I've been playing Silent Hill Downpour and prior to getting the game, during the hype leading up to its release, I remember thinking it looked like it suffered from this syndrome where every area is so full of stuff that you mind glazes over everything. There are no focal points that draw attention because the designers behind the game think that world design means filling, and filling, and filling until every corner is stuffed with clutter. It makes me pine for the 64 days when levels had to have focal points and set pieces because you just couldn’t fill worlds with all that much detail.
This clutter syndrome is something I understood after playing Resident Evil 5, and I expected more of that in Downpour, just unimpressive levels that feel like nothing because there’s no coherence to them, it’s just junk to fill space. But this game is awful, the pure amount of stuff, the darkness, the way your flashlight hardly moves, and the fact that the main character obscures everything, it makes this game unbearable. It’s like you can’t get comfortable with it. It never sits right with you, and all you can do is press forward through it. There’s no familiarity to achieve.
The more I play this game the more it reminds me of like, an NES title, where you’re playing a game from a time when most designers just didn’t know how to treat players and they put the most frustrating shit in the game. Downpour is increasingly becoming a 3D equivalent of that. Just with, like, unexplained paths that look like nothing. There’ll be a row of junk, and it’s so visually busy, like everything else in this game, that your mind passes over it and you register it as another nonsensical border on the level, the kind that anyone IRL could just hop over (you know the kind of boarder I’m talking about), but this border has a little slit in the side of it and you can slide through it. You have this arbitrary slide move that let’s you fit through tight spaces, and you use it here on this thing that looks like a border because the designers don’t know how to direct the eye, they have no idea how to use space. It’s awful. That’s what I mean about NES era kinds of design obliviousness.
I picked this game up because I thought, despite everything that looked bad about it, I could just wander through its weird and bad spaces and take them in as what they are, but the design of this game prevents that and it’s straining on the eye to play this game, or to move through it in an attentive way. I can go to a used game shop and pick up some 64 era four-dollar game just with the intent to move through its space and take it all in, even though the gameplay is surely terrible. It’s crazy to me that hackey designers are using this bounty of technology to produce these incredibly forced ways to make environments undecipherable. It drives me nuts. It’s like the worst parts of consumerism and shlocky design sloshing together to create something with no value, not even in a distanced diagnostic or investigative sense where you just get the game to enjoy its oddities.
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