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).

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.