Sunday 29 July 2012

ARTICLE: Silent Hill: Revelations 3D & Why Games To Films Don't Always Work

Welcome to Silent Hill.... Again.

I am a big fan of Silent Hill and when I say, Silent Hill, I mean the games not the film - and when I say the games I mean the first, well ... three - and when I say the first three I mean, Silent Hill 2.

It must be said that Silent Hill 2 was one of the greatest games I've played - mainly because it understood that it wasn't a town, it was a state of mind. Silent Hill doesn't exist - it's where you go to be judged. Never before had the ending of a game hit me with such an emotional shock that it made me reconsider the hours and hours I'd invested beforehand with this character. It was amazing,  however, the rest of the games (Homecoming, Downpour etc. which I've played but never reviewed simply because they are so bad I don't want to relive the experience) have failed to reach the heady heights.

The first Silent Hill was great but more a bag of ideas than an amazing game, if you go back to play it again (you can download from PSN store) you'll see how awful the controls are, the voice acting and all that, but the right feeling was there. It could be said that the first Silent Hill film was similar. It had the right idea, it was a mixed bag of Silent Hill 1 and 2, it just failed because it wasn't scary, there was poor acting and it failed to compel. Visually it worked, but there was no real depth. Why they didn't take the story from Silent Hill 2 is beyond me - and it looks like Silent Hill Revelations is a film adaptation of Silent Hill 3 therefore completely skipping over the best game of the series. Very strange.

There's the running argument that games into films just don't work. The main reason is because you can't simply transfer the ideas to a big screen. Silent Hill works as a game because you invest a lot of time into the people, you are truly scared of dying so you don't have to restart from the last save point, you slowly reveal what happens, and to fit in this process into 90 minutes when it usually takes 9 hours or so is tough, especially when people are so concerned about taking the best bits when Silent Hill works best as a slow-burner, with the pay-off's being more story based than 'monster' based. It's not the monsters that scare you, it's the lead-up and anticipation, it's the humans and their motives.

Silent Hill, like all good horror, knows that these monsters, this world, is just an extension of the psyche of the protagonist but the film made it seems like it was a ghostly alternate dimension or something. It just didn't work.

So we come to Revelations where the main pull is that it's in 3D. Unfortunately, I'm going to the cinema to see it, same as every new Silent Hill game that comes out I have to buy and complete - full well knowing that it will be shit, but there's this hope, this glimmer, that maybe I might be able to revisit that Silent Hill I love and detest at the same time, but every time I'm disappointed.

This trailer speaks volumes in that there's again no depth, but looks great


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