The Pros and Cons of Silent Hill: Downpour
Posted: Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:34 am
I originally wrote this little screed as a response to a post about Silent Hill: Downpour that I saw on the Silent Hill subreddit, but I figured that I would repost it here to get some more discussion going about the game. Silent Hill: Downpour is a game that I have mixed feelings about. I replayed it with multiple playthroughs about 2 years or so ago now, and that revisiting brought some of its pros and cons into sharper focus for me. I really like the world it builds in terms of expanding the town and introducing us to some interesting new characters. I think that the revelation of Murphy being Anne's "Bogeyman" and the turns that the story took in terms of intertwining the personal traumas of both of those characters makes the central narrative of the game feel fairly well-realized. Mechanically, the game is pretty enjoyable, as well, with the combat feeling much better once you get a feel for the ebb and flow of needing to block and bait out your enemies' attack (it feels kind of Dark Souls-esque, in that regard). The creation of a more sprawling world for the town and the implementation of small side-stories in the form of optional side quests was also a very welcome, engaging touch. However, I feel that the game is betrayed by a handful of key issues: bad side characters, mostly awful monster designs, and a few poorly-written endings.
When thinking of characters, a character doesn't need to have a ton of focus to feel well-integrated into the plot. For example, John Sater fit well into the narrative because, although his source of guilt differed, his actions and fate ultimately act as a reflection of the possible outcomes that could follow from the paths that Anne and Murphy are choosing to follow because of their own personal grief. However, other characters like Bobby Ricks and Howard Blackwood feel very inconsistent because almost nothing is revealed about their backstories within the game itself, and what can be learned about them from outside material (e.g., Silent Hill: Book of Memories, Silent Hill: Downpour - Anne's Story) reveals that the unusual purgatories in which they have been placed deviate significantly from the logic of how we have previously known the town to operate, with their "punishments" making the town feel less like an ambiguous supernatural force and more like a conscious vindictive arbiter. If the inclusion of characters like these was necessary to the plot of the game, more time with them or more DLC content exploring them would have been preferable, and a similar treatment would have even helped to better flesh-out the more well-realized characters like Anne, as well (to me, the fact that we never got an Anne's Story DLC was almost criminal with how well-told that story was and how much it fleshed out many of the side characters).
The quality of the monster design in this game (or lack thereof) mostly speaks for itself, with a few exceptions. The Bogeyman and the Doll were decent, being more or less fresh takes on classic Silent Hill monsters with interesting visual designs and gameplay mechanics tied to them. The Wheelman was excellent, not only being a great design aesthetically but also acting as a perfect reflection of the narrative revelation of what happened to Frank Coleridge and how his fate ties into the stories of both Anne and Murphy. The rest are forgettable at best and outright lazy at worst. The Weeping Bat feels like a very generic movie monster that has no significance psychologically to any of the characters personal struggles, and mostly lacks distinctive features, with a design that doesn't even much reflect their namesake in any way. The Screamers, Prisoner Minions, and Prisoner Juggernauts are incredibly generic, with very little room for symbolism left to the imagination, with all seeming like you could have easily plucked them from budget horror films made in the early 2000s, and none of them being mechanically or visually interesting to encounter or to fight. The Tormented Souls and Wall Corpses are generic Silent Hill designs, also lacking much narrative or symbolic relevance outside of reflecting surface levels themes of confinement; the Void is a mechanical recycling of the scripted Raw Shock encounters from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and the "Monocle Man" is a plot-irrelevant implementation of a leftover asset from early development (this was more or less confirmed by the developers, if I remember, though feel free to correct me).
Finally, in terms of the endings, only 3 out of the possible 6 really feel consistent with the rest of the story. The Forgiveness and Truth & Justice endings are written to be consistent with the stories that are told for Anne and Murphy, with the former stemming from Anne's decision to overcome her and move past her grief in a healthy way once she has learned the truth and the latter stemming from Anne's alternative decision to continue down a self-destructive path of vengeance (an outcome which is treated as canon by Silent Hill: Downpour - Anne's Story and which is consistent with the lengths she is willing to go to get revenge for her father, as portrayed in that narrative). The Reversal ending - achieved by allowing Anne to kill Murphy in the final battle - is arguably also consistent with the stories of Anne and Murphy, as it shows a sort of fate that would be fitting for Anne had she been successful in achieving her unjustified vengeance against Murphy without ever learning the real truth about what happened to her father. The other endings require you to ignore entire sections and/or subplots within the game or to treat them as if they never happened, and are only possible if many of the events leading up to the game and during the games events are either changed or never happened. The Full Circle ending reveals that Murphy actually did kill Frank Coleridge, which is depicted as a source of immediate regret and trauma for Murphy in the ending itself but which never centers or features meaningfully in any of Murphy's struggles during the game, and which completely removes the narrative drama, irony, and tension underlying Murphy's innocence in the death of Anne's father. However, the Execution ending is a much worse offender, revealing Murphy to be the killer of both Frank Coleridge and his own son, which requires that all of the events related to Patrick Napier never happened. In previous Silent Hill games, the endings may have been highly divergent (particularly the the joke endings), but at least in those games, you could see the alternative endings as reasonable outcomes of the character's alternative decisions and mindsets at different key junctures. They felt consistent with what had been established for the characters, and didn't require that you throw out consideration of most of the game's events to justify them.
I imagine that this piece feels a bit more written on the "con" side of things, but as I said before, there were certainly many aspects of the game that I enjoyed, and I feel that it was and still is a title worth revisiting, warts and all. But what do all of you think? I would be interested to know what stood out to each of you as things that the game did especially well or especially poorly, as well as how each of you feel about the game overall.
When thinking of characters, a character doesn't need to have a ton of focus to feel well-integrated into the plot. For example, John Sater fit well into the narrative because, although his source of guilt differed, his actions and fate ultimately act as a reflection of the possible outcomes that could follow from the paths that Anne and Murphy are choosing to follow because of their own personal grief. However, other characters like Bobby Ricks and Howard Blackwood feel very inconsistent because almost nothing is revealed about their backstories within the game itself, and what can be learned about them from outside material (e.g., Silent Hill: Book of Memories, Silent Hill: Downpour - Anne's Story) reveals that the unusual purgatories in which they have been placed deviate significantly from the logic of how we have previously known the town to operate, with their "punishments" making the town feel less like an ambiguous supernatural force and more like a conscious vindictive arbiter. If the inclusion of characters like these was necessary to the plot of the game, more time with them or more DLC content exploring them would have been preferable, and a similar treatment would have even helped to better flesh-out the more well-realized characters like Anne, as well (to me, the fact that we never got an Anne's Story DLC was almost criminal with how well-told that story was and how much it fleshed out many of the side characters).
The quality of the monster design in this game (or lack thereof) mostly speaks for itself, with a few exceptions. The Bogeyman and the Doll were decent, being more or less fresh takes on classic Silent Hill monsters with interesting visual designs and gameplay mechanics tied to them. The Wheelman was excellent, not only being a great design aesthetically but also acting as a perfect reflection of the narrative revelation of what happened to Frank Coleridge and how his fate ties into the stories of both Anne and Murphy. The rest are forgettable at best and outright lazy at worst. The Weeping Bat feels like a very generic movie monster that has no significance psychologically to any of the characters personal struggles, and mostly lacks distinctive features, with a design that doesn't even much reflect their namesake in any way. The Screamers, Prisoner Minions, and Prisoner Juggernauts are incredibly generic, with very little room for symbolism left to the imagination, with all seeming like you could have easily plucked them from budget horror films made in the early 2000s, and none of them being mechanically or visually interesting to encounter or to fight. The Tormented Souls and Wall Corpses are generic Silent Hill designs, also lacking much narrative or symbolic relevance outside of reflecting surface levels themes of confinement; the Void is a mechanical recycling of the scripted Raw Shock encounters from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and the "Monocle Man" is a plot-irrelevant implementation of a leftover asset from early development (this was more or less confirmed by the developers, if I remember, though feel free to correct me).
Finally, in terms of the endings, only 3 out of the possible 6 really feel consistent with the rest of the story. The Forgiveness and Truth & Justice endings are written to be consistent with the stories that are told for Anne and Murphy, with the former stemming from Anne's decision to overcome her and move past her grief in a healthy way once she has learned the truth and the latter stemming from Anne's alternative decision to continue down a self-destructive path of vengeance (an outcome which is treated as canon by Silent Hill: Downpour - Anne's Story and which is consistent with the lengths she is willing to go to get revenge for her father, as portrayed in that narrative). The Reversal ending - achieved by allowing Anne to kill Murphy in the final battle - is arguably also consistent with the stories of Anne and Murphy, as it shows a sort of fate that would be fitting for Anne had she been successful in achieving her unjustified vengeance against Murphy without ever learning the real truth about what happened to her father. The other endings require you to ignore entire sections and/or subplots within the game or to treat them as if they never happened, and are only possible if many of the events leading up to the game and during the games events are either changed or never happened. The Full Circle ending reveals that Murphy actually did kill Frank Coleridge, which is depicted as a source of immediate regret and trauma for Murphy in the ending itself but which never centers or features meaningfully in any of Murphy's struggles during the game, and which completely removes the narrative drama, irony, and tension underlying Murphy's innocence in the death of Anne's father. However, the Execution ending is a much worse offender, revealing Murphy to be the killer of both Frank Coleridge and his own son, which requires that all of the events related to Patrick Napier never happened. In previous Silent Hill games, the endings may have been highly divergent (particularly the the joke endings), but at least in those games, you could see the alternative endings as reasonable outcomes of the character's alternative decisions and mindsets at different key junctures. They felt consistent with what had been established for the characters, and didn't require that you throw out consideration of most of the game's events to justify them.
I imagine that this piece feels a bit more written on the "con" side of things, but as I said before, there were certainly many aspects of the game that I enjoyed, and I feel that it was and still is a title worth revisiting, warts and all. But what do all of you think? I would be interested to know what stood out to each of you as things that the game did especially well or especially poorly, as well as how each of you feel about the game overall.