The prologue level sees you rescuing a hideously burned but still breathing young girl from some kind of sacrificial ritual. But with talk of such a troubled path through development running around my head, I was steeled for disappointment. The Resident Evil 4 influenced camera angle is gone Silent Hill Origins has, fittingly, returned to Silent Hill's origins. Rumours of mismanaged schedules flew as the original team was disbanded, and the project crossed the Atlantic and landed in Portsmouth. It's about the oppressive atmosphere, the sense of being near-helpless in the face of vast, incomprehensible forces, the beautifully composed characters sketched across understated, perfectly formed stories.ĭevelopment shifted around.
Silent Hill isn't about fighting monsters. It sounded, in other words, like the very basis of what makes people love Silent Hill had been overlooked. A Resident Evil 4 style over-shoulder camera was revealed in screenshots, and it was strongly hinted that the core gameplay would be much more physical and combat-centric than Silent Hill fans are accustomed to. Early glimpses, however, suggested that the game would be more heavily action focused than its predecessors. Originally envisaged as a remake of the first Silent Hill game for the PSP, and designed to tie in with the Christophe Gans helmed movie, Origins later became an entirely new game set seven years before the events of Silent Hill. On top of that, the game has had a rather interesting development history - a history patchy enough to give any Silent Hill fan a furrowed brow.
This is the first Silent Hill to be developed outside Konami's Japanese studios, eight time-zones and half a world away from the hive mind at Team Silent.
#SILENT HILL ORIGINS PSP EMUPARADISE FULL#
Now, on one level, it's the job of the journalist to be a cynic - but I'll confess to approaching Origins with something less than the full proportion of professional detachment. Despite his attire, we suspect deeply that there's more to him than a Yorkie-chomping stereotype.
You're Not Here Truck-driving Travis is the reluctant protagonist of Origins. I was afraid that the game I was about to see would be really, really bad. I was on my way to see the next instalment in the series, Silent Hill Origins, at developer Climax' studio near the harbour - and the fear? Simple. It took place on a train to Portsmouth on one of those astonishingly wet July mornings we've been having of late. The most recent incident was very different - about as different as you can imagine, really. That was the first time Silent Hill scared me. I slept with the bedside light on for several days, although I could never have told you exactly why. Beautiful, disturbing, melancholy, eerie, inexplicable and overwhelmingly terrifying, Silent Hill opened a dreamlike world of nightmares. That self-confidence and certainty is probably, in retrospect, a major part of why Silent Hill was such a shot to the gut. An all-too-young viewing of Arachnophobia managed, ironically, to turn a childhood fascination with creepy-crawlies into a screaming terror of hairy beasties with altogether too many legs which has lasted into my twenties, while The Omen left me with broadly the same response to priests, bishops, organised religion and posh children.īut by the age of about 16, I was pretty much past that unflappable in the face of the cheap scares and shocks which movies and games of the time could muster. In my childhood, for example, there were some brushes with frightening movies. Do you remember the first time a piece of fiction - a film, a book, a game - made you genuinely, horribly afraid? Everyone is afraid of something, and for each fear there's a fiction which touches precisely on that most primal of instincts, twanging unsettlingly on the strings that make even us hardy grown-ups wonder, just for a moment, if we really are alone in the dark.