Silent Hill: Origins Updated Hands-On

Konami publicly acknowledged a portable version of the popular Silent Hill horror series in its development hopper since the game's first trailer was unveiled at Electronic Entertainment Expo last year. But when the PSP's Silent Hill: Origins finally made a playable appearance at the company's annual barbecue event in August, we encountered a brief and shallow gameplay snippet that seemed more like a proof-of-concept demo than the beginnings of a solid, finished product. Konami recently let us try out a new build of Origins, and luckily, we can report that quite a few months after that first underwhelming appearance, it looks like the developers have faithfully re-created the Silent Hill experience in handheld form.

As we've previously reported, Origins is set before the original Silent Hill game and is said to explain, at least to some extent, why the sleepy little hamlet of Silent Hill is so disturbing. (But this series has never been big on making lots of sense, so we're not holding our breath on that one.) The game puts you in control of Travis Grady, a trucker who's unfortunate enough to make a late-night stop in Silent Hill to discover a large house that's quickly burning to the ground. After navigating your way through the flames, you'll find a horribly burned little girl lying in the middle of a demonic symbol etched into the floor. Most strangely, she doesn't seem to feel any pain. In fact, she even looks up at you and utters a few words before sinking back into a trance. After delivering the little girl to the front lawn, Travis will pass out and wake up on a bench in the morning with no recollection of what happened after he emerged from the house.

Following this brief, playable prelude, Origins opened up and allowed us to start exploring Silent Hill proper. The first order of business was to head to the local hospital and find out what happened to the little girl. A hospital seems like the perfect setting for Silent Hill to rear its own special brand of weirdness, and indeed, we found that we could travel through any mirror inside the building to an alternate, hellish version of the same hospital. This version was replete with rust, shambling nurselike monstrosities, as well as sinister-looking doorways and other decor.

Fundamentally, Origins plays similarly to other games in the Silent Hill series. You still get to run around some nicely detailed, spooky 3D environments while looking for inventory items and clues. You also get to occasionally battle some grotesquely designed monsters. Camera control is more or less automatic because there's no second analog stick to give you manual control, but you can hit the L button to center the perspective behind your back. As with previous games, you'll have a radio that will occasionally give you contact with characters that will advance the storyline, as well as a flashlight that came in especially handy in that otherworldly hospital.

The combat in Origins is similar to the combat in the console installments of the series, with a couple of additions. The weapons that we saw in the demo included a pistol and a katana, but even if you're not packing an offensive implement of any kind, you'll at least be able to fight with your fists. And you may have to on some occasions because Origins introduces a new weapon-durability system that will cause your weapons to break after you've used them a given number of times. (There won't be a way to repair broken weapons; you'll just have to find new ones.) Luckily, the game gives you a little bit of automatic aiming for both ranged and melee weapons, so your attacks will be more effective when you make them. Finally, you'll sometimes enter a struggling minigame with an enemy that gets too close, whereby you'll have to mash the X button as fast as you can to knock down your foe before it gets the better of you.

Visually, Origins has come a long way since that bare demo we saw at the barbecue last year. It's now roughly on par with the PlayStation 2 installments we remember, both stylistically and technically. The game features the same television-snow full-screen filter as in the past games. The level of detail on the environments and characters is also more satisfying than previously. We were especially impressed with the flashlight, which presents a surprisingly realistic lighting and shadowing effect for a PSP game. We also hope that the game won't be a slouch on the audio side because series creator and longtime sound designer Akira Yamaoka has returned to do the music, as well as other sound work for this game.

Silent Hill: Origins is said to last between 10 and 12 hours. The first 30 minutes or so that we played seemed dense with puzzles to solve and a plot to be revealed. We hope the final game will keep up that pace and offer Silent Hill fans a meaty new installment in this long-running series. The game is due out in the third quarter, so look for more in the coming months.