Silent Hill: Origins Review (PS2)

In terms of personal preference, many people go through their lives drinking only one brand of cola or supporting one particular sporting organisation, stubbornly refusing to even entertain the notion of sampling a comparative beverage or switching allegiance to a rival team.

Indeed, for this videogame writer, an attachment to the survival horror genre has long since been grounded firmly in Capcom’s white-knuckle Resident Evil franchise, to the point where Konami’s equally popular Silent Hill thrill ride has never once been given the opportunity to deliver its own take on heart-pounding terror.

So what better introduction into the eerie world of Silent Hill than a new hefty slice of horror that heaps on the gameplay discomfort while also conveniently plugging certain narrative gaps left by prior series entrants. Welcome (back) to Silent Hill Origins, a PlayStation 2 transfer of the original PlayStation Portable shock-fest that first graced Sony’s sexy handheld back in November of 2007.Origins is set a number a years prior to the events of the first series entrant and revolves around Travis Grady, a seemingly innocuous truck driver who suddenly finds himself drawn into the devastation of Silent Hill after saving a young girl from a burning house on the town’s outskirts. Heading to the local hospital in an effort to discover the girl’s fate, and also unravel the town’s gory mysteries, Travis must endure a sequence of terrifying prequel events that ultimately contribute to the original horrors of the first Silent Hill title and also reveal the unwitting truck driver’s troubled past and personal demons.As with most horror titles -- regardless of series -- Origins starts out gently, opting to build tension via progressive linear pathways that ramp up the fear factor through creepy environments promising frightening beasties around every corner that somehow never seem to materialise. The stark emphasis of Silent Hill’s strangely deserted streets mixed with the claustrophobic corridors and devastated rooms of Alchemilla Hospital certainly succeed in raising neck hairs as Travis searches for the little girl he saved and the player slowly acclimatises to the game’s studied pacing and foreboding sense of anticipation.

However, the hospital’s ominous atmospherics soon give way to blood and gore aplenty when Travis discovers he is able to pass through mirrors that transport him into what appears to be an alternative timeline in any given environment. Indeed, while environmental design remains the same after passing through these mirrors, structural detailing often shifts from derelict and abandoned to blood-stained and horrific, with Travis uncovering truly terrible acts that relate to the ‘real’ world once he steps back through. Beyond using the mirrors as a simple scare device, Konami has cleverly used them to provide the player with access to areas otherwise locked off to Travis prior to stepping through. This introduces integral world-switching that ably supports the game’s environmental puzzle elements and tasks the player to fetch and carry vitally important items from one timeline to the other in order to answer questions, solve problems, unlock further areas, and progress deeper into Silent Hill’s hidden nightmares.The related tension and discomfort of the game’s closely-confined interiors are periodically granted a release by a return to Silent Hill’s streets, which, while a temporary respite, sadly exist as Origins’ weakest element due to the PlayStation 2’s lack of graphical oomph. In a visual sense, the game’s steadily more expansive interior levels are well served by the PS2’s processing power, but the grainy, rich, and almost cinematic qualities delivered by the game’s room-to-room exploration mechanic simply isn’t maintained when searching bland exterior areas. Moreover, the city streets are lazy and disappointing by comparison, with genuine suspense replaced by lumbering creatures that relentlessly track Travis along numerous stretches of generic road as he attempts to find his way to the next interior location. On the upside, Silent Hill’s disappointing exterior visuals are almost saved by the game’s always impressive soundtrack, which manages to deliver plenty of sudden goose bump moments via an unsettling score that claws at the player’s resolve with every encounter or shock narrative revelation. Sound effects are also well implemented and, while not prompting the same player reaction as the score, do also succeed in helping the game’s audio component paper over its periodic visual cracks.

From a gameplay standpoint, the cloying groundwork laid by Origins’ opening few hours is somewhat fractured by the steady increase in creature encounters, with full-on bloody battles soon far outweighing the fabulously tense expectation of possible attack. While not just a point of detraction in terms of being an atmospheric shortfall, the game’s ever-increasing reliance on open confrontations and bloodletting is also sullied by the relative ease with which truck driver Travis (who’s inexplicably proficient with all manner of weaponry) is able to dispatch his foes. Granted, the game’s puzzle-based aspects and interior environments also tend to grow in complexity and scope while playing host to the action, but the regularity of creature killing all-too quickly means that gradual advancement offset by potential and intermittent attacks, gives way to violent repetition that only serves to pad out unrewarding and annoyingly backtrack-friendly puzzle solving.Travis may be somewhat of a dab hand when it comes to gleefully decapitating all manner of menacing monsters without breaking much of a sweat, but Konami and Crave don’t really allow the player to revel in the truck driver’s oddly refined skills thanks to a clunky and unresponsive fight system. Further hampered by an occasionally twitchy third-person camera, battles lack a consistent sense of flow; lumbering almost as much as the creatures intent on separating Travis from his intestines. That lack of fluidity is never more apparent than when faced with single boss encounters, where accurate camera controls and instantaneous button responses are often imperative to avoid a swift demise. Indeed, when gameplay difficulty is achieved by unreliable and poorly implemented controls rather than evolved A.I. and effective development, the unsurprising end result is that (willing) players should be prepared to mine the reserves of their patience in order ensure progression. Ultimately, Silent Hill: Origins, while an intriguing look into the back story of Konami’s popular videogame series, fails to live up to the genre’s double-barrelled category title: Survival Horror. While creatures aplenty mean that Origins certainly delivers in terms of survival, the regular action only dilutes the game’s occasionally genuine atmosphere and moments of horror. Yet, despite the gameplay imbalance, action fans willing to sidestep bowel-loosening tension in favour of dispatching gore-covered beasties are also poorly served when factoring in the clunky fight system and unreliable camera. Silent Hill: Origins may have performed well on the PlayStation Portable, with the (sexy) small screen helping to hide visual deficiencies while the on-the-go nature of mobile gaming is better suited to action-heavy gameplay rather than slowly evolving fear, but the experience just doesn’t translate very well to the big(ger) screen. Hardcore series fans not armed with a PSP will no-doubt find worth in Konami’s PlayStation 2 port, but everyone else would be well advised to give Origins a miss… and perhaps invest their survival horror interest in the older-but-far-superior Resident Evil 4, which offers acclaimed survival and horror in equally large amounts.Verdict: 69%