I've spent the last few days playing Silent Hill: Homecoming for an upcoming review at Variety. I'm not ready to say very much about it yet except for the little bit I say at my monthly feature for Kotaku that ran today. Be a little bit patient until I complete the review, because you can be sure I'll have quite a lot to say about it when all's said and done.
So remember a couple weeks back, I was talking about some of my best estimations, as a Westerner, of the differences between the Japanese approach to story, aesthetics and game design versus that of the West and how that's affected the games we see today as the West begins to predominate. We discussed the RPG genre as an example of where some of these differences have appeared -- I've used some of those same ideas in this feature, which covers the evolution of next-gen survival horror games into more action-oriented titles, wondering one thing: Does survival horror as we know and love it still exist?
Some of the commenters on the article suggested we need new definitions for "survival horror," and could potentially separate "action survival horror" from "psychological horror," or something. What do you guys think?
And, speaking of genre evolution, my colleague Stephen Totilo is re-evaluating the word "RPG," looking at the games we have today and which ones literally let you "play a role" -- what do you think of the idea of LittleBigPlanet, which lets you feel like a game designer, and Guitar Hero, which lets you feel like a rock star, as "role-playing games?" Either way, he and I both seem to agree that our traditional genre labels are becoming pretty useless.
Oh! I will say one more little thing about Homecoming. Remember when some screenshots came out and everyone got all worried because it looked like crap? Those screenshots are in no way representative of the final quality of the game's look :)
