When I say I hate what Silent Hill has become though I'm not talking about the games themselves. Silent Hills 1-4 are still extremely good horror classics but anything after that hot trash. Silent Hill Origins probably being the most forgivable since even though it's a steaming pile of wank you can at least tell its heart was in the right place but once you get past that game it's all downhill from there. The series hit peak shittiness with Book of Memories that probably still hasn't been outdone even with the recent ascension but the series, even in the current day is still in freefall in terms of quality.
The new batch doesn't seem any better either. Ascension is already being shit on, there's some other one called Townfall and I'm not even sure what that is, there's Silent Hill F which seems to be having an identity crisis and looks more like Fatal Frame than anything else and then finally there's that fucking stupid piece of shit remake of Silent Hill 2 being made with the inept and creatively bankrupt folks over at Bloober Team. I could write an essay on why Silent Hill 2 being developed by Bloober is terrible on its own but thankfully I don't have to because YouTube user Bobsvids did a great job of outlining why they are so terrible, so I'll just let him tell you why that project has absolutely no hope whatsoever
But like I said, I'm not talking about the games themselves, per se but what Silent Hill has become conceptually. In Silent Hill 1 you aren't going through a spooky town being hunted by manifestations of your own guilt in order to punish you for something, you're going through a town beset by a cult and the nightmare is coming from another person, not really for the sake of punishment but because she is being used to birth a demon which you end up actually fighting if you get one of the games good endings. Silent Hill 3 continued this plot with the influence of an unborn demon God causing the nightmare to manifest outside of Silent Hill but again, not for the sake of punishment. Heather Mason is not being punished for anything by the nightmare. Silent Hill 2 was an offshoot of this occult story as a sort of aftermath tale where the events of the first game have sort of caused the nightmare effect to spread to anyone who enters. James gets plagued by manifestations of his own guilt but he's the only bloke in the original set of games cast to go through that experience (side characters not included of course, shut the fuck up)
But after Silent Hill 4, due to the popularity of Silent Hill 2 over 1 and 3, Silent Hill is now ONLY a place where you go to "fight your innner demons" or get punished for some kind of misdeed you performed in the past. The worst example of this is in Downpour where thanks to a bunch of talentless hacks trying to write a story that's "open to interpretation" you end up with a game where, in the best ending, the main character is being punished by manifestations of his guilt for something he didn't even fucking do.
The problem is that Silent Hill was originally interesting because it was a gripping story about a cult, a demon god and a families struggle against that cult. 2 was an interesting exploration of the effects of that cult on the town as well as a cool story about 1 guy inparticular and 4 expanded the scope of that a bit more. But in the current day, Silent Hill is now just this weird therepist town you go to when you've done something wrong so twitchy monsters covered in raw bacon can spook you into not feeling so bad about it. So sure, the modern games have fucked Silent Hill on a mechanical level sure, but over time and thanks to the efforts of a bunch of very low skill people who aren't the original Team Silent the CONCEPT of the entire series is completly fucked and ensures that anything that gets pumped out from this point onwards is doomed to be awful garbage that entirely misses the point of what made the first set of games interesting in the first place
At this point I would probably say something like "If you're going to do Silent Hill again, bring back the cult and drop this pseudo-therapy shit" but what really needs to be done is the series needs to be killed. Stop making them, let it die and find another group of talented people to make a new horror new series with new ideas.
Fuck Silent Hill
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