A number of reasons demoted Silent Hill: Homecoming from “Holy crap I can’t wait for this game to come out so I can buy it” to “Yeah I think it’ll go into my Gamefly queue right under X Blades.” My first feelings of trepidation came when its postfixed incremental number was fully replaced by an entire word. Early reports confirmed my fears – not that the game was bad per se, but unoriginal. After a lengthy wait (as Gamefly is wont), I’ve finally played the next iteration in what once was my favorite survival horror series. I find it poetic that in copying everything from previous iterations in the Silent Hill franchise, they’ve oddly lost what Silent Hill is all about. It’s sort of like being a nihilist – if you believe in nothing, then you still believe in something, don’t you?

Using that word reminded me how awesome this album is. Listen to it now.

Let me say up front that I empathize fully with Double Helix – moreover I respect what they did. I would never have suspected the game came from anyone but Konami until I finished it and had a chance to reflect. Double Helix did what anyone would do when they were granted stewardship of a wildly innovative and popular franchise; they emulated past entries as closely as possible. Everything in Homecoming is, well, a homecoming for Silent Hill fans. Enemies like sexy nurses and, most disappointingly of all, Pyramid Head, are inexplicably copied. While some of the enemies (the Siam most notably) do look awesome, all of the enemies are missing their symbolic ties to the main character’s conflict or themes.

Philosophic waxing aside (because let’s face it, that philosophy is shiny enough), Double Helix was most faithful to the Silent Hill progeny in terms of combat – which is to say the combat is a horrible, angering, and frustrating venture that should be skippable, but isn’t. God damnit. Being a consummate idiot with uncanny talent for making wrong decisions, I decided to play the game on hard. I enjoy survival horror games on hard for the most part – it amplifies the tension and stress of the game. At least, that’s what it’s supposed to do when the developers don’t simply put a damage multiplier on all enemies and halve the number of healing items provided to the player.