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Watch On
If you’ve forgotten Silent Hill: Downpour it was the western-developed Silent Hill that went semi-open world and had a bunch of sidequests in it, but was still a bit too busy trying to retell Silent Hill 2 only with the villain in a different hat. It wasn’t a disaster, but to say “at least it wasn’t Silent Hill: Homecoming or the arcade game” is to damn it with such faint praise you may as well be whispering from the other side of the street.
Still, those sidequests were tasty. Ignore the main plot about a prison escapee being chased by embodiments of his own guilt—wow, a man in prison has a dark past, what a shocking development—and you could explore a town full of ghost stories and little mysteries. The one where you follow color-coded ribbons to find out what happened to a missing girl was a particular favorite, a reminder that Silent Hill can still be properly haunting when it tries.
Good luck trying to play it today, though. Downpour came out on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and absolutely nothing else, which means your best bet is probably to emulate it in RPCS3. Or to wait for a PC native port to come along, and what’s that? Oh, it’s a trailer for a PC native port someone’s been chipping away at.
Indie_RU’s port isn’t just a way to play Downpour on PC with an uncapped framerate and higher resolutions, nice as that always is. It’s also restoring cut content, letting us wield extra weapons like the Bogeyman’s hammer and bringing back deleted cutscenes, notes, dialogue, and entire sidequests. It’s also restored a boss battle seen in an early trailer where you fight the “Monocle Man” who was reduced to a cameo in the finished game.
Apparently we can expect the finished product around September/October, which is also when we’re expecting Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn Interactive’s Scottish take on the series. I’ve got my fingers crossed that’s going to push the series in an interesting direction, because all those arena battles in Silent Hill F weren’t really my cup of rusty tea with mud in it, or whatever they drink in Silent Hill.
