Silent Hill: Homecoming lead designer Jason Allen had just finished talking about the virtues of Alien. Eloquent in his presentation at a recent Konami press event, he noted the strengths of Ridley Scott's classic horror film, pointing out that we only fully see the monster at the very end of the movie, a major influence on his approach to tension in Silent Hill.

Despite his clear appreciation of horror, I have to admit, I'm still skeptical about Allen's Silent Hill--the first American-designed entry to the series. It does look great on the outside, a combination of logical improvements and strict adherence to series code. But as a long-time fan, change is more scary than any monster. And like the fog-dowsed town of its namesake, a brief glance wasn't enough to reveal anything significant.

Hoping to calm my fears, I pulled the developer aside at the end of the night. We briefly went over the approach he and his team have had to facing this daunting project, with topics including visual style, Eastern horror, composer Akira Yamaoka, and other filmic influences.

Shack: Playing the game, I was struck by how visually similar it is to the previous titles, right down to the font of the text.

Jason Allen: Absolutely. I'm really conscious of the fact that we are Western developers of something that has been [started] somewhere else, and I wanted to maintain some common threads.

The level of detail on the monsters was quite high, and when we saw them in the world, when the fog hadn't been put in yet, it was very, very clean. Particularly when you start seeing things in 720p, and you can see all the detail, it didn't feel like Silent Hill. It just looked wrong. So the fog had to come in, but it still didn't look right. So this is why we added this grain filter.

Aesthetically it may seem like, "Why would you dumb down something to make it look like last generation?" But I think it's really important that that particular style and look repeat, because I think that's part of the experience.

Shack: You mentioned the difference between Western and Eastern horror in your presentation, and how you've approached it..

Jason Allen: I think the thing about Silent Hill is, I've played all the previous games, but even when I started development, I would say it took me a good three, three and half months to get what Silent Hill is, properly. To understand maybe the.. the ingredients, that make up the experience.

And I was using the example earlier: let's say you have a Westerner that commits adultery. In the West, his wife would put him on Jerry Springer, we'd all point the finger at him and say, "You're a terrible, terrible man." The kids would disown him. That's how it is.

You go back to traditional Japanese culture, through all the generations, and family is everything. Shame is something that is to be avoided at all cost. If you have the same situation, it'd never be spoken about. The family unit would stay together, but they wouldn't deal with it. There would be this oppressive silence in the house, but they wouldn't deal with it. On the surface outside to people they would present basically the same family.

Now if you deal with their children, they've got their foot kind of in the West, kind of still in the East. So they've got some of their older heritage, but also some of the ideals from the West. In that sense, they're like, "We want to talk about what's going on, but we don't want to do it directly." So they do it subtly.

So the example I give is this: If you went into that house, you'd see pictures on a table, pictures of their children, facing to the east. Which is where the family started--the sun rising and all that. But the father would be facing west, because he's the past. So it's displayed, it's there, but you have to be subtle to notice it.

I think that's why Silent Hill is so distinctive, because it has that degree of subtlety to it. And it takes a while to understand the things that you need to place within the world for people to go, "Wait a minute, is that..? Could that be there?"

I like to raise questions in gaming, but not answer them, because I prefer the fans to discuss on the forums. You throw them a bone, and the next thing you have tens of thousands of posts, "Is it this, is it that?" They want to know the answer, but I'm not going to tell them. Because I think it's more interesting for them to try and discover what they think it could be.

Read on for Allen's thoughts on tighter control, the film Jacob's Ladder, and his experiences working with Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka.