Silent Hill f is one of the few Silent Hill games set outside Silent Hill itself. It transports players from the eternal doldrums of Maine, North America to 1960s Japan, and casts you as a school student in the foggy village of Ebisugaoka. It’s very good, thanks not least to a thoughtful and poignant story from Ryukishi07. Appetites are now whetted for a Silent Hill package tour, and Konami producer Motoi Okamoto already has a few ideas about where he’d like the series to go next. Ideas that, admittedly, make me nervous about the possibility of ham-fisted cultural misrepresentation.
“We believe we could perhaps take similar approaches with other cultures across the globe,” Okamoto told Inverse’s Shannon Liao in a recent, translated interview. “For example, in Central or South America, we could perhaps tap into the more local, shamanistic beliefs and see how that ties in. But we could also try to expand our horizons and look into other regions, like possibly Russia, Italy, or South Korea, because all those areas have their own unique types of belief systems. I believe that will be a gateway for us to expand our concepts further.”
Asked to elaborate, Okamoto commented that he reads horror books from Central and South America. He also referenced magical realism, a literary tradition in which myths and folklore form part of daily life, which has precedents across the globe, but is heavily associated (in my experience, anyway) with 20th century Central and South American authors including Gabriel García Márquez and Mariana Enríquez. I can’t quite tell from the write-up, but it sounds like Okamoto cited these last two authors in particular.
He also made more general – indeed, broad to the point of demeaning and reductive – reference to political events that could make a useful context for a Silent Hill game. “Those areas have been affected by a lot of military governments and coups,” Okamoto told Liao. “There is a type of bravado and ‘machismo’ that comes from these political landscapes. There’s also the more folkloric angle coming from shamanism and local beliefs.” As for the above mention of Korea, Russia and Italy, Okamoto didn’t go into detail. In his defence, he was answering questions in person and, I imagine, trying to avoid getting too specific, for fear of setting tongues a-wagging.
Okamoto feels one obstacle to setting a Silent Hill game in Central or South America is the absence of a local developer they would trust with the keys to this horror series. “Central and South America do not have very many prominent development studios for video games capable of handling an IP like Silent Hill,” he said. “So while they have a lot of interesting movies, books, and tales, how we would translate that into games is something we still have to explore.”
Anglophone writers in the northern hemisphere have often done a terrible job of covering the game development scene in Central and South America. Well, I have at least. But one group who come to mind are Ace Team, the creators of Zeno Clash, Rock Of Ages, and The Eternal Cylinder. I think they might find Silent Hill a bit sedate visually, but they’ve certainly got an eye for unearthly creatures and places. There’s also Dual Effect, creators of Tormented Souls, which is in the right ballpark, but closer to Resi and Outlast than Silent Hill.
In the shorter term, there’s Silent Hill: Townfall. It’s being developed in Scotland by Screen Burn (formerly No Code), developers of Observation and Stories Untold. I have no idea where it’s set, but given the studio’s past projects, it should have some frightful gadgets in it.