Poor Murphy. Stuck in Silent Hill all alone.

Let’s talk about the story first. The plot is a very crucial element of any survival horror game and Downpour is no exception. The game is about a convict, Murphy Pendleton who is seeking revenge for an unknown incident. He gets in touch with George Sewell, am officer at the station and gets access to Patrick Napier. For unspecified reasons, Murphy beats the hell out him and eventually kills him. Murphy is then scheduled for a prison transfer with other inmates under the watch of Anne Cunningham. On their way, the bus crashes and falls down through a mountain. Murphy wakes up and finds himself in the midst of, guess what? Silent Hill. From there-on Murphy finds and fights his way through monsters, puzzles and meets with people who will eventually help him escape from Silent Hill. Unfortunately that is all what I can reveal about the story as I really don’t want to spoil it for you guys. The story is pretty well narrated and ends the game on a satisfying note.

Some monsters pose a threat alright.

Silent Hill games have always been about surviving and Downpour does the job done in this regard. You won’t fire and force your way through but instead the game forces you to think and survive. The player will have access to basic weaponry like iron bars, wooden sticks and fire axe to make their way through and take down any weapon or obstacle they might encounter in their way. On very rare occasions you will find a pistol or a shotgun that will make things a bit easier. So overall the game is more about exploring and less about combat, due to which the developers have not really put a lot of effort in to the latter. Now this may bug some players but personally it added a lot of tension in the gameplay.  Vatra Games have also done a brilliant job with the puzzles. Anyone who is horror game fanatic will instantly recognize that these puzzles have been inspired from the traditional Resident Evil games. The enemies in the game also pose some serious challenges to the player and running away from them is the best solution at times.

The game is developed on Unreal Engine 3 and as soon as I think of that it means a game with beautiful vistas. Unfortunately that is the not the case. The game suffers from poor textures and frame rate issues. The score could have gone a notch higher if they would have released a highly polished game. On the other hand, the voice acting and background music have been brilliantly performed and composed respectively, adding a sense of tension and excitement throughout the game.

The game borrows heavily from traditional Resident Evil games which is a very good move in my book.

Silent Hill Downpour is not a game that will appeal to everyone. It has its faults but it does one thing absolutely right. It scares the hell out of the players at times and forces the them to survive and move ahead, which has been the central theme of every game in the long running franchise. Veteran Silent Hill fans should pick this up without any second thoughts. But if you do not belong to that bandwagon you should probably wait for some of the more awesome horror games that are coming out later this year.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

Konami have announced online patches for both Silent Hill Downpour and Silent Hill HD Collection. They are currently under development and will be released soon.

The patch will fix the frame rate issues, the audio-synching in Silent Hill HD Collection. The Auto-Save issues in Silent Hill Downpour will also be fixed.

Stay tuned for more information.

***Please note this walkthrough was not uploaded by GamingBolt.com

Special thanks to Youtube user theRadBrad for uploading this walkthrough.

Check out more video game walkthroughs here.

Without further ado, let’s begin!

Silent Hill Downpour is due for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It is being published by Konami.

silent_hill_downpour_hd_wallpaper

Thanks to Gamesradar for the info.

Here is the latest trailer for Silent Hill: Downpour that was shown at the Tokyo Game Show this year.  It features music from the band KoRn, which I forgot they were still making music frankly.  So the video almost plays out like a music video after a minute, and if you don’t like KoRn, you might want to just mute the trailer because after previewing the game at E3 this year we were actually quite impressed.  The full game comes out for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 early next year (2012).

You take the role of Murphy, an inmate whose prison inmate bus has crashed and are left with what you have from there to move on. There are two aspects of the game which are the main character and the town itself. ‘Downpour’ has something that Silent Hill 2 kind of started with the town and all the strange things that happen depending on who is there, where the game could have had different vignettes about all these different people that would tell a greater story about the town as the developers put it. After Silent Hill 2 the games focused more one that cult aspect seen in the other games. The sound is as always a huge aspect in the game with all of it being stereoscopic. Murphy, the main character even has different positions he will stand or walk in depending on the situation at hand, from frightening moments to him being hurt. Downpour will also have multiple enemies.

If you pay attention enough you will also notice homages to previous Silent Hill games like the Jukebox seen playing in the demo for ‘Downpour’ that was from the first Silent Hill. The camera system has also been brought back to the way the older games were, where you don’t always have control of the camera system. One of the enemies I saw was something the developers called ‘the void’ which almost looked like a black hole and was pretty freaky along with the fact that running away from it was how they reacted to it in the demo. One thing that I was happy to hear the developers mention was the fact that they did not want the player to have to go back and retrace a lot of his steps in the previous games, which was kind of a pain in the ass, as they wanted to steer away from that. Another enemy that was in the demo was one that screamed and disoriented you and the developers mentioned that running away is indeed a good strategy especially if there are more than a few enemies around. The game will also have all new enemies and there will be three different difficulty levels when it comes to the puzzles. After the demo we had a short time for some group Q&A with the developers.

Q: With the name of the game being ‘Downpour’, how much of an impact will water have on the gameplay?
A: A lot, it is not just there for intrinsic value at all, it actual ties into the back story and it is about the psychology of the main character so water does factor into that.
[Later the developers revealed that the more rain there was the more enemies would be roaming the the world and the rain system is completely unscripted.]

Q: How is the absence of composer Akira Yamaoka affected the mood of the game?
A: We were obviously in a tough spot when he left Konami with the musical atmosphere playing such a big role in the Silent Hill game. We had to search for a new composer and were fans of the quieter musical moments in the game ‘Dexter’, while feeling that those moments did not sound strange if played in the backdrop of Silent Hill. Bringing in the ‘Dexter’ composer Daniel Licht, we did not tell him to mimic Akira Yamaoka and we feel that the music is pretty authentic.

Q: Silent Hill 5 was criticized for its streamlined combat engine as it, in effect, detracted from the horror by empowering the protagonist. What role does combat play in Downpour and do you think combat should be handled in a Survival Horror game?
A: Our combat is very much designed to dis-empower the player so you don’t feel very capable or very safe. You will not have a full arsenal on weaponry or a giant inventory system. Whatever you can pick can pretty much be used as a weapon and all the items you pick up are destructible. So if you happen to find a hand gun and then run out of ammo for it you might want to holster it, to wait to find more ammo, rather than using it as a melee weapon as is may break.

Konami have released the first new trailer for Silent Hill Downpour.  The game will release late 2011 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and is being developed by Vatra games.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt.com for more news and updates.