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There's a verse that's meant to help you remember the lengths of months of the year that you probably learned as something like:
Thirty days hath September
April, June, and November
All the rest have thirty-one
Except February, which has twenty-eight, except in leap years when it has twenty-nine, and those come every four years unless the year's divisible by 100. It's a silly month, anyway.
That's just about how I learned it before discovering the far superior finger method, though Wikipedia has a list of rather more satisfactory endings. But the point I was going to make was that this is a bit how Silent Hill Origins felt - it starts off very promisingly but at the very end it all sort of falls apart a little. It's not exactly bad, but you start getting fed up of your underpowered melee weapons breaking all the time, noticing the cracks in it a bit more and almost wanting it to end.
Part of that, of course, is because you really don't want to have to steel yourself to explore any of the nightmare contained within this game any more - the next-to-last section is in a motel (yes, Mother) with a veritable mountain of doors to try, most of which will be stuck, locked or jammed, and you get a real sense of dread when you find one that opens and wait for it to load whatever's lurking on the other side. Curiously, even a lot of the open rooms contain absolutely nothing useful - there was one room with a suitcase full of shoes and another with wedding clothes laid out on the bed, and we wrote these weird features down in anticipation of the contents of the rooms being used for a puzzle which never came.
The other puzzles were well done for the most part, though, especially after their absence in Silent Hill 4. I actually liked the way that this time they were presented as almost believable sometimes - in previous games the approach had been to give you an often completely irrelevant-seeming poem and then expect you to get a sequence of digits or piano keys out of it, but here there was sometimes some odd humour in finding notes taped up around the place saying things like "Mike - To raise the safety curtain you need to turn the stage lights on, you can't let lights A+B exceed the wattage of D, and C can't be more than twice as much as half of the difference. And tell the electrician I want a word with him." The one in the end section was rather more subtle and involved finding a date for the odd-looking fish calendar in the manager's office, where we got the month and day but somehow missed the year and just guessed it (the puzzle being rather more open to experimentation than in previous games). Though there was quite a good one after that involving assembling the Flauros, or the Seal of Someone or Other, that had been collected throughout the game until then.
The largest anticlimax was that of the Butcher. Shortly after the first stage of the game you're treated to a brief look at a hulking great monstrosity in an iron mask, and then get hints at him having been in places before you throughout the rest of the game, often accompanied by various noises in the distance that imply he might be just around the corner. It had built all this anticipation and then threw it away on a very normal boss fight with you running continuously around a kitchen counter while he waddles behind you, occasionally turning around to poke him in the ribs with your shotgun. Granted, he does have a great big knife at the time, but I was expecting one of the buildup scares to finally come to something, and for him to become a Welder-like invincible enemy that pursued you until you managed to shake him off. Instead, you just interrupt him while he's cutting up someone else and then fight. When you feel you can actually damage something it isn't nearly as frightening, though doing it that way probably did wonders for my sanity.
Which brings me to what I'm doing in Mother 3 at the moment. The current section of the game is in a large sort of bio-laboratory (Chimera Labs, because it's a law that all these places are either called that or Phoenix). And the Chimera has happened to escape and is stalking the corridors - when you're in the side rooms all you can do is listen to its stomps and roars to judge whether you can go outside and run away, being told when you're in the same corridor as it by a change of music. And if you touch it you get your head instantly bitten off no matter how big a pointy stick you're carrying. In that way, a massive man with a meat cleaver becomes a far less frightening sight than a little pink chompy sprite that looks like one of the enemies out of Commander Keen.
Actually, that's a bad example. That Dopefish was petrifying.
Thirty days hath September
April, June, and November
All the rest have thirty-one
Except February, which has twenty-eight, except in leap years when it has twenty-nine, and those come every four years unless the year's divisible by 100. It's a silly month, anyway.
That's just about how I learned it before discovering the far superior finger method, though Wikipedia has a list of rather more satisfactory endings. But the point I was going to make was that this is a bit how Silent Hill Origins felt - it starts off very promisingly but at the very end it all sort of falls apart a little. It's not exactly bad, but you start getting fed up of your underpowered melee weapons breaking all the time, noticing the cracks in it a bit more and almost wanting it to end.
Part of that, of course, is because you really don't want to have to steel yourself to explore any of the nightmare contained within this game any more - the next-to-last section is in a motel (yes, Mother) with a veritable mountain of doors to try, most of which will be stuck, locked or jammed, and you get a real sense of dread when you find one that opens and wait for it to load whatever's lurking on the other side. Curiously, even a lot of the open rooms contain absolutely nothing useful - there was one room with a suitcase full of shoes and another with wedding clothes laid out on the bed, and we wrote these weird features down in anticipation of the contents of the rooms being used for a puzzle which never came.
The other puzzles were well done for the most part, though, especially after their absence in Silent Hill 4. I actually liked the way that this time they were presented as almost believable sometimes - in previous games the approach had been to give you an often completely irrelevant-seeming poem and then expect you to get a sequence of digits or piano keys out of it, but here there was sometimes some odd humour in finding notes taped up around the place saying things like "Mike - To raise the safety curtain you need to turn the stage lights on, you can't let lights A+B exceed the wattage of D, and C can't be more than twice as much as half of the difference. And tell the electrician I want a word with him." The one in the end section was rather more subtle and involved finding a date for the odd-looking fish calendar in the manager's office, where we got the month and day but somehow missed the year and just guessed it (the puzzle being rather more open to experimentation than in previous games). Though there was quite a good one after that involving assembling the Flauros, or the Seal of Someone or Other, that had been collected throughout the game until then.
The largest anticlimax was that of the Butcher. Shortly after the first stage of the game you're treated to a brief look at a hulking great monstrosity in an iron mask, and then get hints at him having been in places before you throughout the rest of the game, often accompanied by various noises in the distance that imply he might be just around the corner. It had built all this anticipation and then threw it away on a very normal boss fight with you running continuously around a kitchen counter while he waddles behind you, occasionally turning around to poke him in the ribs with your shotgun. Granted, he does have a great big knife at the time, but I was expecting one of the buildup scares to finally come to something, and for him to become a Welder-like invincible enemy that pursued you until you managed to shake him off. Instead, you just interrupt him while he's cutting up someone else and then fight. When you feel you can actually damage something it isn't nearly as frightening, though doing it that way probably did wonders for my sanity.
Which brings me to what I'm doing in Mother 3 at the moment. The current section of the game is in a large sort of bio-laboratory (Chimera Labs, because it's a law that all these places are either called that or Phoenix). And the Chimera has happened to escape and is stalking the corridors - when you're in the side rooms all you can do is listen to its stomps and roars to judge whether you can go outside and run away, being told when you're in the same corridor as it by a change of music. And if you touch it you get your head instantly bitten off no matter how big a pointy stick you're carrying. In that way, a massive man with a meat cleaver becomes a far less frightening sight than a little pink chompy sprite that looks like one of the enemies out of Commander Keen.
Actually, that's a bad example. That Dopefish was petrifying.
