They keep pumping them out.

Silent Hill: Homecoming boasts list of lame features is so long you’ll probably want to grab a snack before I start rattling them off. There's a useless dodge maneuver that works only half the time, there's an annoying combo system that really doesn't belong in survival horror of any variety (but if they were forced to do it, like if their family was held up at a gunpoint, you think they could've at least done a better job), there's Pyramid Head and lordy-lordy I'm so glad they keep putting that asshole in things whenever they get the chance. It could be worse, I guess, they could have just made a half-assed Pyramid Head wannabe like they did with Silent Hill: Origins. Or maybe they'll partner with Square and put a Super-Deformed version of him in the next Itadaki Street.

Maybe the worst of the bunch is that you can call the shocking plot twist from a mile away. I played Silent Hill 2 too, and since nobody's hit me in the back of the head with a lead pipe in the time since then I can still kind of remember how that game ended. Blissfully free of brain trauma, I am fully able to recall that it's almost the exact same twist as Silent Hill 2. Almost. Now they’ve added ritual sacrifice! I'm willing to buy that there's one creepy resort town with an underground demon cult attached to it, but I think a town like fifty miles away with an even more demonic cult that kills their own children wouldn't get away with it for very long. Just think of the conversations between neighbors, "So, Tom, haven’t seen your kid in awhile. Where's he been?" "Uh, college...?"

And heck, I'm the generous sort so I'm willing to accept that nobody who's in on the whole conspiracy is perturbed by what's going on. I guess they're just used to the vagina-faced monsters. It becomes an issue when your main character saunters in and asks, point blank, "What's up with all the monsters?" That seems like a question that demands a straight answer.

The reason he can't get an straight answer is because there is no straight answer, except for this: everything is happening in this game because this crap happened in other Silent Hill games and it was awesome there, right guys? There's no consistent game logic, it's all just flavor scattered around for fanservice. That's why we have Pyramid Head even though it makes no sense for him to be here, and even though they didn’t even TRY to half-ass his characterization from Silent Hill 2. Now he's just some asshole with a giant knife that goes around bisecting people. Why? Well, I don't know. Maybe mom never loved him. Or maybe his parents were okay, they just taught him the importance of using everything you have. After all, you don't own a six foot long knife and then go around NOT splitting people in half, do you?

We got a couple good games. Man, remember Silent Hill 3? It had that great song by Akira Yamaoka and Mary-Elizabeth McGlynn. That was pretty sweet! And remember shooting that lizard in the first one? I was all like "Oh man, wait for him to open his mouth!" as opposed to this one where, I don't know, the big tittied nurses are back again for some reason. This is the constant complaint: do we not get why those undead chicks were all bosomy in Silent Hill 2? Do we not know why there was a vagina-esque monster? It's all about sexual tension and violence and creepy stuff like that. Is there sexual tension in Silent Hill: Homecoming? I don't know, I hope not. Considering the only backstory in the game is about the main character's preteen brother, that would be a little weird. With fanservice as their only reason to be, the nurses persist.

But IS it fanservice? Is this what the fans want, more Pyramid Head? Dude's only in the game for two minutes and it's still enough to ruin everything. Do they want dialogue trees? Dying in during a boss fight and having to repeat the lame button presses makes it obvious that all the answers lead you to the same conclusion. Really all they've done is invent a new excuse for an unskippable cutscene. Thanks for that, Silent Hill 5.

Please just can the whole thing. Crests and medals to open doors and bloody barbed wire and rusty gratings and giant industrial fans, man, that stuff had its day in the sun. Crappy UFO Endings persist, the final nail in the coffin, showing us definitively that this game is just the soulless harvesting of its predecessor's parts. The creepy, intense psychological horror that defined the Silent Hill series is gone and, after three increasingly bad games, I don’t think it's coming back.