Can a horror game such as Silent Hill Origins work on the PSP? Well no, not really. You see, it’s difficult to know what the intention is with the game. After all, it even tells you to play it in your room, in the dark, and with your headphones on for the ultimate effect. If that’s what you have to do to experience the game in its best light, imagine trying to play it on the tube, during your lunch hour at work, or in the park on a particularly lovely day. There’s no way on this earth you’re going to get the kind of deep, intrinsic thrills the franchise excels at with Joe Public sat leering at you.

That means Silent Hill Origins is on the wrong platform. Shame, really, as it’s possibly the best game in the franchise since the second – and if there are no plans to bring it to the PS2 in the near future, a good deal of Silent Hill fans left cold after the fourth game will really miss out. And if they do play it on the PSP, unless they’re in their room, in the dark, with headphones on, they won’t get to experience the full Silent Hill effect. Because it’s all in there, just waiting to be found. But as a handheld game, it shouldn’t mean having to play it under the rules stipulated, because it defeats the purpose of the PSP. Confused?

Here’s some clarity: Origins is a prequel to the entire franchise, seeing lonely trucker Travis Grady inadvertently become snatched by the fog-strewn town on one of his routine nightly runs. Unfortunately for Travis, he becomes part of something dark, sinister and yet not entirely unrelated to his past. He’s very much been drawn to Silent Hill for a reason.

And for the first few hours you’d be hard pressed to believe it. Origins’ story doesn’t really begin to unfold properly until two or three hours in – where it does so in absolutely perfect fashion, thanks in no small part to a really quite astonishing score from Akira Yamaoka. But for the first hour or so, it just feels like Travis is a bit-part player in an excuse to revisit the town of Silent Hill, as well as some of the first game’s best characters and locations. That said, it proves a wholly satisfying idea – as the first time you meet Lisa Garland, the nurse in the red cardigan, it’s a genuinely unsettling and sad moment. Only if you’re at all familiar with her fate, that is. And it works for other characters, too.

On a storytelling front, Climax Studios opts to make a little more sense than the first game ever did. It’s beneficial for several reasons. Chiefly, it means that Origins is able to retain everything fans love about the franchise, while rewarding them with a much easier-to-follow story. One that sheds brand new light on characters and events from the first game, and by virtue of that, enables us to better understand the town itself.

So Origins is a success on that front. Where it’s less successful is with some of the enemies. The designs are flawless, standing among the best of them, and those few that return from the other games – in particular, nurses and the skin-wrapped walking body bags – benefit from looking more detailed and hideously beautiful than they have before. But Climax makes the mistake Silent Hill 2 did by having far too many that you can just run straight by. Travis does get tired every now and then, jogging at a much slower pace for a moment or two, which makes him more vulnerable. But when you’re outside that’s never a problem. There are some pithy attempts at QTEs too, which aren’t ever scary, nor do they generally surprise when they occur.

But the biggest problem is Climax Studio’s strict adherence to previous games, right down to some ludicrously linear design. Cedar Grove Sanitarium, the second location you visit, is, at times, a lesson in total tedium. Good thing it’s the only bum note in terms of level design – and the fact the story kicks into high gear during this segment means it’s easy to forgive. But what isn’t easy to forgive is Origins feeling like it’s on the wrong platform. Akira Yamaoka has expressed his desire to bring the game to the PS2, only if it’s a success on the PSP.

So, looking at Origins in terms of being the next game in the franchise, as well as the first not developed by Team Silent, and a prequel to everything that has come before, it’s massively successful. And getting to revisit both the town and certain locations from the first game is immensely satisfying – partly because the game looks stunning. But it does fail as a PSP game. On the PS2, everyone would be forced to play it the way Climax intends: in your room, in the dark, with headphones on. Just like the best in this series.

Craig Gilmore