Silent Hill V / Zero

[D3ads]

Apparently in September, a gameplay video was released along with a few screenshots, all the info can be found here:

http://silenthill5.net/

I completely missed this and judging from the lack of coverage on here, so did everyone else? Taylor? Did you know anything about this?

There's shedloads of stuff on there, as well as information on Silent Hill Zero which I'm guessing is the new name for Origins...

[-HP-]

I'm definetly going to get Silent Hill Origins for my PSP!

[ChopperDave]

I think EGM did a cover story on SH5 a month or two ago....

[Patrick_H]

I hadn't heard of this either. I'm dismayed about the change of developer. While the game still looks like a Silent Hill title, somehow the art style looks "Americanized" to me. The nurses are oversexed, and the protagonist looks more like a square-jawed hunky male action hero. I liked that the previous entries lacked these typical characteristics. It looks like Hollywood took over. I'm skeptical that this game will be weird enough for my tastes.

I have been anxiously awaiting Origins for some time and will get it for sure.

[JamesL]

A bunch of my ex colleagues are working on the PSP SH title and they are all very excited about how its turning out. Which is unusual for a game coming out of Climax studios

I think Eurogamer gave it a rather good preview feature a few months back. I'll be checking it out for sure.

[D3ads]

This time around the game is being developed by The Collective, an American development house responsible for the Buffy games and Men In Black (remember how terrible that was?). Having read the interviews and seen the media, I'm a little more assured that it wont be dogshit, the protagonist this time is an American GI (Alex Sheppard... heh, Adrian's brother maybe? ) which is quite different to the usual plain 'jane/joe bloggs' and there is a worry that they'll be more of an emphasis on shooting than anything else. It seems the developers are looking towards the Silent Hill film for inspiration, and the way the paint peels off the walls and metal rusts around in the picture has been implemented into the actual game:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/25643.html

I think the creatures feel very much like anythihg Team Silent could come up with and at least Akira Yamaoka is still working on the sound as well as watching over the project closely. They're trying to rehash the atmosphere of SH2, perhaps they'll bring back Pyramid Head? I'd be in two minds about this, on one hand PH was a manifestation of Jame's guilt and not actually real, on the other, who wouldn't want to fight a heavily detailed multi-mapped PH? It's also well known that PH is just an executioner from Silent Hill many moons ago so it'd be possible that Alex could have some guilty secrets too and therefore could manifest PH again? We'll see.

[Patrick_H]

I think the creatures feel very much like anything Team Silent could come up with

Did you see the RACK on the nurse? That is NOT something the original team would have done. No way.

...Oh wait, maybe Alex Shepherd watches a lot of PORN, and the nurses embody his desires. Gimme a break.

[dux]

I think the creatures feel very much like anything Team Silent could come up with

Did you see the RACK on the nurse? That is NOT something the original team would have done. No way.

...Oh wait, maybe Alex Shepherd watches a lot of PORN, and the nurses embody his desires. Gimme a break.

rolf, I was about to say who ordered in the pornstar nurses?

[D3ads]

I think the creatures feel very much like anything Team Silent could come up with

Did you see the RACK on the nurse? That is NOT something the original team would have done. No way.

...Oh wait, maybe Alex Shepherd watches a lot of PORN, and the nurses embody his desires. Gimme a break.

I was reffering the design of the new creatures not the size of a demon nurse's cleavage, believe it or not I don't really pay much attention to that sort of thing in a game. I see what you mean, but does it really matter? They're not that much bigger, since the original nurses were always well endowed..

I can't believe I'm having this conversation..

I think Akira said it best in an interview he did recently; 'It's funny because the original Silent Hill was our attempt at making classic American horror through a Japanese filter and now with SH5, it's an American take on a Japenese-filtered American horror.'

[Patrick_H]

Of course it matters.

Their decision to oversex the nurse (hence the RACK) to me indicates their art direction. At this point I would say it is overstated and typical- everything seems too prettified or obvious, what I would expect from an American developer adapting a more subtle form of horror. I would liken it to "The Suffering" compared to "Silent Hill". Much of this new SH content reminds me too much of "The Suffering". While I like both games, I don't want to play "Suffering in Silent Hill".

[Taylor]

I completely missed this and judging from the lack of coverage on here, so did everyone else? Taylor? Did you know anything about this?

I did, but since it wasn’t the same team I've not really been following it. And to be honest I didn’t like The Room that much after I gained my rather helpless sidekick (though I know it wasn’t intended to be a Silent Hill game originally).

I might be a bit worried it would be too ‘Westernised’ but I’d really like to suppress my cynicalism for now, the original game was claimed to be a Eastern take on the Western horror genre anyway so I can clutch to that for some reassurance.

The Nurse does have a rather impressive pair but, to my mind, were always intended to be sexually attractive with the slight juxtaposition of having no face. I’ll wait until they bust out the jump scares, zombies and machine guns before I start my tirade.

[Rick_D]

tits.

I didn't finish the first SH game, too much running around in the fog and the dark - annoying puzzles pulled straight from resident evil and done in a more over-the-top way.

No offence to you guys that like the game, I just thought it was shit.

[ChopperDave]

too much running around in the fog and the dark

Wasn't that the point?

annoying puzzles pulled straight from resident evil

Well, if you think about it, any puzzle in a survival horror game is a derivative of an RE puzzle in some way.

[D3ads]

Of course it matters.

Why?! So Because the nurses have large chests, it somehow effects the game making it so different to the old ones? Watch the video where Alex walks up the stairs, a wheelchair falls down in front of him and he hears noises, at the top of the stairs he tries a door and gets that familiar 'The lock is broken, I can't open the door' and then crawls through a broken window into the next room. That's Silent Hill right there, that's all we've really seen of the game in action, there's not enough evidence to suggest that it's going to be shit.

The Nurse does have a rather impressive pair but, to my mind, were always intended to be sexually attractive with the slight juxtaposition of having no face

^^ This, chest size means nothing. If I want to look at tits I'll play Tomb Raider with a naked skin.. or just watch some porn.

(utter drivel)

Having said this, didn't you say Far Cry was shit when you hadn't even played it..? *taps foot*

[D3ads]

*bump*

Seems someone got to play through a demo of SH VI, seems I was right about PH returning perhaps;

Possible spoilers;

It seems they really like Jacob's Ladder - lol. At the beginning of the demo, he says Alex sees these ceiling lights, and then looks around and notices that some doctor is wheeling him through a hospital hallway on a gurney - in restraints. He looks into the rooms as he's being wheeled down the hallway, and sees that the doctors are doing horrible things to people - hacking them up, torturing them, throwing them into holes/pits, etc. Finally this doctor wheels him into a room and walks out (uh oh - could he be next?). But wait!...

- Whoa! More possible Silent Hill 2 crossovers??? ...After the doctor leaves the room, Alex hears this commotion outside. When he turns and looks out into the hall, all he sees is this huge knife impaling the doctor. Right about then, the hubby says, they gave him this "interactive cutscene" button-press prompt (a la RE4), which when pressed helps Alex struggle and wiggle out of the restraints. After he's freed himself, he goes out into the hall and is greeted by a messy blood trail leading away from where the doctor was killed.

- It's confirmed. Alex's little brother Joshua is the kid running around in the game. Yeah, the kid who throws the wheelchair down the stairs at him. Alex sees him shortly after the doctor was killed and yells "Joshua!" Don't know why, but all this time I've been thinking Alex's little brother was a teenager or something since he's in his 20's. Dah well - mystery of the identity of the little kid has been solved. Oh and get this - he leaves crayon drawings all around for Alex to find. Now what other little kid does that remind you of?

- Reportedly, "the combat is the best in the series so far." The hubby says that the combat is a lot more fluid and fun. Nurses aren't hard to deal with (then again, he doesn't know what difficulty the demo was set on). Plenty of slashing and stabbing to go around, and apparently Alex has some sort of "finishing blow." He says it really gets interesting when you're in a room full of enemies and you have to do the "dodge and slash" thing. Also, tapping one of the trigger buttons puts Alex in "combat mode" and we'll see him pull his weapon out. The hubby also says that weapon selection is a lot like BioShock. Oh - and no more extra long charge-ups for heavy blows like in SH 4. He says that the charge time seems to be shorter, and when Alex is ready to deliver the heavy blow the controller rumbles. Also, by pressing certain buttons, we can make Alex burst through a door. If you do it right, you can deal damage to any monsters that might be waiting behind that door. Sounds good to me!

- Watch out for the "split hammerhead" monster! He says pretty much everybody in the focus group got killed by that thing at least once. Apparently if you don't dodge fast enough, it'll rush you and tear you in half, exposing your entrails and all. No sign of "Siam" (the "man/woman" S&M-looking monster) or that crazy, smiling "plastic boob" monster or that "melted tumors" monster in action as of yet though.

- More homage to the movie. Remember that scene when Rose slices through the painting in the hotel, revealing Room 111? Well in the game, this relates to the scene in the bathroom where we see the transformation into the Otherworld and the nurse stumbles out of the stall. After you kill the nurse, if you check out the stall it came out of, there's this flesh-like wall inside. Alex has to use his knife to slice through the wall and squeeze through the opening to get into the next room.

Other things:

- Music is still great (obviously).

- The "real time grain/noise filter shifts" haven't been revealed yet. There's just regular grain/noise in the demo so far.

- Graphics look great (of course).

- While Alex is walking down one of the corridors, he kept hearing this loud baby's cry. Wonder what that's about.

- He entered some hospital room and it was filled with "ovens," kinda like a crematorium. Hmm...

- All the stuff you can accidentally bump into is super noisy (chairs, tables, etc.). As we've read/seen before, the sound alerts the monsters to your position - even if the flashlight's off.

- He didn't get to fight any bosses in the demo. Bah.

- He only got to see the "Otherworld shift" once (the same one that was shown in the video above). Bah humbug.

Some info after questions asked:

- the level that the focus group played was called "Nightmare."

- Alex just dodges out of the way (kinda like Jill does in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis) as opposed to doing the "stuntman action roll"

- The demo was played on xbox360

- As for the "split head monster," the hubby says that they didn't get to fight it during the actual demo, only during the "weapons training" stage. And as for the sounds from the monster, from what he told me, it sounds like they're just using stock monster sounds from some of the other games so far - typical hisses, grunts and moans not unusual for Silent Hill monsters. My guess is that most likely, some of the sounds in the demo are placeholders for now and the real sound effects and such will be put in later.

- As for the scary moments in the demo, he says that there were a few jumpy moments here and there due to the sounds (the group played with headphones on). He said that bumping into random pieces of furniture was startling, mainly since he'd read that the monsters are attracted to sound as well as Alex's flashlight. Then there was also the sound of Alex's footsteps on the grates when it changed to the Otherworld. He said it was unnerving because the sounds of his footsteps reverberating around the environment kept making him think there was somebody walking behind him. Other than that, not really since the only monsters they got to fight during the actual demo were the nurses (as I mentioned earlier, they only got to fight the "split hammerhead" monster in "weapons training" mode).

- (question if the big knife looked like PH's knife): he says it definitely looked

like the Great Knife to him.

- As for Alex's voice, Alex didn't really say too much during the demo, but he did say it was the same voice from the teaser trailer (though not as rushed and "forced" sounding as in the teaser).

- (Were there any more instances of button-press prompting besides

the restrain scene?):

Yes. He says there were button-press prompts when Alex needed to jump over certain obstacles and gaps and for pulling up on ledges (he says the ledge thing is a lot like the button prompt in RE 4, when Leon jumps across the gap after the whole robot Salazar thing and you have to rapidly press A to make him pull himself up).

- (Were there any on screen readings like life bar, power gauge etc?):

Yes. He says there was a life bar on left that's shaped like a red crescent, and it only showed up when Alex got hit. Also, an icon located at the top of the screen shows which weapon you have equipped (if it's a gun, it'll also show the number of bullets).

- (About prefixed camera angles / the camera in general):

He says that the camera is adjustable with right analog stick through the whole thing. He said that sometimes the game will show you a specific angle, but you can adjust it at will.