Silent Hill Origins - hands-on

There's plenty of other stuff we won't see until the game is farther along. We were only able to use two weapons in the demo we played - a 9mm pistol and the sledgehammer - although the final game will also equip Travis with a tire iron, a shotgun, a Magnum pistol and a shovel. Also, we only saw two areas - the freely explorable streets of Silent Hill, covered in a dense shroud of rolling fog, which we're told will be a central hub for the game; and the dark, cramped interiors of an asylum, which we explored with the help of a chest-mounted flashlight.

We also didn't see any of the story, although the developers revealed that certain familiar faces - specifically the malevolent Alessa Gillespie and Dr. Kaufman from the first Silent Hill - will reappear, and that the game will feature plenty of rendered movies and in-game cinematics (so don't expect static text or anything similarly pared down).

Also, while we only saw one of the monster types - horrible, shriveled zombies called "The Affected" - the final game will feature eight different types of area-appropriate horrors (including meat monsters, twisted flesh-mannequins and straitjacket creatures) with three bosses to face down. And like in every other Silent Hill, you'll have a broken radio that'll blast static to warn you when monsters are nearby (although we're told that this time, there'll be some sort of visual display as well).

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Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.