Good pieces of horror are a blend of the familiar with the strange - it's this combination that makes them fascinating. Homecoming's environments - the grungy hospital, the house that's straight out of the Amityville Horror, the deserted playground - all seem as humdrum as the vegetable section of your average supermarket. Though they're meant to be the strange part of the formula, the reality is that they are such cliches that they end up as the familiar - leaving the equation unbalanced and the tension ruined.
The puzzles are clearly designed solely to keep you occupied, and the combat grates. The game lacks creative thinking in all the key areas and as a result it's hard to imagine who's really going to enjoy playing it. Capcom has spoken about how it plans to reboot the Resident Evil series; on the evidence of Homecoming, Konami needs to do the same for the Silent Hill series.
