Silent Hill Downpour

THE BUZZ: Silent Hill fans were disappointed with some of the technical problems of Konami’s two recent releases for the franchise—Silent Hill Downpour and Silent Hill HD Collection. Today, the publisher announced details on patches both games will be getting.

EGM’s TAKE: Here’s the announcement:

Silent Hill fans, we are currently aware that many users have encountered technical issues while playing Silent Hill HD Collection and Silent Hill Downpour.

Development teams are currently creating online patches for both games, which will fix frame rate issues, as well as the audio-synching in Silent Hill HD Collection and the Auto-Save issues in Silent Hill Downpour. Players have voiced their concerns and solutions to these issues will be fixed and launched in the coming weeks. Patches for Silent Hill Downpour and Silent Hill HD Collection will be made available on both XBOX Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.

Thank you for your patience and stay tuned to this page as we update you on this ongoing process.

While frame rate and audio syncing fixes are nice for HD Collection, as a long-time fan of the series—and especially the two games on that collection—those updates alone won’t solve the problems that I have with the HD remakes. Both ports of the game were sloppy—there’s just no two ways about it. So, I mean, it’s nice that HD Collection will be less terrible, but my opinion of it probably won’t change overall.

Downpour, however, is an interesting case. On a technical level, the game needs more fixes than just the save system—but the save system was a huge flaw for the game, so if this patch corrects the issues players had, then that’s a definite plus.

In my review of Silent Hill Downpour, I expressed how conflicted about it I was—it’s a fabulous game marred by some poor design decisions that keep it from reaching its full potential. As with HD Collection, the fixes that will come with this patch won’t correct some of the deeper problems Downpour has—and yet, in this case, I’m much more positive about the patch. It won’t make Downpour the game it could or should have been, but since there is a lot of good to be found among the bad, reducing those bad points by one is something I’ll absolutely welcome.