Silent Hill: Where Did It All Go Wrong?

When The Fresh Paint Turns Out To Be Corrosive

Again following its rule of three, the subsequent lukewarm reception to the seventh generation's offering put Silent Hill on another hiatus. What could Konami possibly be cooking up, to bring back its once-top spot garnering psychological and creepy horror series?

Late 2012 saw the award for "Most Definitely Not What We Wanted" game with Book of Memories: an isometric, co-operative dungeon brawler. Because nothing diminishes the horror aspect like bringing in teammates to help you tackle the experience. Just look at Dead Space 3 or Aliens: Colonial Marines (although not for too long). Basically, it was as far removed from a Silent Hill game as could be, and went down as well as you'd expect.

But that was the final straw, as earlier in the year, Konami put out the Silent Hill HD Collection for PS3 and Xbox 360. "Brilliant," you might think, "They did a cracking job on the Metal Gear Solid one". Except... they really didn't.

Remember how the fog became one of the series' greatest strengths, as whilst being an oppressive element in the in-game world it also hid technical limitations? Well, the remaster sought to remove the fog from Silent Hill 2, making the game look much worse than the original, in the very definition of "warts and all" discovery. Silent Hill 3 favoured well, though, but as a double pack riddled with technical issues, glitches and bugs, the writing was on the wall early on... which you could see now, what with the fog removed.

To make things even more insulting, Konami only patched the PS3 version, leaving Xbox users high and dry with essentially a broken game. A broken game which is readily available on the Xbox One's backwards compatibility store, so you can still witness it in all it's horror...

Name sullied, Silent Hill lived up to its namesake: it went very quiet indeed.