Preview: 5 New Things We Learned About "Silent Hill: Downpour"

It’s been three years since our last trip to the sleepy, creepy hamlet of Silent Hill.

But at a recent event at their offices in Los Angeles, Konami showed off the latest version of Silent Hill: Downpour, one of three Hill games coming out early this year (the other two being Silent Hill: Book of Memories, an action game slated for the February launch of PlayStation’s Vita, and Silent Hill HD Collection, which brings Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 to the PS3 and 360 this March).

Set to be released March 27, 2012 on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Silent Hill: Downpour — the eighth in this survival horror series — is being assembled by Vatra Games, the Czech Republic studio that did the Rush’n Attack sequel Rush’n Attack: Ex-Patriot last year. Though with the event including hands-on time with the game, we now know a bit more about the game than “it’ll be scary.”

While the main objective of Downpour, as with all Silent Hill games, is to survive the horror, this game gives you some other things to do as well. Along the way, you’ll occasionally come across some optional side quests that, if completed, can reward you handsomely.

Some of these will, of course, illuminate more of what you’re going through, those some do feel like busy work. At one point, for example, while exploring an apartment building, you’ll find a note revealing that some tenant has been stealing stuff from his neighbors. You then have to find the things this person stole and return them to their rightful owners.

After a beginning part that sets up the game’s story, you’ll find yourself in the southeast corner of Silent Hill. But this isn’t just your starting point, it’s the hub from which you’ll explore the town.

Unlike previous Hill games, where you only got to visit a small section of the scary suburb, Downpour lets you wander all of its streets. In fact, because the town is so large, and can take a while to traverse, the developers have included a subway system so you can quickly travel from one part of town to the next. Though you will have to complete some of those aforementioned side quests to unlock different stations.

While Downpour adds some new mechanics to this survival horror series, it’s also bringing some old ones back as well. The biggest of these is that there will be separate difficulty levels for the combat and the puzzles, and you can mix and match however you like, making the combat hard and the puzzles easy, or the combat easy and the puzzles hard, or both about the same.

For combat, this will obviously effect how hard it is to kill creatures, while the puzzles’ difficulty often has to do with how much you’re told about the problem. In the aforementioned side quest about returning stolen items, for instance, playing that part on Hard means you aren’t told what to do, while doing it on Easy spells out which items belong to which tenant.

While combat has never been the main focus of the Silent Hill games, it’s still important to defend yourself. But you won’t find a lot of weapons in Downpour. Or rather, you won’t find a lot of things that were made to be weapons.

Instead, you’ll find such items as a fire axe, crowbar, or pipe that you can use to crack skulls. But since these things aren’t built for skull cracking, they will wear down and eventually break after a while. Granted, you’ll always have your fists, but as in all games — well, all games save for boxing games — punching enemies just doesn’t hurt them all that much.

What’s interesting is that you’ll also use these implements to do what they were meant to do. Early on, for instance, you’ll use the axe to chop down some wood blocking your way, while you’ll later use the crowbar to pull down a stuck fire escape ladder.

As you wander the streets of Silent Hill, you’ll notice that it occasionally starts to rain. But this isn’t just an indication to bust out your umbrella. Instead, in Downpour, the creatures all love it when it rains, and will come out to enjoy the weather. The thing is, since these creatures hate you as much as they like the rain, it means storms are more dangerous than acid rain.

These showers are also totally random, not just in when they happen, but also how long they last and how hard it’ll rain. That latter bit is most important, since the heavier the downpour, the more creepy crawlies that will come out. Thankfully, even if it’s just a drizzle, you can always escape by running indoors.