Review by HLWATCHER - Silent Hill: Alchemilla mod for Half-Life 2

-THIS IS THE SAME REVIEW YOU CAN FIND IN RTSL.com-
Well I have -like almost anyone who has played this mode seriously- mixed feelings about the Alchemilla experience.

But don’t get me wrong. Overall I think it was a good enjoyable experience.

So telling the good aspects of it first, I can definitely say I loved the whole mapping in this mod. Maps were neat, very well done and the whole atmospheric psychological horror is there, if we can put this into one equation then it would be: map scary environment (50%) + map soundtrack adaptation (25%) + in game scary clues (12.5%) + puzzle developing (12.5%) = 100% psychological horror.

You know, is curious how many people say they miss the FPS element on this mod, myself I also thought for a bit that this scary mod was like a classic “point and click” game. But after I get more and more into it, I also consider that was a bit unfair.

I loved how this mod fits nicely into the Silent Hill Universe, and despite you don’t find any monster trying to kill you, nor you don’t use any shotgun to blow any monsters head off, the whole story was deep and scary enough to make you think -the whole story of the protagonist is really sad and makes you think that town is just a living hell from another dimension- . I even want to see the Silent Hill movies to get deeper into that eerie universe.

Overall I think is quite unfair to say this was a bad mod just because you don’t shoot anything in there. So be warn if you like to get into it, you have to be willing to explore a lot and to be open mind about it.

I guess another thing I liked about the mod was its whole “old school” aura around it. You know, fetching things, retrieving keys open doors, you know, all that stuff which is enough entertaining to play a bit hours, and then engage with it the next day. You can really enjoy better the mod if you play it by parts and not in one very big exhausting non stop game time.

Now about the bad things. I think the main shortcoming of the mod is its natural limitation in some game assets. like HUD and not be able to have any inventory at all. Sometimes that makes the game-play very confusing, by not knowing what to do, or which main task you have to fulfill. In a personal view I highly recommend you to play it along with some walk trough: here´s the one I use it and I liked it because it was perfectly done and it was very handy; Silenthillmemories.net , Also the gamer can´t crouch nor jump and that sometimes is quite obnoxious because you have this natural HL2 gamer instinct of exploring using the full exploring assets of the main character.

The voice act was really nicely done too, but sometimes I also found some bugs. So I recommend you to install it via Gauge, as you can access the console from there if you have some bug. I had 2 bugs, one in the “living lungs” section where I supposed to pass out I died more than 5 times, luckily I managed to solve this once I re-installed it via gauge. The second bug was about some faulty triggers in the morgue section at the end of it, which I easily solved with “noclip”.

In conclusion this mod is a really good piece of mapping horror in HL2 source engine. Its perfect to play it in some Halloweens eve, and if you want to try the medium library of HL1 & HL2 scary mods, then this one is somewhat mandatory.

I also liked this author work! I think is great and it has some cool quality, reminded me the “Grey” fps horror mod in some parts and in some mapping style reminded me the hegemonic “Cry of Fear” too, so I’d love to see a scary mod from this author where actually you can shoot and kill some monsters, that would be just awesome, by the way, I think he’s developing another scary mod, as I saw it on his Mod DB profile, I hope it will be good as much as this one.