feeling blue?

I finished Silent Hill Downpour!!!!!! It was very annoying and bad but I loved it very much!!!! The environments and art direction were genuinely very beautiful to me, they portray that damp, eerie, rainy tourist town vibe and I enjoyed existing in that atmosphere. My issue with the games past SH4 is that they fail to capture that sense of wrongness, Downpour still struggled but it was different enough that I could overlook it for the most part. I like that the otherworld feels industrial but distinctly different from the other otherworlds in the series. There are cool setpieces and the sidequests (the ones that i bothered to clear) make me feel invested in all the individual tragedies that happened in Silent Hill. In some way I think the protagonist's story fits in with some of the sidequests where he helps them come to a resolution, much like he himself comes to peace with his actions and grief. Except for the treasure hunt, what is that about lol, thanks for the crypt axe i guess?

I like Murphy, even though I find his constant screaming hilarious and very unfitting. His story is sad and I find all the endings interesting except for the bad karma + killing anne ending.... like i guess the story elements can be interpreted in a way to suit the ending but I feel like that there is not enough evidence to me to see Murphy as a vindictive family annihilator. It kind of stops the momentum of the story in its tracks in my humble onion. Also I dont particularly like the choice options BEFORE you get into the town itself determining the ending so early on and then only having another one at the very end. Unfortunately I am a SH2 and Shattered Memories dickrider and I am wishing for more Silent Hill games to use the player's in-game behaviour to determine the ending, there is some of that in the Reversal ending which I got entirely by accident............ I didnt get how I could do the ground slam attack............ im tupid

Mechanically it was kind of a slog........ which im really sad about. Sometimes it felt like it takes Murphy LONGER to get out of the blocking stance than it takes for a Screamer to strike. Being unable to tell the durability of the melee weapon kind of irks me, it was possible to give that visual feedback or have Murphy comment on it or something. The subway tunnels suck, they suck so bad, im sorry. By the time Ive unlocked every fast travel route I was already at the end of the game, its really not worth it. I know the sidequests are a little bit out of the way on purpose to encourage exploration but following through on them is tedious in a way im struggling to put a finger on.

I dont like the monster designs... like at all ............ the only exception is the Wheelman because he is genuinely unnerving to look at (However I feel like it might perpetuate the trope of disabled bodies being portrayed as scary but I have no authority nor proper knowledge on this topic). The Bogeyman I'm kind of neutral about, it's supposed to be a monster that anyone could become afterall. It is still pretty bland, idk.

This may be me being a Silent Hil purist but I think that they are much too human. I've seen others argue that that's the point, as the villains in both Anne's and Murphy's story are essentially just people. I do like this point and think it's valid but I feel like the designs could be better. For one the Screamer reads to me as "crazed banshee woman", I dont think they are particularly interesting as representations of figuratively "crying/lashing out in grief" beyond an incapacitating scream. It could be interpreted that Murphy views grieving as a weakness or something out of control that needs to be reigned in and therefore feminine??? Call me the woker but I dont think the game explores that very much, so to me it reads as a sexist design? Idk...... The prisoner enemies are kind of just disfigured guys, their animalistic erratic behaviour makes way more sense to me from Anne's point of view. To HER the prisoners are violent animals, as far as she knows one of those ungrateful men beat her father into a vegetative state, of course she would see them as such. Murphy isn't implied to have had issues with other inmates beyond their comical ass hollering during the intro cutscenes, if anything his villainous human is Sewell, someone who is in a position of power OVER the prisoners. The doll is explained to be Anne's monster from the comic (which I haven't read), the idea pf somebody seeing themselves as a debased sex doll is genuinely harrowing. I like the concept but not the execution, without that context you're kind of just beating up sex dolls and shadows?

Most of these issues boil down to the fact that Anne should have been a playable character, which would have been soooooo neat!!!!! Her story is so important to Murphy's and I'm miffed that it wasn't playable. Also fuck the weeping bat, theyre goofy and stupid and don't nearly resemble anything that Silent Hill would spit out. They're generic horror creatures!!!! And they look bad!!! This is me once again dickriding the original games but Ito's splotchy, human-but-not-quite-there designs work for a reason. Hell even Silent Hill 4 made the ghosts scary, which are pretty much just floating people!!!!!!