E3 2010: 'Silent Hill 8'? Yes please (but only if it’s good)!

This years E3 was awesome and wet my appetite for enough new games to keep me scraping around for many pennies for the next few months and then some. Yet after so many announcements I found myself not so bothered about new franchises and IP’s as normal, but more intrigued to see 2011 as the year of the older franchises comeback. As they reclaim their former glory, charging to the forefront of their genres an showing the new kids on the block how its done, after suffering not so good sequels in their lineage that people tend to forget about on purpose.

The alternate reality prison sequences have the potential to be pant wettingly terrifying

Silent Hill is probably the one franchise that single handedly got me into survival horror games, yet still the latest announcement left me with a feeling of doubt yet hopefulness that it could recrown itself as one of the leading survival horror franchises after suffering a few unworthy treatments (which in my honest opinion is Silent Hill 4 onwards).

Vatra Studios new trailer for Silent Hill 8 (planned to arrive sometime in 2011) looks promising indeed, ditching the dated characters looking for relatives who’ve oddly run off and/or disappeared in Silent Hill based storyline, and instead putting you in the proverbial shoes of a prison escapee Murphy Pendleton, who escapes a prison transport crash only to end up in Silent Hill (gutted much?). Cue all the nasty psychological horror traits of the series where Silent Hill goes all Hellraiser, transforming into a disturbing reflection of the prison Murphy’s just escaped, hopefully cueing some interesting terrors stemmed from the choices he was confronted with serving time behind bars.

SH:8 promises to blend the flash light exploration and crap yourself scares, mind boggling puzzles mixed with the new use of certain everyday objects such as chairs and bookcases into the combat to prolong your imminent death at the jaws of some grotesque abomination.

If all this is done well and scary enough then Vatra might be onto something, finally rekindling the franchise that Silent Hill: Homecoming failed to do next gen justice.