I've had an idea for a Silent Hill game bouncing around in my head for a while. I know it will never get made, but it's fun to think about. I thought I would share it, see if anyone had any suggestions or comments.
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Introduction: The player starts in a nice, expensive-looking home that's obviously not been taken care of. Modern house, very open central area, lots of glass, but grungy and strewn with litter. You can see a very 'away from civilization' area through the windows, like some rich person's mountain retreat.
You start by waking up. Maybe a short dream sequence beforehand, maybe not. Perhaps the opening menus are set up like a dream sequence? In any case, you wake up in a bedroom much like the rest of the house ? nice, obviously expensive, but there?s litter everywhere and the walls and windows are dirty. You?re sleeping in one side of a double bed, you see as you get up. You get a moment to orient yourself before you hear a meowing from the door.
There?s a cat in the hallway, orange-furred, waiting for you to come out. He looks more at home here than you, stalking comfortably through the rubbish. He'll lead you downstairs so that you can feed him, introducing you to the rest of the house. The widescreen TV in the main area is untouched, but the screen is dark and the chair in front of it is strangely alone ? all the furniture around it is a good distance away. You pass by the front door, picking up the mail. There?s a letter from your dead wife, pleading for you to come to Silent Hill to meet her. From the look of the letter, it's not the first. You toss it onto a pile of similar letters on the kitchen table, along with the one from a 'J. Sunderland' telling you to ignore your wife's missives.
You can wander around here for a bit, but eventually you?ll be led outside. You unlock several locks, including a few you obviously installed yourself, and walk outside to your car. It's similar to your house ? expensive and flashy, but run-down and neglected. A similar car sits next to it, dusty and obviously unused for a long time. You need some groceries, and that means heading 'into town' according to your character-player communication (Internal monologue? Talking to the cat?). It?s evening, and you?re alone on the short drive to a gas station. You pick up a few staples at the convenience store and head outside, but when you walk out the few cars in the parking lot are gone. The lights in the surrounding shops are turned out, and there?s a bit of fog in the air that wasn't there when you went inside. You can look back at the convenience store, but it's in the same shape ? the door is locked, the lights are out, and the guy behind the counter is gone.
The fog gets thicker as you wind your way back up to your house. Suddenly a figure looms out of the mist. This should be reminiscent of Silent Hill 1, but you pass right through the girl (seventeen to eighteen, long black hair, slender) ? She slides through your car like it isn?t there, just between the seats. Her head turns to watch you as it slips past, and your view follows her until your head snaps back to the road. She's gone. But there's a sign ahead, just after the turnoff to your house ? 'Welcome to Silent Hill'.
That's new.
And so is the chasm blocking the road back down the mountain.
Story: This game uses the 'Silent Hill as Purgatory' template from Silent Hill 2, which I consider to be the strongest concept. Over the course of the story, you'll find that the cult's activities originally empowered the town. Once it was 'awakened', though, it started calling to people with buried sins and drawing them in to atone. Its inception as punishment created a pattern that the town now endlessly creates in the minds it preys on. And, as it draws in and consumes more spirits, it?s grown strong enough to reach out in a more direct way. Silent Hill in this game will be portrayed as a blight, gradually increasing in influence, and you won?t really find a way to stop it. This is a very Lovecraftian theme, and it sets up some interesting ideas for future stories. You will gain something from defeating it, though, just like James. The town forces you to confront your sins and either overcome them or perish. If you can beat down your inner demons, you?ll be stronger for it when you leave.
The main character is something of an enigma at the beginning, aside from the detail about his wife being dead. Over the course of the game, we find that his wife is trapped somewhere and can only appear in televisions. She'll haunt him throughout the story ? she lost her own battle, and she only gets glimpses of the main character to torment her.
Three girls serve as the main antagonists. A blonde child in white, maybe five or six, controls twisted toys and dolls. A fire-headed girl in red, around twelve, governs animals. Spiders, dogs, maybe a bear?whatever can be made seriously terrifying in context. An older girl, the late teenager you saw at the beginning with black hair and clothing, governs mirrors and shadows. She'll appear in mirrors occasionally, and if you don?t break them pretty quickly she'll come out after you.
As you progress through the town, you?ll learn more about the main character. His daughter died in a car crash ? his wife was driving. Maybe that's the guilt she had to confront, but what was yours? We pick up that he has issues with knives, though. That will be discussed in 'Mechanics'.
When you reach the hospital, the final area, you?ll start to be stalked by The Doctor. This is a twisted, hulking beast that follows you like Pyramid Head. He's hinted to be linked to your daughter's death. The nurses will reappear in this area, but they're different. Not oversexualized like in Silent Hill 2, but laughing. Their bound heads are split nearly in half, lolling open to shriek in hideous laughter that echoes through the halls. Finally you reach an operating room covered in blood and flashback to the night of the accident.
She was wheeled into the hospital, nearly dead, with a huge chunk of metal in her chest. It?s the girl in red. Her hair is black, and her clothing was originally white, but it?s been stained almost entirely by her blood. The main character drops what he was doing to follow her, talking quickly with the other doctors (we can see now that he's wearing hospital whites) and quickly realizing that his daughter needs immediate surgery to remove the metal from her chest. The main character refuses to let anyone else handle it.
So he scrubs and prepares, and the flashes of surgery we see go well? until he?s making one of the final incisions, and slips. Blood sprays out, and begins to spurt with her heartbeat ? he obviously nicked something vital, because everyone in the room is moving in a panic again. The main character freezes, and after a few moments the girl flatlines. The final boss is The Doctor, now obviously a warped version of yourself. The ending will depend on your choices during the game.
When you defeat the boss of each area, a twisted form of each girl related to their minion type, you have the choice to kill the girl with a knife or send the cat up to them. The cat will nuzzle up to the girl and she will fade away, or the knife will finish her for good. Each choice gets you a different item. The girl in white gives you a porcelain doll ? clean and undamaged if you absolved her, or broken and dirty if you punished her. The girl in red gives you a birdcage ? a bird sits in it after absolution, but punishment leaves an empty, bloodstained cage instead. The girl in black gives you a hand mirror - perfect and shining or burnt and cracked.
Each of these items has a place back at your home. There's a room upstairs with a child's mirrored desk, a toy chest, and a dresser with some sort of animal-related items (food for the bird?). In the corner is a cat bed, and when you enter the cat will curl up in it until you leave the room. You can lay the doll on the toy chest, the birdcage on the dresser, and the mirror on the desk. Your house will be a little brighter and cleaner or darker and drearier depending on which totems you put in the room.
The ending will, obviously, be the main character either escaping the town or being trapped permanently, with a few variations of degree.
Mechanics: There are a couple of major changes to the mechanics that will seem blasphemous at first. Number one, I think this game would work better in first-person. Not to make it a shooter ? quite the opposite. Having played a few first-person suspense games (Penumbra is a good example), I think a first-person perspective can really enhance the player's connection with their character. Silent Hill has always been third-person, and I agree with that for the time period, but now graphics have evolved to the point where a good first-person treatment is feasible.
One problem that can be addressed is communication with the player. This game would have absolutely no HUD or in-game menus, so it will rely on things like camera movement, shaders, sound design, and modifications to the character model to communicate damage, etc. to the player. That level of communication was simply not possible with the technology available to the developers of the early Silent Hill titles, but it can be done now. For example, the inventory would be handled much like in Alone in the Dark (details later), with the camera looking down at the character?s pockets. Making the inventory visible in this way would have been non-feasible for the graphics of Silent Hill 1 or 2, I suspect.
Another is interaction. The control scheme for this game would be simple. On an Xbox controller, the main controls would be:
- Right Trigger uses right hand item
- Right Bumper uses right hand item's alternate use (reload gun, block with melee weapon, etc.)
- Left Trigger/Left Bumper the same, with the left hand item
- Pressing A uses object (Open door, climb ledge, etc.)
- Holding A picks up object (Put in hand if hand is open, put in pocket otherwise)
- Pressing Y looks down at pockets
- Pressing B bashes with most appropriate in-hand item
Using smooth, context-sensitive system like the press/hold A from a first-person perspective would be immersion-breakingly stupid looking with Silent Hill 1 or 2 graphics. But now we have the technology to make it look good.
One advantage of a first-person perspective is that 'behind you' becomes a lot bigger. It's very intimidating to walk into a large area and only be able to see a chunk of it. The designers would have to be very careful not to betray the player by making cheap enemy spawns and the like, but when handled well the increased vulnerability of a first-person view is very powerful. Again, see Penumbra.
Another advantage is that the player invests more in the character. It feels more like 'me' and less like 'some guy I'm controlling' in a well-handled first-person, and that's very valuable for a suspense game.
The other major change is the cat. I was playing around with the idea that the orange cat would follow you. He would give you hints about significant elements of the environment, like in the present Silent Hill games when your character's head looks at something. He would also react to monsters, giving you a directional hint in addition to the radio static. The cat would be played as a very alien agent. He would never really act like your pet, and he would always seem more comfortable in the town than you. He would always seem connected to the town and part of it. His reflections and shadows would be different in different areas ? fluffy and white in the young girl's domain, black and sleek in the older girl's domain. He?s your daughter's cat, and he?s very connected to her spirit.
The last really major change is the weapons. Ammo and guns would be extremely rare. Knives would be freakishly powerful - as in, you swing once and bisect an enemy as they scream horribly. However, the main character would be hesitant to pick them up and troubled while he held them. If you tell him to pick up a knife, your hand will tentatively reach out, tremblingly, like you're afraid of it. As you hold a knife, you hear whispers that gradually get louder. Your vision will begin to pulse dark around the edges after a few seconds, and the pulses get more pronounced over time. If you hold it for too long, you?ll start to hear distant screams and strange hallucinations will begin to appear. This is a reflection of the main character's issue with knives, and it will be reflected in the enemies as well. They will be horribly cut and slashed, in the same manner that many of the enemies in Silent Hill 2 were sexualized. The main character is troubled by the wound he inflicted on his daughter, and his Purgatory will reflect that.
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Ideas? Opinions? Questions?
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Introduction: The player starts in a nice, expensive-looking home that's obviously not been taken care of. Modern house, very open central area, lots of glass, but grungy and strewn with litter. You can see a very 'away from civilization' area through the windows, like some rich person's mountain retreat.
You start by waking up. Maybe a short dream sequence beforehand, maybe not. Perhaps the opening menus are set up like a dream sequence? In any case, you wake up in a bedroom much like the rest of the house ? nice, obviously expensive, but there?s litter everywhere and the walls and windows are dirty. You?re sleeping in one side of a double bed, you see as you get up. You get a moment to orient yourself before you hear a meowing from the door.
There?s a cat in the hallway, orange-furred, waiting for you to come out. He looks more at home here than you, stalking comfortably through the rubbish. He'll lead you downstairs so that you can feed him, introducing you to the rest of the house. The widescreen TV in the main area is untouched, but the screen is dark and the chair in front of it is strangely alone ? all the furniture around it is a good distance away. You pass by the front door, picking up the mail. There?s a letter from your dead wife, pleading for you to come to Silent Hill to meet her. From the look of the letter, it's not the first. You toss it onto a pile of similar letters on the kitchen table, along with the one from a 'J. Sunderland' telling you to ignore your wife's missives.
You can wander around here for a bit, but eventually you?ll be led outside. You unlock several locks, including a few you obviously installed yourself, and walk outside to your car. It's similar to your house ? expensive and flashy, but run-down and neglected. A similar car sits next to it, dusty and obviously unused for a long time. You need some groceries, and that means heading 'into town' according to your character-player communication (Internal monologue? Talking to the cat?). It?s evening, and you?re alone on the short drive to a gas station. You pick up a few staples at the convenience store and head outside, but when you walk out the few cars in the parking lot are gone. The lights in the surrounding shops are turned out, and there?s a bit of fog in the air that wasn't there when you went inside. You can look back at the convenience store, but it's in the same shape ? the door is locked, the lights are out, and the guy behind the counter is gone.
The fog gets thicker as you wind your way back up to your house. Suddenly a figure looms out of the mist. This should be reminiscent of Silent Hill 1, but you pass right through the girl (seventeen to eighteen, long black hair, slender) ? She slides through your car like it isn?t there, just between the seats. Her head turns to watch you as it slips past, and your view follows her until your head snaps back to the road. She's gone. But there's a sign ahead, just after the turnoff to your house ? 'Welcome to Silent Hill'.
That's new.
And so is the chasm blocking the road back down the mountain.
Story: This game uses the 'Silent Hill as Purgatory' template from Silent Hill 2, which I consider to be the strongest concept. Over the course of the story, you'll find that the cult's activities originally empowered the town. Once it was 'awakened', though, it started calling to people with buried sins and drawing them in to atone. Its inception as punishment created a pattern that the town now endlessly creates in the minds it preys on. And, as it draws in and consumes more spirits, it?s grown strong enough to reach out in a more direct way. Silent Hill in this game will be portrayed as a blight, gradually increasing in influence, and you won?t really find a way to stop it. This is a very Lovecraftian theme, and it sets up some interesting ideas for future stories. You will gain something from defeating it, though, just like James. The town forces you to confront your sins and either overcome them or perish. If you can beat down your inner demons, you?ll be stronger for it when you leave.
The main character is something of an enigma at the beginning, aside from the detail about his wife being dead. Over the course of the game, we find that his wife is trapped somewhere and can only appear in televisions. She'll haunt him throughout the story ? she lost her own battle, and she only gets glimpses of the main character to torment her.
Three girls serve as the main antagonists. A blonde child in white, maybe five or six, controls twisted toys and dolls. A fire-headed girl in red, around twelve, governs animals. Spiders, dogs, maybe a bear?whatever can be made seriously terrifying in context. An older girl, the late teenager you saw at the beginning with black hair and clothing, governs mirrors and shadows. She'll appear in mirrors occasionally, and if you don?t break them pretty quickly she'll come out after you.
As you progress through the town, you?ll learn more about the main character. His daughter died in a car crash ? his wife was driving. Maybe that's the guilt she had to confront, but what was yours? We pick up that he has issues with knives, though. That will be discussed in 'Mechanics'.
When you reach the hospital, the final area, you?ll start to be stalked by The Doctor. This is a twisted, hulking beast that follows you like Pyramid Head. He's hinted to be linked to your daughter's death. The nurses will reappear in this area, but they're different. Not oversexualized like in Silent Hill 2, but laughing. Their bound heads are split nearly in half, lolling open to shriek in hideous laughter that echoes through the halls. Finally you reach an operating room covered in blood and flashback to the night of the accident.
She was wheeled into the hospital, nearly dead, with a huge chunk of metal in her chest. It?s the girl in red. Her hair is black, and her clothing was originally white, but it?s been stained almost entirely by her blood. The main character drops what he was doing to follow her, talking quickly with the other doctors (we can see now that he's wearing hospital whites) and quickly realizing that his daughter needs immediate surgery to remove the metal from her chest. The main character refuses to let anyone else handle it.
So he scrubs and prepares, and the flashes of surgery we see go well? until he?s making one of the final incisions, and slips. Blood sprays out, and begins to spurt with her heartbeat ? he obviously nicked something vital, because everyone in the room is moving in a panic again. The main character freezes, and after a few moments the girl flatlines. The final boss is The Doctor, now obviously a warped version of yourself. The ending will depend on your choices during the game.
When you defeat the boss of each area, a twisted form of each girl related to their minion type, you have the choice to kill the girl with a knife or send the cat up to them. The cat will nuzzle up to the girl and she will fade away, or the knife will finish her for good. Each choice gets you a different item. The girl in white gives you a porcelain doll ? clean and undamaged if you absolved her, or broken and dirty if you punished her. The girl in red gives you a birdcage ? a bird sits in it after absolution, but punishment leaves an empty, bloodstained cage instead. The girl in black gives you a hand mirror - perfect and shining or burnt and cracked.
Each of these items has a place back at your home. There's a room upstairs with a child's mirrored desk, a toy chest, and a dresser with some sort of animal-related items (food for the bird?). In the corner is a cat bed, and when you enter the cat will curl up in it until you leave the room. You can lay the doll on the toy chest, the birdcage on the dresser, and the mirror on the desk. Your house will be a little brighter and cleaner or darker and drearier depending on which totems you put in the room.
The ending will, obviously, be the main character either escaping the town or being trapped permanently, with a few variations of degree.
Mechanics: There are a couple of major changes to the mechanics that will seem blasphemous at first. Number one, I think this game would work better in first-person. Not to make it a shooter ? quite the opposite. Having played a few first-person suspense games (Penumbra is a good example), I think a first-person perspective can really enhance the player's connection with their character. Silent Hill has always been third-person, and I agree with that for the time period, but now graphics have evolved to the point where a good first-person treatment is feasible.
One problem that can be addressed is communication with the player. This game would have absolutely no HUD or in-game menus, so it will rely on things like camera movement, shaders, sound design, and modifications to the character model to communicate damage, etc. to the player. That level of communication was simply not possible with the technology available to the developers of the early Silent Hill titles, but it can be done now. For example, the inventory would be handled much like in Alone in the Dark (details later), with the camera looking down at the character?s pockets. Making the inventory visible in this way would have been non-feasible for the graphics of Silent Hill 1 or 2, I suspect.
Another is interaction. The control scheme for this game would be simple. On an Xbox controller, the main controls would be:
- Right Trigger uses right hand item
- Right Bumper uses right hand item's alternate use (reload gun, block with melee weapon, etc.)
- Left Trigger/Left Bumper the same, with the left hand item
- Pressing A uses object (Open door, climb ledge, etc.)
- Holding A picks up object (Put in hand if hand is open, put in pocket otherwise)
- Pressing Y looks down at pockets
- Pressing B bashes with most appropriate in-hand item
Using smooth, context-sensitive system like the press/hold A from a first-person perspective would be immersion-breakingly stupid looking with Silent Hill 1 or 2 graphics. But now we have the technology to make it look good.
One advantage of a first-person perspective is that 'behind you' becomes a lot bigger. It's very intimidating to walk into a large area and only be able to see a chunk of it. The designers would have to be very careful not to betray the player by making cheap enemy spawns and the like, but when handled well the increased vulnerability of a first-person view is very powerful. Again, see Penumbra.
Another advantage is that the player invests more in the character. It feels more like 'me' and less like 'some guy I'm controlling' in a well-handled first-person, and that's very valuable for a suspense game.
The other major change is the cat. I was playing around with the idea that the orange cat would follow you. He would give you hints about significant elements of the environment, like in the present Silent Hill games when your character's head looks at something. He would also react to monsters, giving you a directional hint in addition to the radio static. The cat would be played as a very alien agent. He would never really act like your pet, and he would always seem more comfortable in the town than you. He would always seem connected to the town and part of it. His reflections and shadows would be different in different areas ? fluffy and white in the young girl's domain, black and sleek in the older girl's domain. He?s your daughter's cat, and he?s very connected to her spirit.
The last really major change is the weapons. Ammo and guns would be extremely rare. Knives would be freakishly powerful - as in, you swing once and bisect an enemy as they scream horribly. However, the main character would be hesitant to pick them up and troubled while he held them. If you tell him to pick up a knife, your hand will tentatively reach out, tremblingly, like you're afraid of it. As you hold a knife, you hear whispers that gradually get louder. Your vision will begin to pulse dark around the edges after a few seconds, and the pulses get more pronounced over time. If you hold it for too long, you?ll start to hear distant screams and strange hallucinations will begin to appear. This is a reflection of the main character's issue with knives, and it will be reflected in the enemies as well. They will be horribly cut and slashed, in the same manner that many of the enemies in Silent Hill 2 were sexualized. The main character is troubled by the wound he inflicted on his daughter, and his Purgatory will reflect that.
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Ideas? Opinions? Questions?
