One of the big surprises of The Game Awards wasn’t a piece of news or an announcement, but a lack thereof. All the signs pointed to a Silent Hill reveal: between Sony Arabia’s mysterious tweets, the recently created Silent Hill Twitter account, or the consistent rumors, TGA was the perfect time to unveil a new game in the legendary series.
For those of you who aren’t aware – after all, the last game was released eight years ago – the Silent Hill series is a survival horror series set in the titular town, which has the unfortunate habit of sucking select visitors into a nightmarish otherworld inspired by the town’s dark history of cult activity – or the histories of the characters themselves as they atone for past sins.
Unfortunately, nothing was revealed, which seemingly quashed the rumors. Series creator Keiichiro Toyama recently left Sony despite consistent rumors that he was helming the reboot, and although other recent rumors have said that
Hideo Kojima would be reviving Silent Hills as a PS5 exclusive, the bad blood between him and Konami means that that rumor is a long shot.
However, @AestheticGamer1 (AKA Dusk Golem) one of the first to leak news of the upcoming reboot, has maintained that the game is still in development.
“In mid-2020, a good acquaintance of mine knew I was talking about the Silent Hill rumors, ” claimed Dusk Golem, “They didn’t tell me anything specifically, but they are working with Konami on something entirely unrelated to all of this. They just gave me a nudge to let me know they were ‘mighty positive’ something Silent Hill was in the works currently, wouldn’t tell me any more than that (and that’s fair, they have a personal leg in the race), but were fine joining the list of people who know and can corroborate it for me.”
The question remains, if a new game is in development, why wasn’t it announced at TGA, which is one of the biggest gaming events in the year, and consistently a night when a lot of big projects are revealed? Well, it’s possible that Toyama leaving Sony to form his own studio had something to do with it. If the rumors were correct, and he was in charge of the reboot, his departure could have left the series’ future up in the air once more. A more positive spin is that with the director leaving the project, Sony decided to withdraw the announcement until a new one is found – after all, a new director can also mean a new direction, and any trailer produced thus far may not be representative of the final game.
