Silent Hill: Origins Review

It’s 1:15 on a Monday and I am busy thumb tacking blankets, thick towels, dark sheets and anything available over my windows to deprave myself of any sense that it happens to be the early afternoon at the beginning of the workweek. Why am I doing this? Why when most of the working world at this time are busy drowning in a sea of triple grande skinny latte’s? Why don’t I care that my neighbor across the street finally has his definitive proof that I’m complete batshit as I stand in my window hammer in hand, sick desperation in my eyes. The answer is simple,:a new Silent Hill has come out.
Origins follows Travis Grady a Trucker by trade who, suffers from nightmares he can’t remember as well as a shrouded past. On a routine trip to Brahms decides to take a shortcut that takes him by Silent Hill, when a little girl seems to appear in front of his cab causing him to slam the breaks. The story then starts its ever popular downward spiral into the depths of not only the events previous to the Silent Hill for Playstation but to Travis’s own psyche. Which you must overcome as your fate becomes interlinked with that of Alessa Gillespie.
As soon as the game opens with Akira Yamaoka’s signature music and the cinematic style camera hit you forget that this is a PSP game at all. Even when CG cut scenes are introduced you just might start believing Sony when they said that its like a PS2 handheld, but just might. Though it does look nice throughout the game with effects that seem early PS2 era such as the monsters having a look of wetness to them or that once in a while it seems like your playing through an old 88mm camera. The Camera taken from strange vantage points and angles do quite well at making you feel off balanced, claustrophobic and downright dramatic. but also suffers from the same control issues that this causes such as confusion while moving, which can be irritating when in combat. Though I believe that removing these would greatly reduce the impact of the experience you would agree something must be done. Silent Hill does amazing things with sound in this game not just with the soundtrack which as always is top notch but to screw with you when you think or don’t think your safe. Such as at one point when reading a memo left by god knows what psychopathic bastard describing a triangle head eseque monster who lives in his motel simply named “the Butcher” after finishing this memo a shriek is heard and blood flies onto the wall in front of you. Or threatening music starting up as you enter a new area only to find that as you slowly creep forward meat hook at the ready and there isn’t even some lesser creature meandering around. It’s the little things like this that Silent Hill fans such as myself love.
Though Don’t be too scared my little masochists Travis is a little tougher then your previous heroes. I mean come on dude is a trucker. Even without a weapon you can go into combat stance and duke it out with the denizens of Silent Hill, and even hold down the attack button for a more brutal attack. Now this works with every melee weapon in the game for which there are no lie a metic shit ton. Everything from a sharp bit of wood, tire iron to one time use weapons such as a portable TV to a damn toaster. The downside to having all these weapons are that they have durability and break all the damn time. While this is a cheap and insensible addition, that only deters from immersion with thoughts of “how the hell am I lugging around 4 T.V’s let alone why does my Katana break after 5 swings?” But once again they are everywhere and almost everything is a weapon in Travis’s hands..Though when a weapon breaks mid combat you can push select and get a new one or do this by pushing down on the D-pad but every time I did that I would get some weapon I didn’t feel was appropriate for the situation and would end up doing it the hard way which breaks the mood a little. But this method is still preferable due to the slight lag, inability to run and quick select these weapons which can let some unspeakable creature nibble on my nethers. Also introduced in Origins is the new “grapple” system which isn’t so much for grappling as it is for not getting a syringe of “I’m sure it’s not Red Bull” stuck in your neck or avoiding some other such horrible fate. All in all grappling is cool but I feel like there should be some way to deal damage as well.
Speaking of Enemies and their questionable medical habits the baddies of Silent Hill this time around seemed lack luster for me. As you might have deciphered from my previous comments the Nurses are back along with some of your other old friends with slightly different tweaks. And that while cool for fan service, they seem kinda tired, excluding nurses which for some reason with their spastic shuffle never get old. The new monsters; Giant Crippled Dog Things or Shadow Nutters as I call em don’t seem all that frightening and can be almost always easily avoided by turning off your flashlight and strolling past em.which kinda sucks cause the Shadow Nutters look really cool with the flashlight on. The reason these fiends are so scary is that they are physical representations of either psychological problems with the main character or in this case Travis and Alessa’s. But we get giant crippled dogs, what did he run over a dog or some other living roadside hazard? I just think that with the rich amount of perverse story that is included in this universe they could have gave us something a bit better then that.
In your 7ish hour stint in Silent Hill your gonna see some old locations like the ever popular Hospital and some new areas such as the town Theater and Sanatarium. These locales also exist in the “normal” world as well as the “other” world and you switch between them but the way it happens is much different then your used to. Mirrors allow the player to freely decide when and where they make this switch. While this removes the moments in the old games where all of sudden the sirens will go off and your just like......(expletive deleted) adding to the sense of you spiraling towards some psychic oblivion. It does add quiet a bit to game play where you have to think about direction in two dimensions. Looking through the mirror also shows a glimpse of what the same room looks like in the opposite world relaying a sense of either dread or relief depending on the direction your headed. They use this for a very cool event in the Theater area. Puzzles are still a mainstay in Origins, everything from prescribing little deranged dolls their medication to collecting body parts for a medical dummy only to find that in the other world a dissected body resides their now. Solving them allows the character to get some key or some other debased object of importance.
Let me be forward when I say that before playing this game I was worried, doing a Origin story to a Silent Hill game is like walking through a fat camp with a hamburger tied to your face and expecting not to be crippled by the back exit, it ain’t no easy task. Explain too much or not enough and fans will tear you limb from bloody limb I mean if any fan is gonna do it Silent Hill fans would be on some top 1 list of most likely to. But let me say that I am one of these fans and It doesn’t ruin anything, it only delivers. With the time honored multiple endings, and with secret costumes, weapons and gear depending on a long list of criteria displayed after a clear, give this game re-playability. With a 30 dollar price point for either PSP or PS2 you really can’t go wrong with picking up this one, but follow my advice never mind the negative press you might receive from roommates or neighbors about you nailing blankets to the windows. Play in the dark with the volume way up(on headphones if your on the PSP). Oh and try not to crap your pants it’s a bitch to clean.


Egm style score: A-
out of ten: 8.3