Becrowned is as close to an old school Silent Hill as you can get

thesixthaxis.com:

We are in a golden age for indie horror right now. Titles like Crow Country, Signalis, and HollowBody have taken the genre into new directions whilst clearly showing reverence for the games that inspired them. In an era of flashy remakes and increasing focus on graphical fidelity it is nice to have games that concentrate on the looks and feel of the PS1 classics. The latest entry in this field is Becrowned, a true retro survival horror that more than borrows from Konami’s Silent Hill series.

The central protagonist is a man named Richard Torrance, but with he demo starting in media res rather than being the opening section of the game, there’s not much more to say about him than that. The Steam page describes him as a ‘man of strong will and unbreakable character’ which sounds like the beginning of a hubristic journey to me. There seems to be some kind of Dante-esque story with definite themes of punishment and regret which has always worked for the more psychologically infused Silent Hill over the action focus of Resident Evil.

That being said, there is plenty of combat included in the Becrowned demo, including a familiar feeling boss fight. The sense of familiarity is exacerbated by the demo being set in a hospital, further bringing it into direct comparison with its predecessors. The staccato movement of the enemies and their inhuman appearances are straight out of the Masahiro Ito playbook and fit right into the dark and grimy environments. You find both melee weapons and guns to fight off these foes but ammo is limited – although not as severely so as in some other games.

There doesn’t seem to be inventory management at play here, which seems to be a common shift in the current generation of indie horror. I can see the generic appeal of juggling items but it isn’t something I miss when games remove the limitation. Puzzles involve finding items and unlocking blocked areas with a couple of really well designed examples in the demo. One puzzle in particular requires