Despite being Western-made and not featuring Yamaoka, it still feels and plays like a true Silent Hill game, they completely nailed everything. The visuals are outstanding; a tremendous amount of work went into the main assets to make the game almost photorealistic, especially when combined with ray tracing. It’s a very tactile game, you can see that a lot of effort and love went into the small details.
In contrast, some of the other world assets are noticeably lower in quality and can look like they were made for a PS3 game. The soundtrack from Pilotpriest fits perfectly.
The combat is clunky, but at the same time, it’s satisfyingly brutal and engaging. The game truly shines when the developers allow you to fully engage with it. My favorite sequence is the episode where you wander through a high-rise building with a shotgun, playing hide-and-seek with the Widows. It got me thinking that Sega should let these developers make a new Condemned game. The most memorable moment for me was entering a room, glancing toward a corner, moving toward a table, and suddenly, a Widow came out of the darkness and tried to kill me. It didn’t feel scripted, the AI is reminiscent of something you’d see in Alien: Isolation.
That brings me to the worst part of the game: dealing with The Weight, an unkillable monster that forces you to rely on stealth. The Weight respawns on whatever floor you’re near, it’s always close, it takes forever for it to change position, and it constantly reminds you that stealth in this game is not fun at all. They should have just cut it. I’m tired of all these Western fucking hide-and-seek horror games made for dumb Let’s Players, and it’s sad they added something like that to Silent Hill.
Some of the puzzles may seem brutal, but they’re never boring. My favorite is the one where you count objects in the pictures, and the worst is definitely the AUX pipes puzzle.
It’s also surprisingly well-optimized, it runs perfectly fine on Ultra settings on an RTX 3060. That’s very surprising to see in an Unreal Engine 5 game, but it just proves that it’s always about the developers, not just the engine.
The endings are… OK. You no longer need to replay the game to unlock new cutscenes that significantly expand the story, as was the case in Silent Hill f. The way you unlock the endings makes sense, but the conditions are still ridiculous. The classic Easter egg endings are present: the Dog ending is hilarious, but the UFO one is just… meh.