Today’s forecast for the town of Silent Hill: chilling, with a chance of boredom.
“Silent Hill: Downpour,” the eighth game in the venerable horror series, is like a desert prone to flash floods. Mostly barren, it’s punctuated randomly — and unexpectedly — with startling deluges of brilliance.
“Downpour” has you playing as Ted Danson, I mean, Murphy Pendleton, a convicted car thief whose prison bus has crashed outside a certain foggy Northeast hamlet.
What unfolds is a poor man’s “Alan Wake” (which itself borrowed a lot from the “Silent Hill” series), an exploration of a piney-woods town where the inhabitants are scarce and the laws of physics can no longer be taken for granted.
| ‘Silent Hill: Downpour’ |
| » Systems: Xbox 360, PS3 » Price: $59.99 |
| » Rating: 3 out of 5 stars |
Like all “Silent Hill” games, “Downpour” plunges you from time to time into a place called Otherworld, an alternate version of the normal game environment. Before your eyes, the walls of the room you’re in will disintegrate, and the ceiling will unfold, opening into a huge prison that has everything to do with your past and nothing to do with the small diner you thought you were in.
Like “Alan Wake,” “Downpour” recognizes the horror in being chased. Most of your time in the Otherworld is spent being pursued by some malevolent force, as the layout of the building changes on the fly — hallways stretch out, staircases contract, cages drop, floors give way — and you get glimpses of familiar but unrelated images, like Dorothy standing at her bedroom window during the twister. Was that your prison bus you just ran by? Otherworld stands as a lucid representation of the illogic of dreams, straddling the line of consistency and unpredictability where fear resides.
Between such gushes, “Downpour” slows into a drip-drip-drip — the kind that keeps you up at night not out of fright, but annoyance.
Outside Otherworld, the game is a slog. Making it out of a house you had somehow gotten locked in, your character utters, “Finally.” I couldn’t have agreed more. After so long leafing through drawers and utility closets for keys, padlock combinations, and just the right wire to repair an elevator, I felt more like a maintenance man than an escaped convict.
The bug-ridden combat is no better. Let’s see, I could take on this pack of maniacs in hand-to-hand combat, or I could stand behind this Dumpster, pelting them with bottles. It’s like “Blues Brothers: The Game,” except there’s no chicken wire.
The bulk of “Downpour,” then, is waiting for the Otherworld scenes. With this promise of exhilaration, and a menacing soundtrack by “Dexter” composer Daniel Licht, these waits are worth it. Barely.
