Silent Doom Hill is a Doom 2 mod that sees us play as Heather Mason, protagonist of the third entry into the Silent Hill franchise. Upon booting it up, we find ourselves in a dark, dingy room full of torn apart corpses and human-sized rabbit dolls eerily sitting around. With your pistol in hand and one hundred bullets to your name, you will have to traverse this carnage, as well as avoiding falling off into an endless chasm which makes up most of this world. It only takes a few rooms before you suddenly find yourself waking up from this dream, in a toilet stall you hid in to avoid working.
Happy to find that your shift is now over, you trot straight out of that stall and admire your narcissistic self in a mirror. Enraptured in your reflection, you fail to notice a monster crawling out of a neighboring stall that then proceeds to jump you and steal your flip flops. From then on out, it becomes your sacred mission to retrieve them. With how loud her probably flat, fin-like feet smack against the environment, this is perfectly understandable. Eh? What about its Silent Hill 3 theme? It’s still there, though I wouldn’t play this mod for that alone since this is just scraping the surface of its madness, it only goes further into the deep end as it continues.
As you are given control once more, you will find that it is now in third person and has tank controls. It is a really neat effect, though is rarely used, and will promptly switch back to first person, making it more of a gimmick than a mechanic. You will never enter combat while in that state. When in first person it plays exactly like Doom, minus the significantly decreased movement speed. There are no puzzles, items to collect, or anything that links it to Silent Hill other than its theme and protagonist. It won’t be long before you encounter your first foe, the nurse. She goes down with a few pistol shots and isn’t a threat unless you allow her to get into melee range.
This mod is pretty restrained at first, allowing you to marvel at the strange, surreal environments without much foes needing a bullet to the face. All told, the atmosphere leans more to the surreal than horror, though it does contain a bit of the latter on occasion. There are 11 levels in total, with the majority of them being very short. Most of the enemies have received new textures and sound effects that do make them sound more threatening. They all appear as female now, even the cyberdemon and features frontal nudity. This does make sense for Silent Hill 3, with only the Elemental and Archvile being unchanged as of now.
It won’t be long until you get the shotgun, which remains the same. Later on, you will also receive a new chaingun variant and a unique plasma rifle. Some weapons such as the Super Shotgun and Rocket Launcher appear the same visually but have been tweaked. The super shotgun, for instance, reloads far faster, while the rocket launcher shoots out an incredibly slow projectile. They are a bit of a contradiction as one weapon encourages faster gameplay and the other a more cautious approach to actually land a shot. That wouldn’t be all that noticeable if the mod itself remained restrained with its monster count, though in the later levels it throws quite a few making the slower movement and rocket projectiles a bit of a pain.
Monster projectiles are affected as well. From the imp to the cyberdemon, they are all far slower. The Cyberdemon only shows up once during the mod as a boss fight. Right beforehand, you will be given a rocket launcher. It is quite a bizarre fight as both your missiles slowly try to hit the other. At that point in time, you lack other more useful weapons like the plasma rifle or BFG, yet it isn’t that difficult a fight, just a tad too lengthy. Also by that point, the mod author has long stopped trying to make anything resembling Silent Hill and goes gloriously wild. The very next level has dubstep blasting in the background, tons of action, and cool set pieces. Drained from the boss fight, I found myself with nothing but a knife. They clearly expected that as you get a shiny new gun and a ton of cell ammo in that same room if you manage to make it there.
That single level probably lasted as long as the last eight combined. It isn’t a long experience as only a single episode has been made so far that will take around an hour to complete. It is chock full of strangeness throughout, however. Easily one of its most entertaining aspects is how it progressively just starts doing what it wants until somehow you end up in a situation that has you flirting with a junkie and shooting a security officer to get into a nightclub. I feel the need to issue a warning for those that suffer from epilepsy. The last three maps feature a ton of strobing lights, enough so that it makes fighting a bit difficult at times as projectiles and enemies tend to be hard to spot in that chaotic environment. You only need to jump once throughout, but you will nonetheless need to bind a key for it if you haven’t already.
With all that being said, Silent Doom Hill is definitely an interesting mod. Given that it released on the 1st of April, that may have tipped off the eagle-eyed Doomers out there. This is a silly experience, no doubt, but it is far from a simple joke mod. There is a lot of potential here, and it is undoubtedly a memorable mod already. It won’t appeal to those that only want a Silent Hill experience or theme. This is more akin to having a bad drug induced dream with only a small portion of your brain remembering that you’ve half played Silent Hill 3 over a decade ago. We could be playing as Willy Wonka for all the difference that would make throughout most of this. So would I recommend this? Without a doubt, if you are looking for something surreal. I eagerly away the second episode with the hopes of finally bringing that sandal thief to justice.
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