'Slitterhead' Game Awards Reveal Is What Horror Needs—'Silent Hill' Should Stay Dead

Silent Hill is a dead franchise, and that's exactly how it should remain if Konami is going to have any involvement with it.

At this year's Game Awards ceremony, the original creator of the iconic horror series, Keiichiro Toyama, announced a mysterious project known as Slitterhead. Although the parallels between this and Silent Hill are largely superficial (they've both got monsters that look like creepy perversions of the human form), the new game clearly wants to make its behind-the-scenes connection as explicit as possible.

Its trailer even opens with the following text: "In 1999, Keiichiro Toyama chose horror as the genre for his first directorial work. Silent Hill was released to the world. In 2020, he went independent and founded Bokeh Game Studio. And he came back to face a new challenge in horror."

If the Silent Hill namedrop wasn't direct enough, the words are literally capitalized and displayed in bold. They really want you to know that Slitterhead has a lineage that can be traced back to one of the horror genre's heavyweights. Toyama even roped in fellow Team Silent alumni Akira Yamaoka to deliver the musical score.

Of course, if you are trying to appeal to a horror audience, then it makes perfect sense to invoke the name of Silent Hill. It's one of, if not the, most revered franchises in the genre and has delivered multiple stone-cold classics. In fact, the series was represented twice in our list of the scariest games ever made.

If you were making a possession film and had William Friedkin attached in some capacity, then you would naturally want to plaster the words "from the creator of The Exorcist" all over the marketing materials. The exact same principle applies here.

Yet Slitterhead is crucially not a new Silent Hill game. It's just an original property that happens to involve some of the same creative talent. Which is for the best really, because, as painful as it might be to admit, Silent Hill ought to stay dead and buried at this point.

'Silent Hill' Is Well Past Its Prime

In the lead up to the Game Awards 2021, horror enthusiasts were feverously trying to uncover evidence that would point towards an imminent revival of the Silent Hill franchise.

This is nothing out of the ordinary, as they put on their conspiracy theorists hats every single time there is a major industry event like this. Whether it's E3, a PlayStation Showcase or basically anything that has Geoff Keighley's name attached to it, they will optimistically convince themselves that an announcement is forthcoming. Sometimes they take their rampant speculation and overreaching theories so far, that they end up looking like absolute crackpots.

That being said, the desperation for a new entry in the series is completely understandable. Silent Hill was truly special at the beginning of its run, offering a subtler, more psychological alternative to Resident Evil. The second entry is frequently hailed as being one of the best games of all time—thanks to its unparalleled atmosphere, creeping dread and engrossing narrative—while P.T. was a revelatory experience that has been imitated by countless wannabes.

However, it's time to admit that the franchise's glory days are long behind it. After all, it's been nearly 10 years since the last fully-fledged release and 17 since there was a good one.

All of the people who made Silent Hill unique in the first place (like Toyama) have moved onto other things, and since 2004 it's just been passed around between third-party developers who never quite got it.

Failed reboots like Homecoming, Origins and Shattered Memories all had a surface level of understanding of the franchise, but it never went any deeper than that. They rehashed plot points from older games, flaunted the once-enigmatic Pyramid Head around like he was just a cheap mascot, and put way too much emphasis on gore. They even tried to turn it into a dungeon-crawling hack and slash at one point.

As Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw said in his review of the lacklustre Silent Hill: Downpour: "I don't think I can call myself a Silent Hill fan anymore [...] Over the last few years I have gained an appreciation for what Sonic the Hedgehog fans went through from about 1996 onwards, watching one's favorite franchise flail about desperately trying to recapture the spirit of the good ones, without understanding the essential factors".

So, while it is admittedly easy to get sucked into the hype, the likelihood of a new Silent Hill game being any good is rather slim. Especially with Konami at the reins.

Konami Have Ruined Most of Its Beloved Franchises

Once considered amongst the most trusted publishers in the entire game industry, Konami was responsible for cherished blockbusters like Castlevania, Metal Gear Solid and Pro Evolution Soccer (PES).

Yet, in recent years, they have systematically destroyed any goodwill that they built up with those flagship IPs and have fatally mismanaged each one of them.

Metal Gear in particular has suffered indignity after indignity at Konami's hands. In 2015 they had an internal restructure that saw the closure of Kojima Productions and, as a direct result of this, The Phantom Pain was rushed out the door half-finished. The game was generally well-received by critics anyway, but it whiffed off comprise and its entire last chapter was basically a copy-and-paste job that reused many sections from earlier on.

Having thoroughly burnt this bridge with Kojima, they then set about developing their own ill-fated spin-off, in the form of the risible Metal Gear: Survive. Taking a series beloved for its open-ended gameplay and tactical espionage and then reducing into a generic zombie shooter, it was thoroughly despised by reviewers and fans alike. Konami has not really done much with the Metal Gear license since then, effectively killing the legendary franchise off for good.

PES on the other hand actually had a brand-new release earlier this year, although it was rebranded as eFootball 2022 for some reason. This was yet another botched attempt at a comeback and was met with widespread derision for how it failed to live up to even the lowest of expectations. The title was even labelled the worst game of the year by WatchMojo. In the countdown channel's video, they said: "We have reached new heights in godforsaken sports games [here], with bugs and glitches galore".

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That's Why 'Silent Hill' Is Better Off Dead

While Konami has mishandled the vast majority of its biggest franchises, it has mercifully left Silent Hill alone for the last few years. In 2015, the company announced that they were stepping away from the production of console releases and that they would be focussing more on mobile games and pachinko machines instead.

While they have occasionally dipped their toes back into the console arena (with eFootball and Metal Gear: Survive), they have not done anything with Silent Hill . The closest we've got to a new game is the crossover with Dead by Daylight, but that was just a DLC chapter and Konami crucially had very little to do with it.

The only other piece of Silent Hill content we've had in recent years is a gaudy pachinko machine that was designed for use in arcades and casinos. The very idea of taking Pyramid Head (a symbolic manifestation of misogyny, guilt and psychological torment) and slapping him all over a gambling device, while he implores you to "hit the lever" and spin the reels, was so reviled by fans that its reveal trailer is currently sitting at 26,000 dislikes to 710 likes.

Bearing all of this in mind, as long as Konami are holding onto the rights, it's probably for the best that we're spared the pain of another Silent Hill game. It's time to just let go.

Spiritual successors like Slitterhead and this year's The Medium can carry on its legacy, while we just remember the good times. Yahtzee expressed it best in his review of the latter, when he said: "You know what Konami, I don't even care about Silent Hill anymore. You make all the pachinko machines [you] like. I don't want a new Silent Hill, I want interesting new horror games that benefit from Silent Hill's influence".

That's how the franchise can endure now. Not with any new entries, but by inspiring other developers and creators.