Maybe Silent Hill Should Just Stay Dead – Extra Punctuation

I hate the phrase “This could be good” or “that could be interesting.” It’s the most useless fucking phrase in entertainment journalism. Of course it “could be good”. Everything in a non-released state “could be good;” they exist in a Schrodinger’s cat good-bad quantum superstate until they actually come out, until then speculation is pointless. It didn’t used to be, because we used to have this thing called “playable demos” that let us get a hands-on preview of the ever-essential core gameplay loop, but those aren’t so prevalent anymore. And we know why, don’t we. Because they made it harder for the publisher to bold-facedly lie about the finished product.
But I digress. Next time you feel the urge to say “that could be interesting” in response to this kind of hype, take a moment to ask yourself a few questions.

Start with a good opener like: why do you give a shit? Because it’s Silent Hill! So? Silent Hill is just a six letter word and a four letter word. There have been plenty of terrible creative works that those two words have been slapped onto. You don’t even have to go into the movies. But the first few Silent Hill games were really good! Why were they good? Because they were well made with good ideas? By whom? The… developers, Team Silent! AND WHO WERE THEY?

YOU DON’T KNOW, DO YOU. Well I do. And I know that Team Silent was a different group of people from game to game. That’s why the original 1, 2, 3 and 4 all had different vibes and I still think 3’s overrated. See, the problem here is that the audience for gaming latches onto franchisees rather than creators. Entirely by the design of the insidious committees that run the world, I’m sure. People like game A and so they buy game A+1, not knowing or caring that thanks to some real Ship of Theseus-level hiring and firing at the company, the two games were developed by completely different people. And then they wonder why it doesn’t have quite the same zing.
Of course, even if it is the same people that’s no guarantee of quality, either. Maybe the creators only had one good game in them. It happens. Maybe the first game did and said everything the concept needed to do and say. And if none of that, a sequel is just never going to give that sense of wonder and excitement you get from getting drawn into something completely new.

I had an epiphany a few years back, or perhaps more of a cementing of feelings, when I realised that what has kept me going for fifteen years of the thankless and frequently excruciating job of playing every new game that comes out are those sadly rare moments of playing something wonderful that completely absorbs me. And almost every example of such games in the last few years have been new IPs I knew absolutely nothing about going in. Obra Dinn, Spiritfarer, The Artful Escape to an extent. Stuff that nobody said “that could be good” about. No one would’ve said “that could be good” if you’d verbally explained the premise of Papers, Please to them and Papers Please was a veritable phenom. Meanwhile whenever I’ve played sequels, even when said sequels are perfectly good, like Portal 2, Saints Row 4, Psychonauts 2, it just can’t bring out that same electrifying feeling. Like there’s only so high my emotions can go in a familiar setting.

There are exceptions, Silent Hill 2 foremost among them, as well as Persona 5 perhaps, but these sequels were so transcendent that they did feel like something entirely new. And it wasn’t their similarity to their franchise predecessors that made them interesting. And yet, the committees that run the creative industries still operate on the principle that the familiar is what sells. Which might be true in the short term but any pillock can see the diminishing returns that emerge if you keep churning out the same shit. Look at poor old Assassin’s Creed. If there were anything that illustrated a need for some equivalent of child protective services for IPs, it would be that.

The trouble with committee design is that committees think in much the same way an AI does: it can only process existing information. It relies almost entirely on precedent. And has a bad habit of assuming that if X is true then X will always be true. People really liked Jockstrap Felchers, therefore they will equally like Jockstrap Felchers 2. As well as the next nine films we’ve announced for the Jockstrap Felchers cinematic universe which will definitely work out because Marvel did it and it worked for Marvel. There is no part of this algorithm that allows for the possibility of a creative mind coming up with something new and exciting.

I think, in a nutshell, the constant flow of sequels, reboots and adaptations in the big money arts industries is the result of a system that just asks people what they want and then tries to give it to them. But in my experience people don’t know what they want. If you ask them, they’ll say they want more of what they already like, and if you try to give them that, they’ll complain that they’re bored of it. Nobody can predict what the next new thing that everyone latches onto will be. Because if we could predict that, we’d make it, and become rich as Croesus. It’s never as easy as that. And much as it depresses me to have to present what used to be the default, standard way of doing things like it’s some kind of bold revolutionary thinking, why not use all that triple-A money to fund a load of crazy people realising their crazy new ideas and count on at least one of them taking off instead of throwing all the money at attempts to repeat past success.

Which brings me back to the Silent Hill announcements, I suppose. And to get back to the difficult questions one should ask oneself: in this specific case, what possible evidence could you go off to assume that the results of these announcements “could be good?” I mean, Bloober Team making a Silent Hill game – did you even play The Medium? It was about nine tenths walking sim with particularly bad plotting and one tenth shitty stealth section where you get instakilled if you so much as break wind. Trust me, nothing good will come out of Silent Hill while Konami still have their claws in it. Remember what happened to Metal Gear. Oh god, they’re gonna make Silent Hill Survive, aren’t they. Quickly, craft rusty metal shard and health drink together to make a new equippable patch for your army jacket that gives you +2.6% defense against being confronted by the guilt for your past sins. That was a joke, Konami. Stop taking notes.