TheSilent Hillfranchise has never been as dominantly action-oriented as aResident Evilgame and the ones that tried have been greatly maligned. Still, that clearly hasn’t preventedSilent Hillfrom seeing how to best integrate combat. Combat has always been a crucial element ofSilent Hill—it may not be where the series’ emphasis lies, nor where its strongest themes or motifs have been, but to say combat is nonexistent in the franchise’s original games would be absurd given their number of available firearms and melee weapons alone.
Bloober’sSilent Hill 2unquestionably features more combat than the original—mandatory or otherwise—but that’s not necessarily negative given how engaging and simple its action is in a game more openly designed for enemy encounters. In the remake, players can’t pivot, swivel, and effortlessly circumvent nurses or lying figures via tank controls, and combat is more subtly refined than the original’s elementary and laughable exchange of back-and-forth strikes. This was likely the most challenging and divisive consideration when developing the remake, and it’ll probably be a massive consideration for futureSilent Hillgames as well.
Silent Hill 2’s Remake is the Best of Origins and Homecoming Rolled into One
There’s no telling yethowSilent Hill forSilent Hill: Townfallwill play. Regardless, assuming that one or both will have combat, how they go about designing it will need to be carefully considered. As for theSilent Hill 2remake, it’s now fairly clear where it garnered its design inspirations.The Last of Us Part 2seems to have had a huge influence on its overall framework, for example, while it also interestingly adopts and iterates on some familiar combat designs fromSilent Hillgames of yore:OriginsandHomecoming.
Silent Hill Games Must Embrace Their Past and Look Optimistically to the Future
OriginsandHomecomingfeature a few of each other’s features andasSilent Hillgoes on in chronological order of releaseit is easy to connect the dots and see how combat snowballed fromOriginsand became the atrocity it is inDownpour.Origins’ most notable and iconic signature on the franchise is perhaps its endless inventory of hilariously random items to wield as weapons ranging from drip stands to portable TVs.
Rather,Homecoming’s combat is a travestyas it locks players onto enemies in close-quarters encounters and has them trade stunlocking blows between janky dodges, not unlike whatThe Callisto Protocolwould try and fail to execute in its own dysfunctional combat system 14 years later. Thankfully, theSilent Hill 2remake allows players to choose whether they’d like the red HUD border turned on or not, its dodge mechanic is not leashed to an enemy, and players’ cameras don’t recenter themselves when players are struck.
There are numerous ways futureSilent Hillgames can iterate on combat depending on what angle they want to take in the psychological horror genre, and learning everything they can from the games that came before them will only do well to help avoid like-minded mistakes and pitfalls.
There’s a chance that neitherfnorTownfallfeatures any actual combat if they’re designed with other gameplay mechanics at their center, but in the meantime they have a lot to contemplate if combat will be on the menu at all. Simplyechoing what theSilent Hill 2remake didprobably won’t win them any brownie points, especially if neither of them are released in the near future, and something novel or interesting of their own would be a rare treat.
