‘We suggest that you play the game wearing headphones and with the lights turned off’, says a rather polite introduction screen when you load up Silent Hill Origins. The prospect of one of the most immersive, head-squashingly odd series making the leap from the big screen to the tiny one has interested me long past the slightly dodgy birth that Origins received, with what seemed to be a Resident Evil 4 gameplay style completely scrapped at one point and series fans worldwide wondering if the much-publicised switch from stuttering Climax US to Climax UK was going to make much difference to some pretty average early previews.

The game slots itself nicely into a storyline arc which most of us have enjoyed and put great effort into fully fathoming since the 1999 PlayStation original. Since then we’ve had three game sequels (although 4 is still a thorny issue with many and wasn’t supposed to be a Silent Hill title) and a feature film that was actually pretty reasonable, so the characters and the back-story of the town is now pretty deeply chronicled. Taking place before the events of the original (hence the subtitle, obviously), Origins pieces together the events that kicked the whole thing off.

You play the part of Travis Grady, who is seemingly a pretty average beer-drinking cap-wearing yeehaw truck driver. One night on a lonely drive through a town called Silent Hill a girl appears in front of his truck and runs off. Curious (as most would be, I suppose), he gets out of his vehicle and follows a rather ominous trail of smoke until he discovers a house that has rather inconveniently been set on fire. Upon entering he finds the horribly charred body of a young girl, and realising she is still alive he rescues her before blacking out on the front lawn.

So starts another journey through the bizarre, the disturbing and the plain horrifying. Something that immediately becomes apparent is just how much a chip off the block Origins actually is, with the graining filter and the mishmash of dulled colours instantly making it feel like it belongs. In fact, it’s with a tangible sense of relief that the first hour or so of the game is played, as it unfolds very nicely indeed.

One of my major quibbles about the most recent Silent Hill - 4 - was that it felt as if the balance between puzzling and combat had sloped too far toward the latter, making it somewhat less satisfying an experience. Origins seems to redress the situation, offering some thought-provoking puzzles along the way. The one gripe you could level at the whole thing is that at no point do they ever become particularly taxing, but they’re still a pleasing and somewhat imaginative bunch, with a particular example seeing Travis having to put appropriately coloured medical pills in statues’ mouths based on a doctor’s list and the contents of their padded cells to determine who was located where.

That’s not to say that there’s no combat, obviously, and this time it’s been reworked. Rather than giving you a magical stick at the start that somehow survives being wrapped around monsters’ heads for a good few hours, the melee weapons in Origins all have shelf lives. Scattered throughout the game’s locations are the traditional hammers and the like, whilst also joining in this time around are items like televisions sets and radios that can be chucked at an enemy for massive damage… ish. For a considerable portion at the start of the game you are sans firearms, so dodging between various types of monster whacking tools becomes something you get used to quite quickly.

Something that doesn’t work quite as well, though, is the implementation of the ol’ quick time event button pressing, which gives Travis the chance to escape various enemies’ attacks but not to actually harm them at all, which is somewhat disappointing. Another main issue I found is that weaponry in general is in much too plentiful a supply, and that Travis is so handy at basic fisticuffs that you can pretty easily stockpile a whole load of weapons you won’t even need to use. Part of what made Resident Evil 4 so terrifying in places was the overbearing sense of needing to scrimp on the ammunition and take on monsters in situations where you were rather vulnerable; Origins misses out on this by giving you plenty to fall back on.

Still, it’s not all negative stuff. You’ll traverse various places within the town such as the hospital and the sanatorium, wandering from room to room solving puzzles, defeating enemies and picking up crucial items or story-padding snippets. It’s very much in the same vain as Silent Hill 2 in the way it feels, which for me personally is a good thing. A neat addition to the play mechanic is that, whereas previous titles have dictated when you descend into the hellish, bloodstained version of the town, Origins allows you to switch between it and the ‘normal’ world through mirrors.

Thus, switching between the two worlds of Silent Hill now becomes an integral part of puzzle solving, as well as acting as a lever for all sorts of creepy situations. During one particular section of the game, Travis discovers that a key he rather needs is stuck out-of-reach under a shower drain grill. By flicking to the bloodier world, the shower room instead becomes something rather more horrific and the puzzle is solved. Travis is able to unlock different doors and pass through areas in each version of the world to the corresponding one, leaving the player with some pretty thought provoking travelling ahead.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been doing my best to skim around some of the finer points for you. The whole point of a Silent Hill game is to immerse yourself back into the town, its characters and the goings-on, and to spoil things for you would verge on being criminal. Suffice to say, throughout the game Travis meets a few characters that appeared in the original game, discovers more about the girl he tried to save and also has to tackle his own personal demons. It’s a fine addition to the series indeed, and what could have been a bit of a disaster of a side offering is actually a superb part of the main course instead.

Sadly, there’s a downside to all this. You see, my main gripe with Origins is that, just when you really start getting into the story and becoming comfortable in Silent Hill’s smog-wrapped streets, it all suddenly screeches to a halt. The game can be clocked within about six or seven hours with every area carefully scouted and every item plucked, and although the game does offer you the standard multiple endings and, in this instance, awards for hitting certain kinds of criteria in the form of items for use in future playthroughs, to have the rug pulled from under you so suddenly, just when things are really warming up, is really disappointing.

Which in itself probably goes to show just how good a job that Climax UK have done with what there is of Origins. Whilst a bit of understanding of previous events does help the enjoyment, the game would be an ideal point for people new to the series to start their own journey through. For us hardy veterans, consider this a bullet well and truly dodged, but at the same time something that does have a few niggling issues and a depressingly short lifespan. Still, seeing that outside studios can do Silent Hill justice is very much a relief, and puts the upcoming American-developed Silent Hill 5 into a much more hopeful light.