8 Oct, 2011
It’s no secret that Silent Hill is one of the most iconic horror titles in the entertainment industry. With games that feature some of the scariest and disturbing creatures and stories that would give you nightmares, Silent Hill doesn’t take the label of “survival horror” very lightly.
With the upcoming Silent Hill: Downpour title getting ready to release at the end of March in 2012, design director Brian Gomez of Vatra Games sat down and discussed the watery theme of Downpour in an interview with Konami, stressing that it was the perfect vessel (so to speak) to demonstrate protagonist Murphy Pendleton’s inner struggles.
“Water plays a really important role in Silent Hill: Downpour,” explained Gomez. “When we were creating our central character Murphy Pendleton, we were looking for themes and motifs that we could work into his personality, and try to figure out his inner psychology, and ways we could transfer that psychology into a physical form in the Other World.”
Mind games, split personalities, and duality is going to be a major theme alongside the ever-present water in Downpour. It’s a reflection of Murphy’s inner struggles, said Gomez, and water was the perfect element to use in order to illustrate that with its nature of being both life-giving and death-dealing. “Murphy is a mutable character, he’s changeable, he’s been influenced by some negative forces in his life, and has sent him down some wrong paths,” said Gomez. “He’s also got a duality to his personality. He’s a caring family man, but he’s also got a dark side. And we thought that water is the perfect element to illustrate that. Water — it’s mutable, it’s changeable, it can take the form of whatever vessel you put it into, and it’s also got a dark side. As you’ve seen, water is not only life-giving, but it can be incredibly destructive.”
It’s also going to be your warning beacon of whether you’re approaching the darkness of the Other World, Silent Hill‘s rendition of a living Hell. In Downpour, Gomez explained that the growing presence of water is an indication of how close (or far away) you are to the Other World’s border. “We used rain and water as the central theme to build our Other World,” Gomez explained. “So as you explore Silent Hill and you explore our dark environments, you’re gonna find that it may start off as something really simple; it might just be water dripping from a leaky pipe, it might be something like a leaky toilet, but as the water starts entering the environment, and the water level starts getting stronger, you basically start to see the encroachment of the Other World.”
And what about segments that aren’t involved with the Other World? Gomez explains that the setting of Downpour will be taking place in a completely different part of town, in which players have never seen before. It’s going to be a pretty big section, and will have your typical horror movie fare of locale — abandoned classrooms, darkened movie theaters, the stuff that will put players on edge. How else will you make the game feel new if you keep repeating the same places from previous titles? “In Silent Hill Downpour, you’re going to get the opportunity to explore a previously unseen corner of the town,” said Gomez. “It’s going to be an area five-times larger, roughly, than any other scene or area you’ve seen in a previous Silent Hill game.”
Some of us would hope to find abandoned theme parks and halls of mirrors, along with creepy clowns, but Gomez said the developing team at Vatra Games explored places made famous through other media. They’re really aiming to scare the holy s*** out of us. “We looked at things like horror movies, horror fiction, comic books, things like that, and we identified some of the places that tend to come up in the genre quite a bit,” said Gomez. “Places like deserted subway stations, or deserted classrooms at night. I mean, some of your worst childhood memories probably took place in a classroom. So you’ll start to see environments like that creeping into this Silent Hill. Areas like movie theaters, deserted bathrooms, places like that we managed to work into all of our levels.”
This game might not work out too well for hydrophobic players, as leaving buildings won’t bring any relief either. Gomez went on to explain that during segments in which the player will be outside of buildings and in the streets of Silent Hill, you’re still going to see lots of water through passing storm clouds, rain, and that fog that all Silent Hill junkies know and love. “When you’re walking around outside in the exterior sections of the town, which tends to be a more free-roaming experience around a large Silent Hill town area, the weather changes dynamically,” said Gomez. “So as the storm clouds start to gather and that ubiquitous fog that we all know from Silent Hill is getting thicker, the rain starts to fall, and maybe it’s just a light drizzle at first, but then it starts getting heavier and heavier.
“Basically the worse the weather gets and the more water starts falling, the more danger Murphy finds himself in. So as Murphy’s own mental state starts to deteriorate, the weather starts to reflect his own mental state deteriorating, and thus Murphy’s inner demons start manifesting in a physical form. So basically when you’re walking around Silent Hill and it starts to rain, you better find some shelter.”
There’s going to be plenty of shelter too, as Gomez explained Downpour will be further exploring into the past of the sleepy town as being a resort destination. Kitchy little umbrellas on a boardwalk over calm waters? Sure, why not. “…if you know the background of the town, if you’re a normal person and you don’t have a lot of guilt or sins weighing on your conscience and you go to Silent Hill, you’ll find that it’s a really charming little New England lakeside town,” said Gomez. “But if you go there and you’ve got a lot of guilt and sin pressing on you, it’s quite a different place. We wanted to see what happens when you take those charming little lakeside town features and put it through the Other World and see what happens when you get the dark version of the town. So in this game, you’re going to be able to explore places like the boardwalk along the lakeside, and one of the major tourist attractions previously unseen is called ‘Devil’s Pit.’”
We’ve already mentioned that hydrophobic gamers will have problems with this game, but claustrophobics might have issues too. Gomez explained that new areas of Silent Hill will feature underground caves, and also abandoned mines to explore the history of Silent Hill as a mining town. “‘Devil’s Pit’ is a massive underground cave system with a huge drop-off, that Murphy gets to explore in quite a lot of detail, and he also gets to get into the coal mining history of Silent Hill, so you have a little bit of the dark-creepy mines as well to explore,” he said. Downpour is going to have a little bit of everything for every gamer out there, and Gomez is hoping we’ll be inspired by something as we navigate the dark and twisted streets of Silent Hill.
And let’s not forget that in the end, this is a game. With previous Silent Hill games, we had the opportunity to view multiple endings, and Downpour won’t be any different. Choices will again play out how your game will end, and we might even see aliens abduct Murphy this time too. It’s not confirmed, but Gomez hints that there might be a little lolz to be had at the expense of diligent players. “Like all great Silent Hill games, of course Silent Hill: Downpour is going to feature multiple endings,” Gomez said. “Murphy is a guy that has done some bad things in his life, and he knows what he’s done that sent him to prison, and he knows what it is that sent him to Silent Hill.
“As the player, it’s going to be your job to figure out what it is that’s troubling Murphy and why is he going through this extreme form of psychotherapy that we call Silent Hill. Depending on certain key moral decisions that you help Murphy make throughout the game, it’s going to determine which ending you get. I won’t tell you how many endings there are, but there are more than just a few of them, and depending on the actions that you have Murphy take in the game, will determine which ending you get to see. So at the end you might get a happy ending where we realize that Murphy’s just a poor troubled anti-hero that’s made a few mistakes, or you might learn that there’s an even darker side to Murphy and didn’t even see coming. And of course for completionist fans out there, there might even be a tongue-in-cheek joke ending hidden in there somewhere if you’re really diligent and look for it.”
While initial impressions of Silent Hill: Downpour have been less than stellar, Vatra Games and Konami are confident that this 8th installment of the long-standing horror franchise will become a title worthy of its predecessors. Initially slated to be released at the end of this month, recent news now place the release date as March 31st, 2012.
If we have to wait longer for perfection, in Downpour‘s case we’ll take it.
Watch the full interview with Brian Gomez and Konami here.
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