These are PC games (either co-op adventure or party games) than can be played locally and that I have enjoyed myself (in no particular order). Bold ones are my fav.
I’ve gotten easily $200 worth of value out of it, and if mine broke I’d buy another one. Sometimes niche things deserve the extra price. It’s more of a problem of the world draining everyone’s disposable income for niche things like these.
For me, it looks like a good game. But doesn’t look like Silent Hill. Because of this it comes off as a game that was made and had the SH name slapped on it for street cred. That never works well in any case I’ve seen. Usually ends up the worst rated in a series.
Genuinely curious, why does it not look like SH? Is it because of the japanese setting? Because other than that it looks heavily focused on proper psychological chaos. I think we’ve got to give developers some form of freedom if we want to see this series advance!
IMO, hit stop in the combat. Also, the camera perspective puts too much emphasis on combat.
At its core, the peak way to play Silent Hill was to engage in combat as little as possible. This makes sense both in lore and for the player of the game:
In the game lore, protagonists in Silent Hill are “Everymen.” Just an average person. Average people do not generally have combat experience or training, and thus an average person put into a Silent Hill scenario, will more likely want to run away than engage in combat with a weapon they are not familiar with. They may be so unaccustomed to combat with a weapon they may injure themselves or waste all the bullets or break the weapon due to lack of training in combat.
For the player, combat felt bad, and generally posed more risk than reward (trade potentially losing a lot of health in a fight just to not have to walk around the enemy) as in Silent Hill, killing enemies doesn’t reward the player with anything other than having one less enemy to avoid. They don’t drop health or items.
Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game. The 3rd game’s original plot apparently did give the protagonist a dark past, but Konami felt it would have been too much and thus changed the plot significantly. Some elements of the original plot still remain, but are reworked into the new, different plot in the game currently.
SH2 remake, and in fact Homecoming and Downpour fall victim to this overemphasis on combat, and it is primarily the fault of the over the shoulder camera. The combat feels good and fun, and thus it makes the player want to do it more. This resulted in more sales because the mainstream audience seems to only like playing one kind of game. Unfortunately, it also resulted in the IP losing its identity.
The story looks fine, but calling it a Silent Hill game when it gives no indication of connecting to the town of Silent Hill is concerning. Every Silent Hill game previously connected to the actual town in some way. If f doesn’t do this, then nothing separates it from being a generic horror game with the Silent Hill name slapped on top.
I’ll try to reply to points highlighted by the both of you, to try and play devil’s advocate for a bit:
I really don’t think the combat looks like anything we’ve seen from Resident Evil. Honestly, I don’t even know if there’s gonna be a gun in the game, judging from the trailers.
The main character clearly looks like an inept at handling weapons too, like the old games. We don’t really know how much damage we take or how easy the combat is, but it’s obvious they couldn’t come out in 2025 with a combat system as stiff, clunky and annoying as the one featured in the first trilogy. Many games in the last decade have shown that you can have a combat system that feels fluid but also have it so that you may want to not fight, for one reason or another (If I recall correctly, weapons do break in the game after a certain amount of use - that’s surely a deterrent from using them).
There’s a difficulty setting at the start of the game, so I’m sure you can just crank it up to hard if you want to have a though survival horror experience.
We have no way of knowing how they’ll connect the whole situation to the town of Silent Hill, that’s true. I’m honestly not disturbed by this as I never felt the physicalness of buildings and road to be the important factor. For all we know, Silent Hill is a catalyst that connects people living through particular distressing emotions to a horrorific underworld - who says it cannot happen in another part of the globe?
.
Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game.
I… I don’t think this counts as a very strong argument if you read the sentence a couple of times. The 3rd entry is, in its actual form, beloved by many fans of the original trilogy.
I don’t know peeps, I understand the sentiment of wanting a good game but we should genuinely just wait and try out the game if we’re interested. They can’t simply make the same game over and over, because that’d be even worse. It’s like with music artists, you know? Bob Dylan was shunned by many for “going electric”, yet those albums are now considered absolute classics. I’m not trying to say Konami has the same artistic foresight of Dylan, but we should at least try to cut them some slack and hold our opinions until after the game has come out and we’ve been able to try it out :)
Respectfully, as a Silent Hill fan, I have been “cutting Konami some slack” for 20 years. And I have been getting burned for 20 years. So please excuse me for being cynical.
I didnt even mention The Short Message or Ascension because I didn’t feel like I even needed to bring either of them up, but just mentioning them now should be enough to illustrate my point in mentioning them at all.
Silent Hill f was the project I was most interested in from Konami when they announced it. I am not disinterested in the game, and I will likely still play it. However, I have a lot of major reservations because of my history with Konami. I didn’t appreciate the changes made to SH2 Remake, so while the mainstream audience at it up, I didn’t even finish the game. I will see how it goes, but the more I keep seeing about the game, I keep seeing some stuff I don’t like.
Everytime a hit lands on an enemy in the trailers, the game stops for a few frames. This better be removed or an effect that is only in the trailers. If that’s in the game and I can’t turn that off then I probably won’t keep playing it. That might seem nitpicky, but I play Silent Hill for a specific experience. I don’t play Silent Hill to get an experience I can get from Resident Evil or some other game. I am totally fine with Konami “making the same game repeatedly,” so long as story elements, levels, items, etc are different, I would be glad to have games in a series have identical gameplay between each entry. Metroid Prime 1 and 2, for example, or Half-Life and Opposing Force. Although the story, weapons, and visual assets are different, the core gameplay is identical. You are still getting the same gameplay experience in the sequel as your did in the original.
To each their own! I’m a long time fan of the original trilogy too, but I’d be very bored if they kept spinning around the same formulas. I do agree with the fact that SH2’s remake added unecessary things - but to be fair, I think the remake was just unnecessary overall, they could’ve simply spent their resources trying to reverse-engineer the original in order to bring it to modern hardware.
Have you tried to take a look at recent horror indie games? Titles such as Tormented Souls might scratch the particular itch, if Konami fails to deliver.
Silent Hill is more than just psychological chaos, most any modern horror game does that much. The Japanese setting doesn’t really help, it would make it harder to adapt to the IP, but it could have been done in a way that it wouldn’t have been an issue.
I’ll have to rewatch the trailer to give you more specific points, but it seems combat might be more prevalent than it should, veering more to the Resident Evil brand. The shifted world didn’t make much of an appearance in the trailer, but from the glimpses it seemed tame and not really all that horror-esque. It doesn’t even appear to be in or connected to the town of Silent Hill.
Being a bigger fan of the first two games than any of the rest, i see them as the standard, the fog and mist, not being able to see everything clearly so that odd shapes and shadows mess with you is also something I am missing in the new game.
It may be a great game. I just don’t see it as a SH game.
Woo, time to see how many gooners are actually on lemmy.
The modern “video game essay” format came out of people on the Something Awful forums who were REALLY into Silent Hill. It was Japanese style horror in a Western setting with a lot of fairly heavy themes and implications so it was the perfect confluence of weebing out and “it is dark so it is deep” level discourse. And what started as people writing thousands of word arguments for what the shovel being at an 80 degree angle in that shed meant became people making 60 minute youtubes on what it meant that Heather ALSO saw the titty nurses and how it represents her repressed lesbian urges. And 3 hour videos about Pyramid Head that would make even Freud roll his eyes.
And… basically all of the later Silent Hill games REALLY sucked. The Room has its defenders but pretty much everything after that is universally panned and with good reason. Up until last year-ish with the remake of 2.
Which was a different kind of shitstorm. Because now you had all these essayists who were The Keepers Of Silent Hill lore (one of the most famous ones wrote her master’s thesis on SH2 I want to say?) seeing the greatest of the games being remade. And by fucking Bloober team? Pretty much every essayist had keyed in that Bloober have some very questionable themes in some of their games. Uhm… trigger warnings but
spoilerBloober at least used to really like the trope of “The only way to stop this great evil infecting you is to kill yourself and it with you” and “They were a victim of abuse and should be pitied even as they perpetuated the cycle”. That are both, fairly unarguably, shitty mindsets but are also horror tropes going back literally centuries
So it was the mix of “This is MY game and MY story and how dare they change it” combined with “Also they picked the bogeymen that I hated on so hard last year that I could buy a car”.
And then… Bloober kind of made a masterpiece? Like, most of their changes are fairly loved/appreciated and everyone but the most hardcore of the SH2 Video Essayists loved it.
But now we have Silent Hill f that very much DOES feel like a cash in and a way to make a Fatal Frame but with a more marketable IP. But also… Fatal Frame fucked hard?
Either way? The most important thing ever is to never stop saying that Silent Hill (the town) is really smokey because it was built on top of a coal mine that caught fire and has been smouldering for decades. That is some real Silent Hill fan lore that not many people know but is really cool to share.
Nah. Modern day gooners are all based on how Arsenal fans just can’t stop touching themselves. Like, if you ever go to a game there is an entire section dedicated towards group edging.
In all seriousness, I have no idea what the actual origins of “gooning==masturbation” is. But the word “goon” mostly just is a synonym for thug or henchman. So a lot of groups used it because they are the bogeymen and blah blah blah.
Literally just started that a few minutes ago actually. Really good first impressions. The cats are very realistic. So much so my dogs were having just as much fun as I was watching me play haha.
Was going to comment this as well! I enjoyed the story quite a bit too. Despite nothing really “happening” per se I remember the ending feeling emotional regardless.
Driver San Francisco kinda. You spend most of the game in a coma, but you do wake up and do some real stuff for the ending.
Depending on your definition of nothing happens, Mad Max too. At the start of the game Max loses his car, meets this car fanatic and for the entire game he helps you build the “Magnum Opus”, the most badass car the wasteland has seen. At the end, you lose your Magnum Opus, he gets killed, and you get your original car back. You have a big impact on other people throughout the story, but as far as the protagonist is concerned, he is pretty much exactly where he started.
It’s really hard for me to separate my nostalgia for older games with what I’d think about them now. There are some games I’ve played a LOT but haven’t touched in years for one reason or another.
Some pre-Steam games would be things like Halo 3, World of Warcraft, Runescape, and few Pokemon games.
On Steam my most played game BY FAR is DoTA 2 at ~2100 hours. I loved that game and I still think it’s really well designed… I just haven’t played it in years because it makes me too mad to play with randos and it’s impossible to get 5 friends who play DoTA online at the same time anymore.
If I was going to pick a top 3 outside of those nostalgic outliers, maybe:
I tried it out when the testing started. It’s… fine. I’m not much of a shooter/action game player, so the higher skill elements of it are a bit of a barrier on top of re-learning a lot of DoTA-type stuff. I can imagine getting into it more if it came out years ago. But now it’s hard to find the time and motivation I’d need to dedicate to even get back to the level of incompetence I had with DoTA.
bin.pol.social
Ważne