"In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill." This custom story is made as a tribute to Team Silent and the titles that they have made during their time at Konami from 1996 to 2005. Entries such as 'Silent Hill', 'Silent Hill 2', 'Silent Hill 3', and 'Silent Hill 4: The Room' are collected as memories and to show what the series has meant to the community. Team Silent and Silent Hill may be gone, but the memories and the lasting impact on horror will forever be in the hearts and minds of the fans of the revolutionary series. This mod serves as my own version of the town of Silent Hill with the themes of Obsession and Grief so that means no monsters, no people, only memories.
Silent Hill: Respite is the perfect embodiment of everything wrong with the modding community. Its development cycle doesn't only show how narcissistic people are in the modding scenery nowadays, but also proves that people who disregard others can never learn or improve, and as a result, stay stuck in the never ending loop of asking help for basic things, while using other people's creations to further put yourself in the spotlight.
I love this concept. As a tribute to the famous Silent Hill series, it's really very nice. The museum of horror films got me the most. Even though it is a beginner's work and we could find many mistakes and shortcomings in it, there is literally at every step you can see the enthusiasm of the creator for his work in order to create something unusual for the conditions of Amnesia. It's not for the maximum rating, but I'm already looking forward to the author's future projects.
Normally I wouldn't say anything negative about such a mod and consider it a fun little project.
However, the author boasted about it so much that I felt compelled to take him up on the challenge.
===IN SHORT===
Considering how long this took to make and how much the author talked about it, the final result is a let-down.
Respite is a single map with little detail, barely any gameplay and way too much reading.
It's essentially just a collage of easter eggs with some fanfics attached.
Which would've been fine if the mod wasn't advertised like god-knows-what.
However, there are some quite promising level design ideas here.
I think you can make something quite good if you focus on crafting a focused story!
===EXECUTION===
The map is rather poorly detailed, except for a few specific spots.
There is some creativity here that I appreciate, but you need to put way more effort into detailing and polishing.
The sound design is almost nonexistent.
Music fading in and out at a short radius feels odd and there are like only 2 other sounds in the entire mod.
I'm not gonna comment on gameplay since this mod is not trying to hide the fact that it's a walkig sim.
This mod features heaps of writing. It was way too much and too fast.
Extract the essence from your writing and your texts will improve drastically.
The graphic design of the custom notes was quite good though!
When it comes to being a tribute to Silent Hill, this mod is a mixed bag.
Many of the references aren't related to Silent Hill.
Some are cute, but would only fit in an original content mod.
There are a few references though that really don't fit in here at all.
As a result, Respite feels like a 40/60 split between tributing its author and Team Silent.
===MISC===
I can't find a way to put this nicely, so I'm gonna go fully biased for a moment.
Don't go on Discord and boast about making basic stuff with custom assets which were not made by you.
When the assets are most of the appeal, it looks like you're trying to take the credit for them.
It's as if someone gave you a cake, you placed it on a platter, put a cherry on top and told everyone at a party that you made the cake.
I was not the only one to be put off by this, by the way. Being humble where needed will make everyone way less picky about your work.
Nitpicks:
- In the start there's a long monologue playing over a note that doesn't have the matching text. It just doesn't work.
- Silent Hill movie posters in Silent Hill are cliche.
- The cinema banner looks like it is missing textures.
- Heaven's Night looks quite odd with the haphazard mix of a modern setting and medieval furniture.
- There are quite a few technical mishaps in the map.
- To quote you directly:
"Bloody Disgusting, Gameranx and PCGamesN have expressed their interest with the mod. Take the Moddb reviews with a grain of salt."
The fact that a few obscure news outlets mentioned your mod doesn't discredit the reviews. Or make the mod better either, which is what you implied.
- The mod is advertised as a "conclusion to the Silent Hill series". If anything, it's a post-mortem summary of loose ends.
- Spacing out the credits like that will make everyone skip them, not listen to the entire song.
- Four 1-page notes are more intersting than a single note with 4 pages. Break them up!
- There is a lot of unused assets in the files (and also some copies of vanilla files). Keep better track of what you use, because the download could be a lot smaller.
I hope this review doesn't discourage you, because that's not the point.
Hopefully you can take what I wrote to improve your design and writing skills as well as some "public relations" stuff, and make something great in the future.
Gonna rate it 5 - Respite is not much, but there's nothing overly annoying in it either. It's a decent first mod.
Hey! Not bad honestly, the ambience and the level itself was very reminiscent of the few things i remember of Silent Hill as a whole. I think it does the job for what it tries to represent, but for this filsize this mod could have benefited a lot from well.. something to do and spend a time on other than reading. The notes weren't that meaningful for me, i don't know all that much about Silent Hill and there wasn't that much to do so the mod was pretty short. If only you'd take this little town for a ride and put actual monster encounters and goals, maybe make it a little longer this would have been worthwhile for anyone's time. Areas had a good ambience, that one room with the tiled windows even looked quite good to be honest. Could use more details but atmospheric all in all.
In this state, it's worth a 7/10 for me for being different, definitely doesn't deserve the low score it currently has. Consider making some gameplay, and make it longer and i'd gladly replay it. Although letting people rate a one room demo was definitely not a good decision 10 years after the release of Amnesia, especially in this community :)
Positives:
- A decent look alike to Silent hill locations
- Story is kinda alright
Negatives:
- Over 2.6GB large. The Super_secret folder takes up more than 800MB of space. It's not even secret because you don't need a password to open it
To put this into perspective, the vanilla game requires 2GB memory and 3GB Hard drive. Just remove the "secret folder"
- No ambiance what so ever in the dining area
- Some overlapping textures at a couple places
- Levels lack any sort of details. You added furniture, but completely skipped the detailing part at most areas, making most of the level feel so empty
- Why are you referencing yourself and your creations at some places? I'm not sure how horror VR is related to Silent hill either. If this is a Silent hill tribute, maybe focus on making it look like Silent hill?
- The outside ambiance is a 2D sound and not 3D, which makes no sense in this context
- You glitch badly if you touch trees lol Gyazo.com
- Music will fade out very suddenly. Example at the heavens night. I hear it loud and clear at the stage, but a meter in to the bathroom and I can't hear it anymore. Music always restarts whenever you get out of the range and go into range of the music again too
- Area outside the bathroom's window is a stretched plane, which is too close to the window so you clearly notice it Gyazo.com
Conclusion:
Meh.
It's an alright Silent hill look alike. Just, everything besides that is not very well crafted, and you added a bunch of uncessessary references not related to Silent hill.
Decent work.
5/10 - Average
~ Regards, The Crusty Dusty
It's nice the creator made a tribute to his favorite game franchise, but sometimes it looked like he made a tribute to himself rather than Silent Hill.
Some rooms and areas in this mod are filled and decorated with things that aren't related to Silent Hill, such as posters of the creator's seemingly favorite movies and images from his other Amnesia mod.
It really feels out of place for a mod that aims to tribute Silent Hill.
Other than that, the mod is alright but it feels a bit underwhelming.
It's cool that it takes place in a map that represents Silent Hill, but sadly there isn't much to do other than read very long notes. The areas could have been more detailed and have more ambient (Most of the rooms are dead silent), it would have helped with the immersion.
Even so, I understand what the creator tried to do and it's decently put together for what it is. I just hoped there would be more interactive elements than just reading notes, you can go pretty creative with this kind of stuff.
Some other stuff:
The rar file included in the mod weights over 800mb (!) and doesn't include much other than some songs, random pictures from the level editor and some videos.
It's probably better to just include a link to a google drive folder that includes those files rather than greatly increase the size of this mod for little to no actual reason.
I also find it very weird how slow and spaced the credits are, I guess the creator wanted to fit the credits to match the length of the song, but I can't think of anyone who would actually stay and watch the slowly-rolling credits just to witness how "cool" it is that the credits match the length of the song. Again, it seems the creator did this for himself more than anything else.
This is not even an actual custom story. It's just one room to do basically nothing. Let's please stop releasing things like this.