14 DAY TRIAL // The Silent Hill series returns this year with Downpour and one of the developers working on the game says that dual difficulty sliders for combat and puzzles have been re-introduced in order to allow players to focus on the part of the game that they like best.
Speaking to Joystiq, Tomm Hulett, who is the producer working on Silent Hill: Downpour, said, “A lot of people really like puzzles, and Silent Hill provides really cool puzzles, but they’re not good at fighting. So you can set fighting to easy, puzzles to hard, you’re good to go.”
Those who plan on experiencing the puzzle content on the highest possible setting will fight hard to get through them while those who opt for a lower difficulty will get more clues, some of them leading to hidden content that can make the rest of the game even easier.
Puzzles might be the meat of Silent Hill for some fans but others play the game mostly to see how the development team warps real world during its terror inducing Otherworld segments.
Hulett also talked about the Otherworld areas, stating, “Players will come to understand that they don’t know what’s going to happen and they have to react and escape. And that’s taking a type of horror, fear that’s been in the old games, but sort of enhancing and giving it a new twist. Even if you’ve played all the other games, these Otherworlds will feel different and scary and unusual and you’ll find things that you wouldn’t have expected to find.”
The protagonist of the new Silent Hill is Murphy Pendleton, a former convict, and the story of the new game will be linked more to his experiences and memories rather than the mythology of the series.
Silent Hill: Downpour is set to be launched on the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft during the first quarter of 2012.