The dismal coronas of 40-watt fixtures pass overhead before melting into the black grime of tiled walls. Disoriented and tethered to a rusted gurney by bands of buckled leather, you roll past the cells of screaming patients before being deposited in an abandoned operating room. You tear at the binds with ferocious desperation, freeing yourself to the hallways. On the other side, the ghostly figure of Joshua, your little brother, leads you further into a realm of darkness, disfigured shapes, and faceless nurses moving with the grace of arthritic puppets.

Anything sound familiar?

The first hour of Homecoming bears striking resemblances to that of Silent Hill 3, the film Jacob’s Ladder, and it rips two scenes directly from the Silent Hill film. Even the premise, in which military veteran Alex Shepherd scrounges through a living nightmare in search of his brother, recalls those of earlier games. Whether the influences are positive or negative depends upon which side of the fence you stand. On one side, you are almost guaranteed a classic, tried-and-true Silent Hill experience. On the other, the appeal of the series is in pushing yourself to endure a world of suicidal insanity unlike anything seen before. After five versions, those scalpel-toting nurses don’t inspire the dread that they once did.

Much of the game takes place in the unnerving stillness of Shepherd’s Glen rather than the neighboring Silent Hill. Shepherd’s Glen has a rich history of its own that comes alive for those willing to inspect the paintings on the walls and the texts scattered about, but both towns were founded upon questionable intentions of faith and reaped the tragic rewards of those beliefs. A choking fog rummages through the cracks of rotting floorboards, contortions of flesh roam the corridors of neglected homes, and the Otherworld lurks beneath the fragile surface of reality. There is no doubt that Double Helix captured the essence of the series in disconcertingly fine fashion, but possibly too well for its own good.

Imagine the L.A. skyline during rush hour, condensed into the perimeter of a city block, and you have a good idea of how thick the trademark fog has become. The visibility of previous games has been cut in half, to the point where you can stand in the middle of a street and not see the sidewalk. I was so disoriented that pulling out the map every 20 seconds or so became second nature, and often, only to see which direction I was facing. I am the person that friends turn to when they get lost in in-game mazes, so the fact that I got turned around in alleyways is ridiculous.