Secondly, creatures frequently attack en masse, and dealing with more than one at a time is a nightmare unless they’re kind enough to line up neatly in front of your swinging wrench or 2×4 plank. I was hesitant to pick up Silent Hill Origins. Origins certainly looks the part, thanks to the traditional Silent Hill mist and its re-creation of the environments we've come to know over the years. Although some aspects of the PSP original, such as character models, have been obviously enhanced, the animations are stiff, and textures that looked sharp on the handheld iteration look pixelated on the larger screen. The reliance on fixed camera angles, even with a one-click reposition button, means that you can’t always see the monster bearing down on you until it’s far too late. Like the previous Silent Hill games, Origins is light on scares but heavy on murky atmosphere and mysterious dialogue. Silent Hill Origins Review. Let me explain. If you know Silent Hill 1 to 3, then you’ll find Origins brings the series full-circle and carefully pulls a few loose ends together. In any case, Travis spots a little girl in the middle of the highway just in time to avoid hitting her. The problem with most of the game is that it's all been done already, and was done better by the last three games in the franchise to hit the system. PS2 Review - 'Silent Hill Origins' by Matt Olsen on May 13, 2008 @ 4:25 a.m. PDT Silent Hill makes its handheld debut with a brand new adventure that … Cryptic dialogue? PSP Review - 'Silent Hill Origins' by Tom Baker on Dec. 16, 2007 @ 2:42 a.m. PST Silent Hill makes its handheld debut with a brand new adventure that … The impatient might object to the convoluted puzzles and the combat is a weak link, but as the first serious example of handheld horror, this sets a satisfyingly high bar Franchises: Silent Hill. This time, you're in the shoes of Travis Grady, a trucker navigating through a downpour of rain on an eerie, foreboding night. Silent Hill Origins review The chills are handheld-sized, but no less horrifying By Andy_Kelly 09 November 2007. Stuart Andrews contributed gaming reviews to Trusted Reviews between 2005 and 2019. For the most part, they are pretty clever, requiring you to explore every nook and cranny for scraps of clues and various items. I heard a lot of bad stuff about it, most notably the camera issues and the many glitches. Meanwhile a brand that – for a while – sat at the pinnacle of the Survival Horror genre has seen itself overtaken by a revitalised Resident Evil, the increasingly potent Project Zero series and even Sony’s under-rated (if overcomplicated) Forbidden Siren duo. Walls dripping with blood? Conclusion Silent Hill Origins is perfect, both for the series aficionado and the first time gamer, venturing in the sick and sad world of Alessa. One of the most appealing things about Silent Hill Origins' release on PSP last November was the way Climax managed to shoehorn a fully-fledged and exclusive Silent Hill adventure onto a … You could argue that putting the player in control loses a little of the old terror of suddenly finding yourself in Silent Hill’s version of hell – and you wouldn’t be wrong – but it allows for a few ingenious puzzles and a little less backtracking in complex areas like the Sanatorium. Nier Replicant Review - Carrying The Weight Of The World, Call Of Duty: Warzone Nuke Event Time, Destruction Of Verdansk, And Rebirth Island, Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic Remake Reportedly Coming. Random groans and sudden encounters with other characters are also appropriately creepy, if not exactly scary. The Silent Hill Marathon RETURNS! Melee is as plodding and unsatisfying as you remember, usually bloody but too measured and monotonous to be much fun. At times, an enemy attack will trigger a contextual minigame that requires you to hit the necessary buttons within a prescribed time limit to avoid taking damage. It appears that the poor photo-sensitive denizens of Silent Hill are alerted by the shine of your flashlight, so you realise that one of Silent Hill’s signature features is actually best switched off. Despite its pint sized delivery however Silent Hill: Origins is a solid little romp that in a lot of ways is the closest thing to a ‘traditional’ Silent Hill outside of the first three games. It doesn't even fix long-standing problems. Silent Hill Origins advises you to play it in the dark with headphones, but it forgets to add that you should lock your door. Silent Hill Origins serves as a prequel to the 8-year-old franchise, where the game's protagonist, a truck driver named Travis Grady, steps into the mysterious town of Silent Hill in pursuit of a little girl wandering around the freeway. We start this game, as with so many Silent Hill games, observing the character that we’re going to be playing throughout the game. By now, gamers have become well aware that if any character mentions Silent Hill, they're in for a world of pain. This isn’t a new thing to Silent Hill by any means, but where once the idea of fleeing from demons seemed a part of the whole scary experience, you now feel more like you’re just avoiding a source of prolonged hassle. Kevin VanOrd Most reviews for Silent Hill: Origins were positive; its original release on the PSP received a Metacritic aggregate score of 78 out of 100. Atmospherically it’s horribly effective, particularly if, as the game suggests, you play it with your headphones on and the lights turned down. Barring last year’s Christophe Gans movie adaptation, fans of the Silent Hill series haven’t had much to celebrate in the four years since Silent Hill 3. Unfortunately, most of the creatures need to be whacked repeatedly before they go down, and even then they will get up several times before they have the good grace to lie still. Silent Hill: Origins is awesome and it's a must-have for all PSP owners. This is where Origins is at its best: Boss monsters are huge, designed well, and fun to take down. … If not, don’t worry. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. I spent large portions of the game backtracking to use an old save point just because I couldn’t risk waiting to find a new one. GameDaily wrote that Origins "impressively brings all the elements we love about the Silent Hill franchise to a portable format that works wonderfully". If you're here to fill in the missing pieces of series lore, Origins has plenty of meat for you to chew on and plenty of familiar locales to explore. Origins is a prequel set before the events of the original Silent Hill for the PlayStation. Silent Hill is always an interior journey for its lead as well, and this one takes Travis back into the unexplored dark regions of his own past. Visually, Origins sits as close to what we saw in Silent Hill 2 and 3 as you could reasonably expect on the PSP. That goes double when the series’ ‘feel’ is so important. Destructoid review: Silent Hill Origins. And isn’t it slightly ridiculous that you end up – apparently – with a coat bulging full of portable televisions, jumbo bottles of alcohol, metal drip-hangers, cleavers, meat-hooks and sledgehammers just because you can never have too many highly breakable melee weapons in such a monster infested town? And as with any Silent Hill, there’s an argument that the two worlds reflect different states of your protagonist’s mind: one a twisted vision of his present-day reality, the other a nightmare representation of his repressed unconscious. Silent Hill Origins review A great Silent Hill prequel. The fact is that the Survival Horror genre has moved on since Silent Hill 3, and a lot of the old Silent Hill conventions – so faithfully reproduced here – now feel horribly dated. In this case, it also relies heavily on nostalgia to set its mood, which may be fine for many fans, but the setup lacks the originality of prior series plots. Review: July 17, 2014. The last game in the series, Silent Hill 4: The Room was clearly a separate game hastily integrated into the Silent Hill mythos. Nevertheless, when compared to its PS2 predecessors, the visuals simply can't compete. But in this case, the good news is also the bad news because from a gameplay perspective, Origins is exactly what you would expect. You slowly gather a small selection of ranged weapons, but as ammo is scarce you’re best saving these for key boss battles. Story It appears that Silent Hill Origins is the prequel for the first game of the series, featuring a protagonist named Travis O'Grady, not my favorite SH character from what I can tell. Meanwhile, the constant drip-feed of information through reports, notes and odd, childish drawings is more unnerving than all of the shock scares and crimson gore in Clive Barker’s Jericho. However, Silent Hill: Origins would set the groundwork for a much narrower mindset in Yamaoka’s approach to Silent Hill’s music. Origins proves that Silent Hill is still worth a visit, but it does little to advance the series by re-treading on old ground. The horror series makes a solid debut on PSP. It’s too clunky, too irritating and too old-school for that. Silent Hill: Origins is indeed a solid Silent Hill experience indeed. I think it is one of those genres that is both easy to make fun of and at the same time enthrall you into the mix and truly be scared, if done right. In November 2007, Konami released Silent Hill Origins for the PSP, developed by Climax Studios; the game was a prequel and recounted the beginnings of the horror in the eponymous town. Then the title Silent Hill … The music, by series stalwart Akira Yamaoka, is packed with foreboding ambient tracks that escalate suddenly into peaks of churning menace, and is arguably the most unsettling thing about the whole game. The third-person movement is slow, unwieldy and occasionally counter-intuitive. Travis Grady clearly doesn't frighten easy. What's missing here is a clear sense of suspense. Doing so means that for the majority of the game you’re restricted to melee weapons, pressing the right shoulder button to lock on and then bashing X to take a swipe. As anyone knows, I love the horror genre. This isn't an origins story, its it own thing. When you think of Silent Hill, what jumps to mind? 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