Home News Games Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima welcome you to Silent Hills

Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima welcome you to Silent Hills

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silent hills
silent hills

In what sounds like an idle fanboy dream willed psychically into life, Konami’s much-loved but recently neglected series Silent Hill is getting a new instalment under the aegis of two of the people surely best qualified to make a Silent Hill game.

The long-running survival horror series is known for being a) bloody terrifying and b) bloody weird (and c) bloody bloody), so its new custodians are cause for celebration. In the bloody terrifying corner, we have renowned film writer/director Guillermo del Toro, known for his lavish horrors and horror-tinged adventures, from Cronos through Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. As for bloody weird, Hideo Kojima is best known for Metal Gear, a stealth series equally lauded for its mind-frying plots as its accomplished gameplay. Oh, and just to complete a nice fan-pleasing trifecta, they’ve only gone and got Norman Reedus, best known as unstoppable zombie-killing machine Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead, to play the lead.

The game was announced via a typical piece of offbeat viral marketing from Kojima. At Sony’s Gamescom conference the other day, a teaser trailer for a new horror game called “P.T.” was shown, announcing an “interactive teaser” available for PSN. Turns out “P.T.” stood for “Playable Teaser”, and completing the PSN download – which Kojima expected to take about a week, but it was cracked within hours – revealed the official Silent Hills announcement. (An amusing hint that no-one got until Kojima explained it was that P.T.’s developer was listed as 7780s Studio – which is derived from the square kilometre area of Shizuoka, a Japanese prefecture whose name translates to “Quiet Hills”. The Silent Hill series is often referred to as “Shizuoka” in Japan.)

Last night Kojima added a few more titbits to chew on at his Metal Gear Solid V Gamescom conference – as well as confirming that Kojima Productions would be the game’s developer, he noted that he wants to make it as scary as possible. “We originally wanted you to pee your pants,” he said. “Now we want you to s*** your pants.”

What we don’t know is a release window or indeed what platform it’ll be on – presumably PS4 is a lockdown, but other than that there’s nothing to do but wait for more details. While stocking up on spare pants.