When I first saw Silent Hill: Origins for the PSP, I had serious doubts about whether it was really up to the task of carrying on the franchise’s tradition of scaring the holy bejeesus out of you. The Silent Hill series delivers scares by creating an atmosphere of true dread and fear, relying on subtle sound cues and gruesome visuals to ramp up your tension until you feel like you can’t bear any more. Would Silent Hill, I wondered, still be scary if you could see your lap around the edges of the screen? Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: Yes, now please excuse me while I turn on every light in the house.
As its name implies, Silent Hill: Origins takes place before the original Silent Hill. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recognize many of the characters and events of Origins, as they cover much of the same ground. You play as Travis Grady, a trucker who takes a shortcut around Silent Hill at exactly the wrong time. Travis rescues young Alessa Gillespie from a burning building only to discover that her mom, Dahlia, would’ve been quite happy to let the girl die in the blaze. Rather than doing the smart thing and heading for the hills with all due speed, Travis decides to stick around and find out what’s going on. Cue the twitching, faceless nurses, the blood-smeared walls and that really big guy with a knife the size of a Buick.
Despite being on the small screen of the PSP, Origins comes through with the unsettling imagery and nerve-rattling audio that made its predecessors a must for every horror fan. Konami didn’t skimp to squeeze the game onto the PSP, this is a true Silent Hill title, from the staticy radio to the fast-moving blobs of flesh roaming the streets. Are they trying to eat me? Do they even have mouths?
Origins also has the franchise’s well-constructed puzzles and mysteries. As you travel through the buildings and streets of town, you’ll find scraps of messages, clues, and items that will not only help you unlock doors and proceed forward, but will also begin to fill in some of Silent Hill’s back story. Previous entries in the Silent Hill series had you flipping between the nightmarish otherworld and the only slightly less nightmarish real world, but when and where you traveled was largely out of your control. Origins lets you move between realms at your discretion by touching mirrors, seeing elements of one environment quite literally reflected—usually in some twisted manner—in the other. This can make for some intriguing puzzle solving situations, as you switch worlds to circumvent obstacles like locked doors, or pick up items on one side to use in the other. It works very well and makes the relatively small environments feel larger than they are.
Unfortunately, Origins stays true to Silent Hill’s uncooperative camera and sloppy combat, too. A quick push of the left shoulder button centers the camera behind you, and that’s good enough for most situations, but in close-quarters combat it’s almost impossible to consistently maintain a helpful point of view. You’ll frequently wind up fighting something that’s just around a corner, or discover that you’re being attacked by a monster you didn’t even know was there.
Origins does try something new with its combat, by letting you pick up ordinary objects like TVs and bottles to use as weapons. They’re plentiful and do a lot of damage, but they’re one use only and require you to get fairly up close and personal with whatever it is you’re trying to hurt. It’s interesting in theory, but unfortunately, the loose controls make it impractical to use. More often than not, you’ll only realize that you’re too far from your target after you’ve missed and they’ve gotten an attack of opportunity.
Fighting with more traditional weapons like guns, knives, and clubs is somewhat easier, but still frustrating due to aiming difficulties and unresponsive controls. The game rarely throws too much at you at once, and you’re usually just a quick sprint away from evading your attackers, but running away like a chicken just isn’t that much fun.
