A Silent Hill fan is making a PC port of Silent Hill: Downpour that restores a cut boss battle and plenty more

Silent Hill: Downpour Native PC Port - Trailer - YouTube

If you've forgotten Silent Hill: Downpour it was the western-developed Silent Hill that went semi-open world and had a bunch of sidequests in it, but was still a bit too busy trying to retell Silent Hill 2 only with the villain in a different hat. It wasn't a disaster, but to say "at least it wasn't Silent Hill: Homecoming or the arcade game" is to damn it with such faint praise you may as well be whispering from the other side of the street.

Still, those sidequests were tasty. Ignore the main plot about a prison escapee being chased by embodiments of his own guilt—wow, a man in prison has a dark past, what a shocking development—and you could explore a town full of ghost stories and little mysteries. The one where you follow color-coded ribbons to find out what happened to a missing girl was a particular favorite, a reminder that Silent Hill can still be properly haunting when it tries.

Good luck trying to play it today, though. Downpour came out on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and absolutely nothing else, which means your best bet is probably to emulate it in RPCS3. Or to wait for a PC native port to come along, and what's that? Oh, it's a trailer for a PC native port someone's been chipping away at.

Latest Videos From

Watch full video here:

Indie_RU's port isn't just a way to play Downpour on PC with an uncapped framerate and higher resolutions, nice as that always is. It's also restoring cut content, letting us wield extra weapons like the Bogeyman's hammer and bringing back deleted cutscenes, notes, dialogue, and entire sidequests. It's also restored a boss battle seen in an early trailer where you fight the "Monocle Man" who was reduced to a cameo in the finished game.

Apparently we can expect the finished product around September/October, which is also when we're expecting Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn Interactive's Scottish take on the series. I've got my fingers crossed that's going to push the series in an interesting direction, because all those arena battles in Silent Hill F weren't really my cup of rusty tea with mud in it, or whatever they drink in Silent Hill.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.