Despite Origins getting so much right, it fails to provide anything original and lacks a compelling protagonist.
Welcome to Silent Hill. This town is pretty much a heavily rusted over psychic mirror in the worst sort of way, allowing messed up people to have their messed up psychological demons take physical form and rape, kill, eat, and do funny things with their corpses, probably not in that order. Trucker with dark past Travis Grady stumbles into this pleasant little town after saving local psychic Alessa from a fire, and ends up going through a fun little tour of his past demons and the local religion. And while this is all good, something seems off.
Travis has no reason to be in Silent Hill. He's just a guy passing through, yet the town seems to want him to continue to relive his traumas while he goes on a item fetching quest for Alessa. It seems a bit awkward, I mean, Alessa is seemingly omnipotent, right? She shows up every time Travis gains a part of the Flauros, but seriously, can't she just pick up the damn things herself instead of wasting time playing with the stupid trucker? I wonder if every bloke who takes a wrong turn and ends up in Silent Hill gets stuck doing an item fetching quest for her. Well, now we know what she does for fun. "Oh, a family of four? Well, Alex is going to have flashbacks of his college alcohol problem, Debora is going to flashback to her awful past marriage with Greg, Jenny is going to have to deal with all the bullying cheerleaders at the school, and little Timmy is going to find that Scar from the Lion King is indeed real, and going to eat his face. And he's going around with a metal disney hat, carrying a massive sword."
In the mean time, the combat is absolute garbage. Quicktime events that are either too easy or involve buttons that flash on the screen for approximately 12 nanoseconds before your face is chewed off, weapon degradation, horrific camera angles, and generally awkward combat system reduces the combat to looking like a bunch of Parkinson's patients trying to do ballet while the cameraman has an epileptic fit. Although, given Silent Hill's reputation for awful combat, that's the norm.
Still, despite all this, I really enjoyed the game. Perhaps it's just that I miss Silent Hill's creepy atmosphere, but it felt good to go back, and furthermore, it felt right. It gets the town, the music, the feel, the monsters, the psychological projection bit, the plot continuity, and even the crappy combat right.
I feel the biggest problem with Silent Hill Origins is the lack of any real meaningful character development. You get a glimpse of what the characters from Silent Hill 1 were doing before they ended up in Silent Hill, but the times you encounter them are few and far between, and they seem to give off a vibe wondering, 'why are you here?' a question reflecting by the player as well. Furthermore, Travis himself has the emotional depth of cardboard, and ultimately isn't interesting in any way shape or form. Sure, what happened to him sucked, but his reaction to the horrific trauma of Silent Hill is one of general apathy, perhaps slight annoyance. You want to feel sorry for the guy, but... You just can't. He just doesn't seem to care either way. The sooner they learn having a character that cares about his situation is much more meaningful than having someone who is emotionally flatlining two seconds into the game.
Part of creating a successful Silent Hill game is having meaningful, likable characters. Harry Mason is a great example of that- a normal joe looking for his daughter who he's lost in hell. James Sunderland, another great protagonist, is a really wonderful tragic character who's just looking for his dead wife. Insane, yes. Tragic and sympathetic, very yes. Also important, side characters. Where would Silent Hill 3 be without the smarmy Vincent, or Silent Hill 2 without Maria, Angela, or Eddie? All these characters were deeply interested in something, some tormented, and ultimately very interesting. Silent Hill Origins has some great characters from Silent Hill, but they have maybe a minute of screen time at most. Furthermore, you spend a lot of time reading about characters, only to have them appear as monsters and flashbacks, something that helps the storyline, but doesn't really help Travis' situation.
Still, the problems with Origins being properly addressed and more than properly ranted about, the game isn't half bad.
The story, once you get past the main character's complete lack of charisma, has a lot of depth and possibility. Travis' involvement with Alessa seems a bit pushed, but his personal history contains a lot of meat for speculation, and depending on the ending, he could either just be a normal guy with a horrible past, or a horrible guy with a horrible past. Or a guy who gets picked up by aliens. And the duality works, as there is some hinting at his complicated psyche, however due to the awful writing, it seems like all this character history is studying someone completely unrelated to this cardboardy protagonist.
The easter eggs are a very welcome touch, after the general lack of decent easter eggs in SH4. There are flashlight filters, a whole slew of extra weapons, another UFO ending, and a variety of costumes, including the Dog from the SH2 dog ending and Vincent from SH3.
The music, written by the godfather of Silent Hill Akira Yamaoka, is unsurprisingly stellar. Another part that I felt was well done was the cutscenes. Some of the rendered cutscenes are downright gorgeous, better than anything I've seen from Silent Hill before. The monster design is good, and more importantly, meaningful, and the combat is challenging, something that has little to do only slightly with it being badly designed. I actually died a number of times, something that has never happened in a Silent Hill game, save for SH3 and that stupid train scene. There's also a Pyramid Head clone monster in the mix, but he seems there simply to appease the pyramid head fangirls. If there are such a thing... I'm sure there are. I'd rather not meet such people... Or would I?
The game plays much like the other games before it, with a lot of strange puzzles in a building with lots of flipping between alternate and real world before having to brave the streets. The big difference with this game is that you can actually control what side you are on via mirrors, which in some cases removes some of the fear by giving you control, but by the same token, it's terrifying having to go into the alternate world, especially if you're not sure you have to. Giving the control to the player may give them a chance to prepare themselves for going alternate, but at the same time it also puts them in control of their pathway to the hellish otherworld, something that made me hesitate several times in the game, simply standing in front of the mirror, giving myself a chance to prepare myself.
The hellish otherworld, of course, is terrifying, and full of nasty monsters. One thing it lacks is interesting snuff movie-esque scenery, such as those disturbing hospital things in SH4 and some of the weird scenes in SH3 with Valtiel, but it's excusable. The outdoors as well is rather scary, as there are plenty of monsters, and unlike the other Silent Hill games, these monsters will chase you down and eat you if you don't run. Of course, it is rather comedic to watch a straightjacket zombie try to run, but at the same time it's rather terrifying.
Ultimately, this game is very frustrating. If they changed a few small things, such as losing weapon degradation, fixing the annoying camera angles, and providing a more sympathetic character, it could have been a surpurb, if unoriginal addition into the Silent Hill series. Still, it's flaws are rather excusable, and I found the game to be really a lot of fun, possibly one of the best games I've played on a handheld ever. Of course, that's probably just because it's Silent Hill.
PS: Dear game distributors, what the hell. Many of my friends got a copy of Silent Hill Origins before I did, and while I got a copy, it got left in my friends car, which subsequently got broken into by people who deserve to be earraped by Pyramid Head. I had to get my copy from a specialty shop (to those of you who live in the Seattle area, Pink Godzilla has one copy of SH: 0), as nobody else seemed to have it. If a game sells out like that, release more copies. It was frustrating enough to have to wait all this time to get a copy, more frustrating to have to go to a specialty shop. Not to say that Pink Godzilla is frustrating in any way...