What does Silent Hill’s poor performance mean?

The latest Silent Hill, Silent Hill: Homecoming has only seen a US release, but even for a one-region release has performed pretty poorly. This can be simply put down to little to no advertising from Konami and general average reviews.

Metascore lists Silent Hill: Homecoming as a 72/100 “mixed or average reviews”, which is pretty alright but not what we’d come to expect from the series since Silent Hill 3, just before the series took a turn into something different. Sales figures from VGChartz (Not the most accurate of sources, but the best guess we have as Konami wont release any numbers) indicate that Silent Hill: Homecoming has sold 240,000 units across both platforms so far. These numbers are not too bad, but are totally destroyed by the more action oriented Resident Evil 4 which achieved 730,000 in the same time frame in the PS2 alone. Of course the huge amount of PS2s in action at the time makes a difference but SHH still should have done a little better than that.

A more fair comparison on current gen consoles targeting the survival horror market would be Dead Space, and using the same source sold a total of 950,000 worldwide (620,000 in the US) in a similar time frame as Silent Hill. So what does this mean for the “Silent Hill horror”? Clearly the market favour blowing things heads off and “strategic dismemberment” which is understandable because it’s awesome, but is also in a way disappointing. After the reviews and sales of SHH I came to wonder if horror games will now simply be this method of action vs psychological horror.

Konami have stated that if Silent Hill: Homecoming “is a success” then they’d consider continuing the franchise, but are the current sales enough? A nice change of pace would be going back to the series’ roots and bringing back the original team as lots of fans detested the idea of the original creators not being involved (save Akira Yamaoka), but this doesn’t look like much of a possibility. Speaking with the previous games’ art designer Masahiro Ito he said that “My real intention is SH is over” and didn’t like the direction that has been taken with his Pyramid Head character, stating that he is part of James’ story and they are just using him for his “cool appearance” rather than to explore the psychological depths of the character, and that is exactly what is happening to horror games. The depth seems to have been lost somewhere.

Dead Space was a great game to play, but the ending and the reason for the monsters was pretty poor. If you’ve seen the ending and finished the game then you know the details behind Isaacs girlfriend, and when you get to that conclusion you’ll walk away thinking “Wow, how retarded” because it simply is. I don’t want to spoil anything for those who haven’t finished it, but lets just say that it’s a pretty moronic mistake that is totally unrealistic and would not happen unless you were pretty stupid, and I’m not talking about evil monsters from space tearing people apart.

Hopefully Konami will step up and try to gather Team Silent back again or something. Chances are they will move onto another random developer to make the next one if they decide to make another one at all. If they do choose this route I hope to god that it is someone with more experience on next gen consoles, because Double Helix did a good job but they missed out some pretty huge things that need to be in a Silent Hill game, and included some things that weren’t in the previous games and shouldn’t be in any game – hoards of unstoppable bugs. The PC version in particular is a horrible mess which really dumps on the fans who have been eagerly anticipating the next in their favourite horror series only to find they have to play it in mediocre graphics whether their PC can handle them or not.

Here’s to hoping the series makes a roaring comeback and changes peoples perception on horror games and encourages developers to take a similar route with deeper storylines with deep characters and stories that are so intricate that you can discuss for years – like the old Silent Hills. That’s not to say Resident Evil style shattering heads isn’t great fun, we just need the old properly scary games back for a bit of variety.

Check out our Silent Hill: Homecoming Review here to see what we thought of the game.