The Silent Hill universe remains one of the most legitimately scary and psychologically unsettling universe in video games- in a sense, it is almost wasted on video games, where there is always some expectation of action, and action can always undermine fear. Just ask the Resident Evil and Dead Space franchises what I mean.
There is, however, one genre of video games that would be particularly well suited to Silent Hill’s brand of fear, and that is adventure games. It seems fans agree, because they have gone ahead and released an entirely new fan made Silent Hill adventure video game, called Silent Hill: Alchemilla.
Here is what they had to say about the game:
“So we have an ADVENTURE type game in Silent Hill universe with NO MONSTERS and NO GUNS, MELEE. We wanted to implement these features strong enough and we searched for people for the last days and sadly didn’t find any who could help us to do this quite well. It is very sadly for us too. We don’t apologize for this cause we did all what we can,” reads the description.
“In our game you will not find inventory system or notes system and the reason the same – there are no people who could do that on Source engine (people start to hate it cause it outdated). So just sit tight, take pen and notebook and play as hardcore gamer, make notes yourself, draw your maps yourself. If you Silent Hill fan – you should deal with that.”
This, essentially, sounds like the perfect horror game that I have always envisaged, so I’m going to go ahead and give it a run later. You should too.