapons, from a knife to a lead pipe and axe, and a few ranged weapons, such as handguns and shotguns, you’re able to take on the lunging, stumbling enemies created with Silent Hill’s unique brand of filthy, stomach-churning designs in mind.

Using a competent targeting system to attack these shambling, fleshy masses, you can shoot at them from afar or use heavy and quick attacks to take them out up-close, dodging and blocking their attacks by hitting the dodge button just as they’re about to pounce at you, successfully evading or stopping their savage attempt in its tracks.

If you happen to get knocked down (which will happen… often), you can try and get up straight away by using a neat-sounding trick of hitting the dodge button as you hit the dirt, enabling you to spring straight back into action. Getting knocked down is almost always an unexpected occurrence though, so you’ll have to be quick to take advantage of this ability.

There’s nothing exactly technically wrong with the controls of Silent Hill: Homecoming, and everything works the way you would expect it to and to a suitable degree, but there are things that could have made your abilities easier to use and less frustrating – cancelling your current action, for example, would have made a world of difference, as you may be in mid-attack and you notice the enemy is winding up for an attack of its own. The ability to cancel your own attack at this time and go straight into a defensive manoeuvre would definitely cut out many of the annoyances where you feel your grip of the controller getting just a little tighter, and your blood pressure rising just a little higher.

It’s apparent that the controls are meant to complement the slow, deliberate pacing of the game, but when you’re asked to confront increasing amounts of enemies with your limited abilities, a feeling of being cheated slowly crawls over you, colouring the experience for the worst. Silent Hill: Homecoming is all about the slow, creepy, horrific pacing, enemies and environments, and the game starts out strongly by providing limited enemy encounters to keep the pace up and keep you moving forward, but despite the wider-range combat system as compared to previous Silent Hill games, you never feel properly equipped to take on hordes of enemies, or even a single fast-paced boss, always feeling as though your failures in the game are not your fault. The controls are not suited to high-paced frenetic action, and the developers should have realised the limitations of the system, seeing as how those limitations were pre-determined and self-imposed.

To this end, Homecoming is not an easy game, even on the default ‘Normal’ difficulty, and only ever provides just enough weapon ammunition and health replenishments to see off the next round of enemies, before being forced to turn to your melee weapons and battle it out against the hellish minions intent on your demise, as they slowly chip away at your health during each encounter.

Respite from the demons comes in the form of brief puzzles that will barely challenge your intellect, but are welcome changes from entering into scraps with ghastly monsters. Even during these times of relief, Homecoming continues its barrage of dense atmosphere, creating mood with simple, slight camera sways and screen filters to add to the grimy look of the game. The music continues to contribute to the apprehensive ambience, while the fog in outdoor areas creates a morbid sense of curiosity – what monstrosity lies around the corner? This ploy is effective in keeping interest in the game alive, as each footstep becomes a stride towards progress, rather than progressing corridor by corridor, as in other games.

What may put a stranglehold on your progress, if not grinding it to a halt, are the handful of glitches and bugs (the in-game error kind) you may happen to encounter, and the general unfinished feeling you get while playing Silent Hill: Homecoming. Sounds can play out of sync with on-screen actions, there’s not-insignificant amounts of popping and geometry disappearance at seemingly random times, and there are problems with scripts running multiple times, triggering the spawning of more enemies than is possible to deal with, forcing restarts at earlier savegames.

At one time, a once-killed enemy fell down and disappeared, only to reappear, reanimate, walk around a bit, and then promptly die again. In the world of Silent Hill, this kind of thing would have been perfectly in line with the enforced style, but when it’s not supposed to happen, it can be jarring. Strange indeed.

Silent Hill has carved a niche for itself that has won it a number of diehard fans over the years, but that niche is rapidly becoming too small and too specific to appeal to a new wave of game players – players who may enjoy a good bit of survival-horror-filled fun, but would rather the experience lean more towards the ‘fun’ than ‘survival.’ Silent Hill’s brand of horror is very unique to the series and is in danger of seeming antiquated when compared to Resident Evil, one of the genre’s forefathers, and an example of how a series can reinvent itself while still retaining the elements that made it successful in the first place.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is a half-step towards such reinvention, but the developers need to think hard about what fans enjoyed about the series in the past, while trying to encourage and welcome a new set of players to keep the franchise alive in the future.

Homecoming is a competent game and one that hardcore fans will probably enjoy with the same kind of morose zeal with which they approached previous entries to the series, but it either needs to move with the times and cater to a wider audience (who expect a greater smattering of action with a serving of terror), or hone in on its unique offerings and provide a survival-horror experience that fans will relish. With Silent Hill: Homecoming, Konami and developers Double Helix have tried to appease both groups of players, and muddied the experience in the process.

Pros: Great atmosphere; creepy and disgusting enemy designs; graphically sound; wonderful music and sound effects

Cons: Mismatched, at times clumsy, combat system; bugs and glitches; awkward storytelling

Purchase: