Silent Hill: Homecoming

Silent Hill: Homecoming is a survival horror game developed by Double Helix Games and published by Konami Digital Entertainment for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows. The game was released in North America in 2008 and in Europe and Australia in 2009. It was never released to Japanese audiences due to cancellation.

Plot
The game's plot revolves around Alex Shepard, a military soldier returning to his hometown of Shepard's Glen. When he arrives, he finds that the town is not what it used to be. In addition, his father, his brother, and numerous other residents of the town are missing. So Alex must explore the town and locate his brother, Josh.

Gameplay
The player assumes the role of the protagonist, Alex Shepherd, a Special Forces soldier who returns home from an overseas tour of duty to find that his father and younger brother are missing, and that his mother has gone into catatonia. Alex begins to search for his brother, leading him to Silent Hill after searching his hometown of Shepherd's Glen.

Overall gameplay is similar to past entries in the series. The player, as Alex, explores the various environments and locales, searching for clues to advance the plot, such as photographs, drawings and other items which are placed inside Alex's journal, which the player may read at any time. To assist the player, Alex will turn his head towards items and clues to inform the player that the object may be picked up; other recurring items include weapons and ammunition, which give off a glow as a visual cue to the player, and health drinks. Puzzle elements also play a part in the game, and Alex's journal may be used to refer back to photographs and other items that can help the player decipher such puzzles as keypad entries. For the first time in the series, the player may select responses when engaging in dialogue with other characters he encounters in the game, which in turn may affect how the player sees the plot unfold.

In addition to exploration, combat is another major element to the gameplay, and the player must fight the various monsters that appear. In contrast to the more naïve protagonists of previous games, combat in Homecoming takes into account Alex's experience as a soldier. The player is able to perform light and heavy attacks, or mix them to perform combinations, and may also perform a variety of finishing moves to ensure that the monsters are dead. Attacking enemies also leaves wounds in them that match the motion carried out by Alex in inflicting the attack. In terms of controlling Alex, the player may also perform new maneuvers such as targeting the enemy before attacking them, dodging enemy attacks, and performing counter-attacks. As well as melee weapons, pistols, rifles and shotguns are available as firearms, which can be upgraded to stronger versions later in the game. In addition to the changes in combat, and unlike previous entries in the series, the player is also able to fully control and rotate the camera as they choose; one analog stick controls player movement, and the other controls the camera.

<!--==Plot== At the start of the game, the player controls Alex through a nightmare concerning his younger brother, Josh, before Alex wakes up in the cab of a truck driven by Travis Grady, the protagonist from Silent Hill: Origins, who gives him a ride to his hometown of Shepherd's Glen. The town, named for a distant ancestor who helped found it, is covered in fog and deserted, with several roads having fallen into disrepair or simply collapsed into nothingness. At home, he finds his mother in a near catatonic state, murmuring about his father leaving to find Josh; promising to find Josh, Alex leaves.

He soon discovers that many more people have gone missing in Shepherd's Glen since he left when he finds childhood friend Elle Holloway pinning "missing" signs to a board outside the police department. Back in Shepherd's Glen, Alex allies himself with Deputy Wheeler in the police department. Alex eventually learns that his father was involved in the secrets of the town and had left to attempt to resolve the town's problems, but before he is able to get answers from his mother at home, he is knocked unconscious when The Order—the cult which worships Silent Hill's god, and has been taking people from the town —kidnaps his mother.

Alex, Elle and Wheeler chase after the soldiers across Toluca Lake, but are intercepted by the Order before they can reach Silent Hill. Elle and Wheeler are taken to Silent Hill's penitentiary, where Alex attempts to rescue them. He finds his mother, Lillian, strapped to a stretching rack by the Order; here, the player must make a decision regarding whether to kill her out of mercy or not, which will affect the outcome of the game. After rescuing Judge Holloway from a death similar to those he has already witnessed, and separating from Wheeler once more, Alex finds the Order's church, where he listens to a man in the confessional who mistakes him for a priest; whilst his identity is not explicitly revealed, it is heavily implied from his description of his life, and Alex's strong reaction to it, that it is indeed his father, and here the player may choose to forgive him, again affecting the outcome of the game. Alex soon meets his father face-to-face, and he reveals that Alex was never a soldier, and has been in a mental hospital since "the accident" occurred. He begs forgiveness before he is skewered and cut in half by the monster Pyramid Head.

Continuing on to the Order's underground facility, Alex is captured by Elle's mother, Judge Holloway, who reveals that everything that has happened is due to a broken pact. One hundred fifty years ago, the four founding families broke away from Silent Hill's Order to move to Shepherd's Glen. They were allowed to do so on the condition that once every 50 years they would sacrifice one of their children in a preordained fashion. On this occasion, while Joey Bartlett, Scarlett Fitch and Nora Holloway were successfully sacrificed by their parents, the Shepherd sacrifice failed, and as a result, the Order had been reformed to try to appease their God. Judge Holloway tries to kill Alex, who gains the upper hand and lodges a power drill through her skull. Alex rescues Elle from the facility and, after finding Wheeler gravely injured and allowing the player to choose whether to save him—once more affecting the game's ending—continues on alone to find Josh. He eventually finds the sacrificial chamber with each family's sacrifices inscribed; his name is listed, confirming Alex as the intended sacrifice for the Shepherd family.

Realizing he was the intended sacrifice, Alex experiences a flashback showing Josh's true fate. When Alex was younger, he had taken Josh rowing out on the lake, where Josh showed Alex the Shepherd Family Ring, which his father had chosen to give to him instead of Alex. In a jealous rage, Alex struggled with Josh to try and take the ring, and as they struggled Josh slipped, breaking his neck on the side of the boat and falling into the lake. His father retrieved the body, and explained that Alex had "ruined it for all of us", since he had "chosen" Alex, and not Joshua; unable to accept Josh's death, Alex was then sent to the mental hospital, and with Josh instead of Alex sacrificed, the Order's pact was broken. Fighting a final monster, Alex is faced with Josh's corpse, and is given one final chance to face reality and say goodbye to Josh for the last time, before leaving his brother and the facility.

There are five endings available, which depend on the player's actions during the game, including whether the player kills Alex's mother, forgives Alex's father, and saves Deputy Wheeler. These range from the single positive ending to the game—the Good ending, where Alex comes to terms with his past actions and reunites with Elle to leave Shepherd's Glen—to three endings where Alex's fate is negative, including Alex getting drowned by his father, waking up in the hospital, receiving a lobotomy or being turned into a Pyramid Head. In addition, the tradition of a UFO ending also returns, where both Alex and Elle are abducted by a UFO while Wheeler watches on. . In addition to these endings, if the player collects all of Josh's pictures, after the credits finish, a bonus scene is played. It starts off with Alex entering his home. Upon entering, Alex notices pools of water leading up the stair case and to his room. Alex then climbs the stairs and enters his room. Alex then sees Josh sitting on the bottom bunk of the bed. When Alex aproaches Josh, Josh looks up and says "smile" and then takes a picture of Alex with his camera.-->

Development
Chief designer of Silent Hill Homecoming, Masashi Tsuboyama, announced the game's development in a 2004 interview with Eurogamer, in which he also debunked previous internet rumors that it was to be called Shadows of the Past. No information was initially imparted about the platform the game would appear on, other than it would be appearing on the next generation of consoles, which had yet to be released. Around two years later, an interview with composer Akira Yamaoka revealed more information; he hinted that they had hoped to carry on "plans of the earlier Silent Hill platforms", and that the team were creating a title with the idea of "fear in daylight", with similar psychological roots to Silent Hill 2. The suggestion that the story and gameplay would be more like that of the second entry in the series in the way the player is directed, and in the character's behavior, was reaffirmed in a later interview, along with the idea of creating the game for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms.

However, most of the ideas previously hinted at were not found in subsequent information releases. At E3 2007, a new teaser trailer was displayed by Konami that revealed the title of the game to be Silent Hill V, and that the game would be released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Further to this trailer, Konami executives also revealed that the developer would not in fact be Team Silent as in previous iterations, but that, like Silent Hill: Origins, it would be developed by a Western developer, The Collective. The Collective had merged with Backbone Entertainment in 2005 to form Foundation 9 Entertainment, and Foundation 9 then merged The Collective with Shiny Entertainment to create Double Helix Games. The team had been working on the production of Harker, another survival horror title, but this was placed on indefinite hiatus during Homecoming's production.

Double Helix drew inspiration not only from past installments in the game series, but also from the first Silent Hill movie adaptation; this is most evident in the transition from the normal world to the Otherworld, whose "ripping" effect almost matches that found in the movie. Other similarities from the same source includes the reaction of nurses to light, the bug-like creatures seen in the movie, and the Pyramid Head rendition, known as the "Bogeyman" in this game. Homages to previous games in the series include a reference to the long-running joke of the lead character placing their hand in a toilet bowl to retrieve items. The script, in-game journal entries, and instruction manual were written by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano, based on the story and the summary of events provided by lead designer Jason Allen, lead artist Brain Horton, and lead level designer Daniel Jacobs. Despite the change in development team, Akira Yamaoka returned from past installments in the series to create both music and sound effects for the game. Yamaoka wrote 70 minutes of music for the game, and insisted on working with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn to provide vocals, as fan reaction to her voice on previous Silent Hill titles has been favorable.

The game had difficulties in passing censors in some countries before it could go on sale. The Australian classification board, the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), refused to classify the game, due to "impact violence and excessive blood effects". The objectionable scenes included various body parts being drilled into, as well as the bisection of a character by an enemy. This had the effect of banning the game for sale in the country, and representatives for publisher Atari mentioned that they would be asking Konami to tone down the violence to allow the game to receive the needed MA15+ rating for its sale to be permitted in early 2009. The German version of the game was also postponed to 2009 in order for cuts to be made to pass the German censors.

Homecoming was released in North America on September 30, 2008 for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles. The PC version, which in North America, Central America and South America is only available via the Steam content delivery network, was intended to launch on the same date as the console versions, but was delayed, finally becoming available on Steam on November 6, 2008. A European release on all platforms was intended for the same month, but the title was delayed in the region to February, 2009. In contrast to the American regions, a PC retail release on DVD was made available in Europe.

Reception
Homecoming received at Metacritic 71 out of 100 for the PS3 version, and 70 out of 100 for the Xbox 360 version. Aggregate site Game Rankings gave a 71.82% aggregate score for the Xbox 360 version, and a 71.28% for the PS3 version. As the second external developer working on a Silent Hill entry, and the first for a home console iteration, Double Helix were under scrutiny from reviewers and Silent Hill fans to see how a Western developer would handle the franchise; many reviewers found the change in developer to be a positive move overall, while some, acknowledging faults in the final product, expressed interest in seeing further Silent Hill games from the same developer. In contrast, Zero Punctuation commented that the game was as an example of Japanese franchises being downgraded by Westernization, particularly in the different approaches taken to induce fear in the player. Evidence of this can be seen in the monster design. In Homecoming the enemies tend toward a motif of weaponry and invoke a more reactive sort of fear. Whereas in previous installments, enemy monsters were alien yet still very obviously human and familiar in nature, which created an instinctual kind of fear. A feeling that made them more disturbing or "slightly off" rather than just outright scary or surprising.

Positive reviews were given to the graphics and the environments in the game, described as "fantastic", with Shepherd's Glen in particular being "rendered brilliantly", and "the upgraded visuals bestow a filmic quality to everything and the world's eerie transformations look better than ever". Some surprise was expressed at the darkness of the game, with the flashlight seemingly having less effect than in previous games, and making some markers, such as doors, hard to spot.

Also adding to the atmosphere is the audio, with music written by series regular Akira Yamaoka. Yamaoka's music and ambient audio was received well, being "atmospheric, moody and beautifully presented"; combined with "an amazing score", the audio goes "a long way toward establishing the expected Silent Hill mood", though some concern was expressed that the music was "somewhat misplaced" with the game and did not fit in so well. Voice acting, which has traditionally been seen as one of the series' weaker points, was reviewed as better than the series' usual attempts, but occasionally "flat" when more emotion was needed.

The game's plot received a largely mixed reception. While some reviewers graded it positively, describing it as "intriguing and disturbing", it was also noted that it "isn't particularly original, and there are no great surprises", even though it "still makes for a very involving journey into the macabre". Several reviewers likened the story to a subplot of the main Silent Hill mythos which, while able to "stand on its own", "barely mentions certain characters which fairly dominate the backstory of previous SH games". Further to the mixed reception of the plot, some critics expressed disappointment at the predictability of the main twist in the story regarding Alex's predicament, whilst others found it "genuinely shocking". Croshaw's Zero Punctuation review was generally negative, stating that while the level design, story and combat were all competent the game had little to do with what he liked about the Silent Hill series and would have been better served as a completely different franchise.