Shack: The controls are obviously much tighter than in the past.

Jason Allen: It was one of the things that I first addressed when I went on the project. They were asking me, "Do you want to stick with a rail-based camera, or do you want to go for more of a free-form?" And I said one of the frustrations for me, as I say, at its heart [Silent Hill] is a mystery game, right? And you're trying to solve that, so a lot of it is exploration.

You go into a new space and you go, "What's in here that tells me a bit more about my journey?" And if you have a rail-based camera, you're not seeing the entire room, so there's always a degree of frustration. "Oh, I want to know what's in this corner over here, and I can't see that." So putting that [free-form] camera system in allows us to be able to see the room, so you get a feeling more that you're immersed in the space in a way that perhaps you wouldn't have been before.

Shack: How have you gone about balancing the combat with the faster controls?

Jason Allen: It's a lot of play-testing..

Shack: Faster enemies?

Jason Allen: There is that. We have some enemies--the one you saw with the ribcage, it's called Smog. It wasn't clear from the capture, but we use him as a kind of blocking character. So that you put him in really tight spaces, because he has this area of influence cloud within the--he was designed around glowing embers, wood and charcoal. So he has that coloring on him, he has these blisters on him that pop and change color. So what you're seeing is kind of a smoke effect around him. If you get too close, you get in that cloud, and you have almost like a struggle mechanic.

So the area of attack is one thing. The way they surprise you. They obviously fight in numbers as well, we're not dealing with singles. It was very important that we could have a fluid way to switch [between targets]. And obviously, we do have ranged weapons in the game, and I'm limiting the amount of ammunition that you're getting. I'm still balancing that stuff today--the game's not out til September, but I'm still tweaking.

But that's one of the things, I don't want it to feel like, "Hey, it's just a run and gun, I can go through it and just shoot." We have neat little tricks with the weapons, certainly with the ranged weapons, that you can do to force monsters into stun earlier than you would normally. But you have to know where they are, you have to find those.

I always felt at its heart it was a melee-based game, so the lion's share of the combat is really melee-based. We do have ranged weaponry, but I think the visceral nature of contact with melee makes it feel more tense. Once you step away from a creature, the tension drops down a lot. Unless they're charging at you.

Shack: You also mentioned earlier that Ridley Scott's Alien was an influence. How about the film Jacob's Ladder?

Jason Allen: Oh sure.

Shack: It's been cited as an influence on past games in the series, but I mostly bring it up because of the military element in Homecoming.

Jason Allen: Absolutely. It's very much--it is actually one of the things we talked about earlier. For example, character introduction--sometimes when you play games, a new character comes in, boom the spotlight goes on, the creature comes out, you see them in all their glory. As humans, we categorize and we label, and that's how we store and understand what it is. We go, "Okay, I'm seeing the Gecko in Metal Gear. I can see how it walks, how it runs, and I can potentially see how it might have limitations, because I can view it and think that way analytically."

But if I don't see a creature, if I only see glimpses of it, I don't know what he can do. And my fear is maybe greater than its skills. And I think we can play off of that fear in the game, so if you don't see him, you see glimpses of something, and you go, "Okay, I really don't want to go out there. I really don't want to face him. I don't know if this pipe that I'm used to using is going to be effective against that creature. What's he gonna do?" So, I think that's again one of the things we're looking at.

But going back to your point about Jacob's Ladder, yes, most certainly, because we have strong parallels in the military theme, we don't know if he's dead and it's his death throes--

Shack: And as you said, Silent Hill can be a metaphor for purgatory..

Jason Allen: Absolutely. You don't know. I don't want to answer that. I don't even know if I have the answer to that. It's just a point of view. My perspective may be wrong, but I think it's like: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and mystery is also. You go through, you experience it, and you form your own conclusions--and because we don't answer them, you might be right. You don't know.

Shack: What has it been like working with [Silent Hill 1-4 composer] Akira Yamaoka?

Jason Allen: It's been great. Obviously there's a language barrier, and they do bring translators over, but his English is very good, he's getting better all the time. I can see that just through the duration of the project, how much more comfortable he is using English than he was.

He's been over probably 12 times. Obviously it's not a short flight for him, and you can imagine the jet lag. But he's fantastic. He'll give us 20 tracks, and we'll say, "This is what we're kind of thinking for this particular piece," and we'll go through it and I'll say, "You know, maybe change this," and he's more than open to changing anything, so it's really a painless process. It's been great. And it's nice to have that continuity toward previous games as well.

Shack: Multiple endings?

Jason Allen: Yes. Yes.

Shack: And I noticed Pyramid Head in the presentation--

Jason Allen: Really? Are you sure? [laughs]

Shack: Just out of the corner of my eye. [laughs] Any comment on his role in the game?

Jason Allen: I leave it up to you to play and find out.

Shack: Thanks Jason.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is headed to stores this September, on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.