And so we come to Silent Hill Downpour, the last “main” console entry in the series to be released so far. After Shattered Memories there was a lot of speculation about where the franchise would go next- continue down the same path, or return to the way things had been before? That Climax would be back at the helm for a third time seemed more or less guaranteed.

Or not. Shortly before E3 2010 the development of a new Silent Hill game for the PS3 and Xbox 360 was announced, made by yet another little-known studio, Czech-based Vatra games. This time around the aim was to pull all of the different innovations made over the last four Silent Hill games into one, carefully alleviating the flaws that had plagued the franchise across three console generations and bring Silent Hill back to its position as the premiere name in survival horror.

Did it work?

Rumblings of a fifth Silent Hill title (Origins was widely considered a spin-off at the time) on next-gen consoles date back to 2004, when the game was said to be a psychological horror title a la Silent Hill 2 using the idea of “fear in daylight”. For a long time the nascent fifth Silent Hill game took on a kind of mythical status among fans, who created a sort of platonic ideal in their heads that turned out to bear almost no resemblance to the finished product.

After the release of Silent Hill 4 and the dissolution of Team Silent, it seems that Konami had a bit of trouble deciding what to do with the franchise. Rumours started swirling that a remake of the first game was on the way, with the protagonist re-designed to tie into the soon to be released first Silent Hill movie. I don’t know whether that last part was ever actually under consideration, but it turns out Konami had actually been thinking of doing a remake of the first game (and they would eventually greenlight one later, as we’ll see) but decided instead to go with a prequel. The game first came to the attention of the public via a leaked title, the in-my-opinion much cooler-sounding Silent Hill: Original Sin. For quite a while no one knew anything more than that the game would be released on the PSP and take place before Silent Hill 1, and expectations were high despite the rather startling revelation that the game was to be handled by a Western developer called Climax instead of being developed in-house at Konami (the break-up of Team Silent wasn’t widely known at this time, although I don’t think it was exactly kept a secret).

By the time Team Silent’s fourth and final horror effort was nearing release, the gaming landscape had changed significantly, mostly due to one thing: Resident Evil 4, a ground-up reinvention of the horror genre that kicked survival horror to the curb in favor of faster-paced “survival action”. While Silent Hill 4 came out several months earlier, Resident Evil 4’s huge departure from its roots and innovative gameplay had already been well established by pre-release coverage in the gaming press, and as a result Konami found themselves in the unenviable position of releasing a game that suddenly looked outdated and old-fashioned.

To be fair, Silent Hill 4 was by far the biggest departure from the formula established in Silent Hill 1, mixing up a number of mechanics and traditional elements that had been faithfully carried over across two sequels. Was it enough to make Team Silent’s swan song stand out compared to Capcom’s coming blockbuster?

Warning: If you intend to play the 2024 remake and haven’t played this original version, I recommend skipping this post for now

During the 2001 Tokyo Game Show audiences were treated to the first ever trailer for Silent Hill 2, the eagerly awaited sequel to the original Playstation game. As the franchise was making the jump to the relatively newly minted Playstation 2 expectations were high to see what Team Silent could pull off with the improved hardware.

Instead of actually showing the game, Konami decided to unveil the new title with a series of strange, horrifying CG trailers that pushed the already grotesque imagery of the first game into the stratosphere. They were far darker than anything anyone had seen before and featured disturbing overtones of misogyny and sexual violence that seem pretty edgy by today’s standards but was even more so at the time.

This was all a pretty big hint that Silent Hill 2 wasn’t going to be quite what anyone was expecting.