So many new (actual! probably real and not getting cancelled we hope!) Silent Hill projects announced!

I'll just sit here and vibrate quietly.

Okay, I'm cautiously optimistic about pretty much all of them. Which is, I know, very "not a real fan" of me, lmao.

Silent Hill 2 Remake

I guess whether remaking the widely-considered best game of the franchise is a good idea or not will come down to whether the remake is good or not, lmao.
(Silent Hill 2 is mostly considered the best, but 3 is my favorite, personally.)

Not to be shallow, but ooooh, it is pretty. I can mostly get over the old graphics and sometimes-awkward voiceacting of 2 (2001, baby!), but it undercuts some of the solemnity of a few of the scenes, and seeing them with a modern upgrade I think will be very cool.
BUT. Only if the team can make it look good. Good graphics don't replace a sense of style and lighting and cinematography, and SH2 had very excellent use of the above, and losing that in favor of a graphics upgrade is not worth it.

The trailer is pretty good, and really does make me excited for it. (Though again, I know it's always possible they'll fuck it up.) I am excited that Masahiro Ito and Akira Yamaoka are both coming back for it, because at the very least that means the design and the music are going to be good, ha.

Silent Hill: Townfall

The teaser for this is pretty minimal, as was any additional info, but honestly, I'm pretty hype? I like the little bit of it from the teaser, and while it feels different than a mainline game, it does sound like it could be very good.

Return to Silent Hill film

Christophe Gans coming back! I actually absolutely love the first Silent Hill film. (I know, back into Not A ~Real~ Fan territory.) We don't talk about the second film. A shame about all those promising production photos and casting and everything, since the movie wound up never ever happening.

The first Silent Hill movie was obviously very much inspired by the first game, while still being a different take on that story. I thought it utilized new backstory elements and pieces from the game really well together to create a coherent whole that I do really, really like. The ethos of the monster creation - "disturbing, not disgusting" - is exactly the right tone. There are also several scenes that very obviously took design and cinematography cues directly from the game, and it was clearly made by someone who did enjoy Silent Hill and wanted to encapsulate the right tone.

So bringing back the same director and producer to do a similar take on/adaptation of Silent Hill 2 sounds very promising, and is something I want to see. I will be very sad if the film gets shelved, as additional Silent Hill projects with this director have.

Silent Hill: Ascension

Definitely the one that I am least excited for. It COULD turn out really great and prove me wrong, but I just see this going very poorly, ha.

The whole deal is that it's interactive and live/in real-time, so the fandom as a whole participates in what happens with the story. It's also a "no takesies-backsies/no re-dos" scenario, so whatever decisions get made are permanently part of the story canon.

That COULD be really cool, I guess, and I enjoy the idea of participatory and interactive horror, but it seems wildly prone to people trying to be dicks and wrecking it for people who are actually into it. Maybe there are safeguards against that in some fashion? Idk, even if so, story-by-crowd-consensus seems... meh? Not like a thing I'm likely to be interested in?

Silent Hill ƒ

Pretty! This makes it seem like maybe one of those leaks from several months ago (the cherry blossom monster concept art) may have actually been a legit leak! Or it's one hell of a coincidence.

I really like the creepy design, the growing vines/veins, the beautiful flowers blooming horrifically from a body. Very much body-horror, which is a staple of Silent Hill, but it's extremely different. Body horror that has an aspect of corruption but also beauty, rather than the much more grotesque horror that's typical for the franchise... I like it. It feels similarly psychological; different horrors for different minds? Idk, I'm not saying any of that terribly well, but I'm excited.

This has nothing beyond a non-gameplay-footage trailer, which is lovely and creepy, but even that little bit makes me really hopeful for something interesting and new in the series!

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So basically I'm pretty hype! I know the dangers - we were all burned by P.T. - and it's possible that pretty much any of these (except probably the remake) could still wind up cancelled or with a major direction change or the like.

But all the creators they interviewed (er, with the exception of Ascension, I'm afraid) sounded really excited and engaged and like they want to make games that do new things (a necessity, for a franchise with glory days on the PS2) while not screwing up the things that made/make those games great. Not that anyone ever says "yeah, I definitely hope to make the worst game ever, and am doing this purely to cash in on franchise branding while making a just frankly terrible product that spits on the name" or anything, lol.

I'm going to have to get a PS5. :/ Somehow.