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Is It Good? Silent Hill Downpour: Anne's Story #4 Review

Comic Books

Is It Good? Silent Hill Downpour: Anne’s Story #4 Review

We have reached the finale of Silent Hill Downpour: Anne’s Story. It’s been an enjoyable and interesting ride from start to finish, filling in the backstory and movements of the character during the game.

With the final issue before us, let us see how it all closes out. Is it good?

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Silent Hill Downpour: Anne’s Story #4 (IDW Publishing)


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After all of the hell, madness, and chaos that Anne has been through in Silent Hill she has finally reached Murphy Pendleton. She’s ready to put an end to everything and finish what she started, based on the advice that her own father had passed onto her. Will she finally be able to pull the trigger or will her own personal demons rip her apart like so many people before in this foggy city?

silent-hill-downpour-4-anne-creatures
Speaking of guts, I think those things want to eat your guts.

Now that the entire Silent Hill Downpour mini-series has ended, it’s best to go over the entirety of the run to see how well it went. Overall, I would say that this issue and the mini-series itself was good overall, doing what it set out to do: it focused solely on Anne and her journey, the demons she encountered, her struggles to catch the man she was after, and the personal hell she experienced. The comic helped fill in plenty of backstory for her, a bit of the figures of the town, and even filled in a couple of lingering plot holes that the game had. This is a worthy addition to the game, adding a quite a bit more depth to both it and Anne.

The biggest question on my mind when it came to this comic though was the ending. You see, like all Silent Hill games, Downpour has multiple endings. From my understanding, there are very few endings in the series that could be considered canon, allowing for the game to end rather ambiguously and differently for each player. As such, the comic here picks a particular ending from the game and frankly, makes it the official ending for the story. I personally liked the ending, but I think it would have been better if the comic ended at a certain point; it should have ended with what happend to Anne and Murphy on the boat left up in the air, allowing for the reader (if they played the game) to insert the ending they got. Of course, having an actual ending probably makes more sense so it’s not too big of deal in the grand scheme of things.

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Writing-wise, this issue and previous ones by Tom Waltz have a lot of strong points (with a few minor hiccups here and there). The characterization and backstory for Anne was excellent from start to finish like stated, though there was a small problem to it: most of the Silent Hill games (the ones I played at least) have the main character able to overcome their own demons and be able to move on after fighting back against the monsters in the end. Here, it honestly feels like Anne didn’t really do much in the end. She found out about the truth and that’s it. She didn’t really move past anything in the end or change the story on some level, which is a bit disappointing. Other than that, the dialogue and narration were good and handled well. The pacing was erratic and story seemed to jump around a lot, though given the nature of the games, it doesn’t feel too out of place. It’s also creepy and horrific in the right places, so it was far scarier than most horror comics I’ve read.

The artwork by Tristan Jones has been great and consistently creepy throughout the book. The characters look decent, even if they are often a bit hard to make out given the heavy shadows and angles in the book at point. The monsters, whether new or old, are all well-drawn and depicted, being downright horrifying and nasty overall. The colors were moody and often featured intriguing effects. The only real problems came with a couple of pages that were hard to follow, going back to the weird story structure and pacing problem. Scenes radically and abruptly changed and it was hard to tell at points when the scene was different. Still, the artwork definitely fit and helped the book stand out visually.

Is It Good?

Silent Hill Downpour: Anne’s Story #4 is a solid ending to the mini-series. It had some problems, but the mini-series in general would be a great addition for any fan of this particular game. It adds more onto the story, the characters, and even fills in a few gaps as well. Overall, I recommend this and when it comes out, give it a look if you enjoyed Downpour.

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