Since its inception in 1999, the Silent Hill series has taken us to new and terrifying places, like a creepy school, a creepy hospital, a creepy amusement park, a creepy apartment building, another creepy hospital, a creepy hotel, a creepy motel, a creepy mall, a different creepy apartment building, a creepy hospital...

Okay, maybe there was some repetition in there. But that's always been part of the series' charm (if "charm" is the right word for a franchise whose monsters look like animals that have been skinned, and then sewn to each other) -- taking familiar, safe places and running them through the Nightmare Filter. Team Silent iterated on this formula with the addition of first-person segments and a nearly Silent Hill-free plot in 2004's The Room, but Double Helix's Silent Hill: Homecoming returns to a more traditional experience.

The first level is a creepy hospital. See? Traditional.

You play as Alex Shephard, a combat veteran who returns to his hometown of Shephard's Glen after a stint in a hospital to discover that the place is looking a bit...foggy. Townspeople have gone missing, large sections of road have disappeared, and the most he can get anyone to admit to is that something "strange" is happening.  Alex goes out in search of his brother, Josh, and his investigation leads him to dark-cultish happenings in Silent Hill.

The biggest change this time around is the combat system; Alex can lock on, evade, and perform counterattacks and basic combos. It's the most fleshed-out combat system in the series yet, and works pretty well; the downside, however, is that Alex's capability removes most of the tension from enemy encounters--with a knife and enough time he can kill pretty much anything. The game attempts to make up for this by throwing more enemies at you at once (one area has you fighting no fewer than five nurses simultaneously), but when all else fails you can still run faster than almost anything else in the game.

Near the end, monsters give way to human Order members. I thought it was kind of lame until the first time one of them saw me and went, "Oh, shit!"  You just don't get that kind of welcome from Pyramid Head.

Puzzles in Homecoming range from "Collect three doodads and return them here" to "Aimlessly slide these blocks around until you snap your controller in half."  There aren't many in the game, they're not very interesting, and it feels like they're included out of habit more than anything.

Similarly, Homecoming's story is good, but not great. Series fans won't be caught off-guard by most of the twists (SPOILER:  there's guilt), and the plot was a lot less confusing than usual. In any other series, the latter would be a good thing, but most of the fun of a Silent Hill game is deciphering its events and symbolism alongside a protagonist who may never understand it all himself. Homecoming spells it all out for you by the end, which is a little disappointing.

Although Homecoming does little to progress or evolve the Silent Hill franchise, it hits far more often than it misses. Fans of the series won't be disappointed (barring occasional fatigue), and fans of action/horror games will find it perfectly adequate.