Silent Hill: Homecoming

• 1. Introduction

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  Silent Hill: Homecoming begins with a truck rattling through fog on the road into Shepherd's Glen. Inside the cab, asleep, is Alex Shepherd, a soldier just back from an overseas tour of duty. The driver is Travis Grady, the same man who served as the protagonist of Silent Hill: Origins. Homecoming is the sixth installment in the Silent Hill series, developed by Double Helix Games and published by Konami. Alex has come home to find his younger brother, Josh, who has gone missing along with their father. His mother, meanwhile, sits at home in a catatonic state, murmuring only that his father left to search for Josh. The search for Josh soon pulls Alex out of Shepherd's Glen and toward Silent Hill. In the town of Silent Hill itself, an organization called the Order is waiting. What happened to Josh, why the Order wants the Shepherd family, and what it will cost Alex to find out, unfold across the chapters ahead.

• 2. Combat Like a Soldier

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  Photographs, drawings, and other clues that Alex finds while exploring go straight into a journal he can reread at any time. The game nudges the player along by having Alex turn his head toward objects he can pick up. Weapons, ammunition, and health drinks give off a faint glow so they stand out from the environment. Some journal entries are the only way to solve the game's puzzles, including keypad codes scattered through the world.

  For the first time in the series, players can choose how Alex responds when talking with other characters. Those choices affect how the story unfolds from that point on.

  Combat breaks from series tradition too, since Alex fights with a trained soldier's instincts rather than an ordinary civilian's panic. He can throw light and heavy attacks and chain them into combinations. He can also finish off monsters with dedicated finishing moves, a mechanic the series had only tried in rough form in Silent Hill: Origins. Wounds left on enemies match the exact motion of whichever attack struck them. Alex can target enemies before striking, dodge incoming attacks, and pull off counter-attacks.

  Melee weapons share space in his arsenal with pistols, rifles, and shotguns, all of which can be upgraded as the game progresses. Firearms handle with more realism than in earlier entries, forcing Alex to shoulder long guns and fight the pull of recoil. Unlike previous Silent Hill games, players can also rotate the camera freely, using one analog stick to move Alex and the other to look around.

  That trained precision would soon be tested against monsters shaped by a pact the Shepherd family broke long before Alex was ever sent overseas.

• 3. The Order's Pact

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  Elle Holloway, a friend from Alex's childhood, is pinning missing person notices to a board outside the police department when Alex catches up to her. It becomes clear that Shepherd's Glen has lost far more people than just Josh and his father.

  Walking through town, Alex separately witnesses the deaths of Mayor Bartlett and Dr. Fitch, both killed by monsters in the Otherworld. Each of them, it turns out, has a child who is also missing. Back at the police department, Alex allies himself with Deputy Wheeler, and together they learn that Alex's father had been involved in the town's secrets and had left to try to fix them. Before Alex can get answers from his mother, the Order, a religious group tied to Silent Hill, knocks him out and takes her.

  Alex, Elle, and Wheeler cross Toluca Lake by boat to search Silent Hill for Alex's father, but the Order intercepts them. Elle and Wheeler are taken to Silent Hill's penitentiary, where Alex goes to free them. He finds his mother bound, and the player must decide whether to kill her out of mercy, a choice that shapes the ending. After freeing Elle's mother, Judge Holloway, Alex finds the Order's church. There he secretly listens to his father in the confessional, where the player can choose to forgive him. Alex's father soon reveals that Alex was never really a soldier and has been in a mental hospital since something he calls only "the accident." He begs for forgiveness moments before a monster known as the Bogeyman, resembling Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2, kills him.

  In the Order's underground base, Judge Holloway captures Alex and explains that everything happening is the result of a broken pact. A hundred and fifty years earlier, four founding families broke away from Silent Hill's Order to settle Shepherd's Glen. They were permitted to leave only on the condition that, once every fifty years, one family would sacrifice a child in a preordained way. Joey Bartlett, Scarlett Fitch, and Nora Holloway, whose twisted spirits Alex has already fought as boss monsters, were each successfully sacrificed by their own parents. The Shepherd family's sacrifice, however, failed, so the Order reformed to try to appease its god. Judge Holloway then tries to kill Alex, who kills her in self-defense. He frees Elle, finds Wheeler injured, and the player again chooses whether to save him before Alex continues on alone to find Josh.

  Realizing he himself was meant to be the sacrifice, Alex relives a flashback of what really happened to Josh. Years earlier, Alex had taken Josh rowing on the lake. There, Josh showed him a ring their father had chosen to give Josh instead of Alex. Jealous, Alex struggled with his brother over the ring, and Josh fell into the lake and drowned. Their father pulled the body out and told Alex he had "ruined it for all of us" by being the wrong son. Unable to accept what he had done, Alex was sent to a mental hospital rather than the military he believed he had joined. With Josh dead instead of Alex, the Order's pact was broken. After defeating a final boss that embodies Josh's spirit, Alex finally gets to apologize, telling him he never wanted him dead. He leaves the family ring and his father's flashlight on Josh's body before leaving the chamber.

  Five different endings are possible, shaped by choices like whether Alex kills his mother, forgives his father, or saves Wheeler. Only one is unambiguously positive: Alex comes to terms with what happened and leaves Shepherd's Glen with Elle. The other three see Alex drowned by his father, waking in the hospital for shock treatment, or turned into a Bogeyman himself. A joke ending has Alex and Elle abducted by a UFO while Wheeler looks on. Players who collect every one of Josh's pictures, or finish the game on hard difficulty, unlock a post-credits scene. In it, Alex finds a soaking wet Josh sitting on his bunk bed, camera in hand.

  That reveal, that Alex had misremembered his own life throughout the search, was a twist a new team of developers had to build from nothing.

• 4. Building Homecoming

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  Masashi Tsuboyama, chief director of Silent Hill 5, first announced the game's development in a 2004 interview with the outlet Eurogamer. In that same interview, he denied earlier internet rumors that the game would be called Shadows. At the time, Konami gave no details about which console the game would appear on, only that it would run on the next console generation.

  Around two years later, composer Akira Yamaoka gave an interview that revealed more about the direction of the project. He said the team hoped to carry forward "plans of the earlier Silent Hill platforms." They were building the game around an idea of "fear in daylight." He compared its psychological roots to those of Silent Hill 2. A later interview confirmed both that comparison and the choice of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as the game's platforms.

  At E3 2007, Konami showed a new teaser trailer revealing the game's title as Silent Hill V. It also confirmed the game for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, though most of the plans hinted at earlier did not survive to this point. Konami executives also announced that the developer would not be Team Silent, the studio behind earlier mainline games. Instead, a Western studio called The Collective would make the game, following the same approach taken for Silent Hill: Origins.

  The Collective had merged with Backbone Entertainment in 2005 to form Foundation 9 Entertainment. Foundation 9 then combined The Collective with Shiny Entertainment to create Double Helix Games, the studio that finished Homecoming. At the time, that team had also been working on another survival horror project called Harker, which was put on indefinite hold during Homecoming's production.

  Double Helix borrowed heavily from the first Silent Hill film for inspiration, not just past games in the series. The transition into the Otherworld, with its "ripping" visual effect, closely echoes a similar moment in the movie. The game also borrows the film's nurses reacting to light, its bug-like creatures, and its version of Pyramid Head, reworked here as the Bogeyman. One older series joke survives intact too, the recurring gag of the lead character digging through a toilet bowl for items. Lead designer Jason Allen said the team wanted to keep the series' storytelling depth and atmosphere while making combat feel more intuitive and less frustrating. Writers Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano wrote the script, in-game journal entries, and instruction manual. They worked from a story and summary of events supplied by Allen, lead artist Brian Horton, and lead level designer Daniel Jacobs.

  On the 10th of September, 2009, it was reported that Homecoming would not get an official release in Japan. Konami attributed the decision to marketing reasons, saying the company had chosen not to promote the game there. Japanese fans would only ever reach Homecoming through imports, since Konami's own marketing plans never gave it a domestic release.

• 5. Yamaoka's Score

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  Despite the overhaul in almost every part of production, composer Akira Yamaoka came back to write the music and shape the sound effects. Homecoming was the first game in the series built around surround sound. Yamaoka wrote seventy minutes of music for the game.

  He also insisted on working again with singer Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, since fans had responded well to her voice on earlier Silent Hill titles. McGlynn ended up providing vocals for four tracks on the soundtrack. Homecoming's soundtrack was released on the 24th of November, 2008.

  Before players outside a handful of countries could hear any of it, though, the game still had to satisfy classification boards in places like Australia and Germany.

• 6. Banned in Two Countries

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  Australia's classification board, the Office of Film and Literature Classification, refused to classify Homecoming at all, citing "impact violence and excessive blood effects." Reviewers pointed to specific scenes, including body parts being drilled into and a character being cut in two by an enemy, as the objectionable material. The refusal effectively banned the game from sale in the country. Representatives for publisher Atari said they would ask Konami to tone down the violence so the game could receive the needed MA15+ rating. That rating came through in early 2009.

  Germany's release was pushed back to 2009 as well, after an uncensored version of the game was rejected by the Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle. Once cuts matching the Australian release were applied, the game was resubmitted. It received the rating "keine Jugendfreigabe," meaning restricted to adults.

  On the 19th of November, 2010, the Amtsgericht Frankfurt am Main went further. It confiscated every Xbox 360 copy of the game imported uncensored from the UK. The court cited Paragraph 131 of the German criminal code, which covers depictions of violence, effectively banning the uncensored version from sale in Germany entirely.

  None of that kept Homecoming from reaching store shelves across North America that September, where critics were already forming their own verdict.

• 7. Release and Reviews

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  Homecoming reached PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners in North America on the 30th of September, 2008. The Windows version followed on the 6th of November, 2008, available in North America, Central America, and South America exclusively through Steam. Europe received every version simultaneously on the 27th of February, 2009, including a retail PC release on DVD, something North American players never got. Nearly a decade later, on the 25th of July, 2018, Homecoming became backward compatible on Xbox One alongside the Silent Hill HD Collection.

  On Metacritic, Homecoming settled at 71 out of 100 for the PlayStation 3 version, 70 out of 100 for Xbox 360, and 64 out of 100 for PC. As the second outside studio to work on a mainline Silent Hill game, and the first to do so for a home console, Double Helix faced heavy scrutiny. Both critics and longtime fans watched closely. Many reviewers ultimately judged the change in developer a positive move, even while flagging faults in the finished game. The reviewer known as Zero Punctuation took the opposite view. He framed Homecoming as an example of a Japanese franchise diminished by a more Western approach to horror.

  Critics praised the graphics and environments as "fantastic," singling out Shepherd's Glen as "rendered brilliantly." They noted that the upgraded visuals gave the world's transformations a filmic quality. Several were surprised by how dark the game was, since the flashlight seemed to illuminate less than in past entries. This occasionally made markers like doors hard to spot.

  The score, again written by Akira Yamaoka, along with the ambient audio, was described as "atmospheric, moody and beautifully presented." It helped establish the series' expected mood. Some reviewers still felt the music was "somewhat misplaced" at points. Voice acting, long considered one of the series' weaker points, was judged better than usual, though occasionally "flat" in scenes that needed more emotion.

  Reception of the plot was mixed. Some reviewers called it "intriguing and disturbing," while others noted it "isn't particularly original, and there are no great surprises," even if it still made for "a very involving journey into the macabre." Several compared the story to a subplot of the wider Silent Hill mythos, one capable of standing alone. Even so, it "barely mentions certain characters" central to earlier games. Opinions split on the main twist regarding Alex's condition, with some finding it predictable and others calling it "genuinely shocking." Zero Punctuation's review was largely negative, judging the level design, story, and combat competent on their own terms. Still, it argued Homecoming had little to do with what its reviewer valued in the Silent Hill series. It suggested the game would have fared better as an entirely different franchise.

  That verdict, that Homecoming was a competent game wearing an ill-fitting name, left one question open. What a Shepherd family story might have looked like without the Silent Hill name attached to it never got answered.