Apparently, the kids love to fight—at least according to Silent Hill f director Al Yang and producer Motoi Okamoto. So to appeal to these new audiences, the next Silent Hill game will have fewer moody walks in the mist and more fights with a lead pipe.
“Inserting more entertaining and thrilling action into Silent Hill f was an idea I had ever since the early phases of the development,” Okamoto says in an interview with Game*Spark (via Automaton). “And, since NeoBards Entertainment is a company that’s tremendously good at making action games, this is also one of the reasons why we decided to choose them as the developers.”
As a massive Resident Evil fan, I’ll never say no to more action in my horror games, but that’s never been why I played Silent Hill. I’ve always loved it for the confusing narrative, hideously twisted monsters, and overall doom and gloom; exciting action sequences aren’t even in the equation. All in all, this shift to a more fight-focused game, even with soulslike attributes, seems like a sharp deviation from the usual.
But it’s not as if this isn’t on the developer’s radar, Okamoto does acknowledge this break in tradition: “The Silent Hill series isn’t considered a game that has entertaining action per se, but as we’re opening our doors to new players, we began to wonder what it would be like if we added more of those elements into the game.”
I’m not going to throw in the towel just yet. This may be an unusual next step for the Silent Hill series, but I don’t think it’s impossible to pull off. Better action sequences could be a really cool way to show off not only the designs of each monster but also how their bodies shift and change when battling. It could lead to some seriously cool and gory moments, which I’m all here for.
Although I’m not entirely sure this change was instituted for a purely functional reason, it seems like this is more of a reactionary move as Silent Hill tries to find its identity in a post-Silent Hill 2 remake world.
“We didn’t want to end up recreating Silent Hill 2 over and over again, and we were aware that there was no reason to keep making clones of it,” Yang says. “So, in order to avoid repeating what previous major titles did, we decided to make the action stand out more.”
There’s no question that following on from Silent Hill 2 is tough, especially as the remake surprised so many new and old players by just how good it was. There’s also clearly a pressure to keep on innovating and changing things up in order to hit an ever-changing goal, something that it seems Silent Hill has now become a victim of.
“Challenging action games are gaining popularity among younger players nowadays, so I believe that if we implemented such elements into the game, it would resonate well even with people who are new to the series,” Okamoto continues. I’m not entirely convinced that younger audiences crave soulslike action—there’s certainly an audience for it, but I believe that new players can still appreciate the quirkiness of OG Silent Hill.
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