Video Game / Silent Hill: Origins

Jack says the town is located on
old "spiritual ground"...
Hopefully we
will be blessed!

A prequel released for the handheld PlayStation Portable and later ported to the PlayStation 2, Origins is a retelling of the events that happened seven years before Silent Hill. It stars a trucker named Travis Grady, whose attempts to take a shortcut through Silent Hill get sidetracked by a figure running onto the road and a house on fire. After bailing a mysterious (and very, very crispy) girl out of her house, he passes out and awakes in the completely deserted streets of Silent Hill. His attempts to find out what exactly happened to the girl lead him all over the town and eventually get him embroiled in mysterious cult activity, as well as the troubled past of his that appears to be a prerequisite for Silent Hill protagonists.

Although Origins faithfully sticks to the Silent Hill formula for creepy atmospheres, nightmare worlds, and baffling puzzles, it introduces Breakable Weapons and being able to switch over to the Otherworld via mirrors—in practice, this just means twice as many areas (of which half are just a grimdark version of themselves) to explore.

Characters in Origins, with the exception of Travis himself, are all younger versions of the characters found in Silent Hill — Dahlia, Lisa, and Kaufmann. They wear different clothes and have slightly different personalities, but are ultimately the same.

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Tropes specific to this game:

• Actionized Sequel: While the game does feature "better" controls and a bigger emphasis on killing monsters, the combat was going to be similar to that of Resident Evil 4 with a close, Always Over the Shoulder camera view. There were also plans to introduce a laser aiming module for guns and a barricade system to block monsters from accessing certain areas. In October 2006, the U.S.-based team was sacked and production was moved to another studio in the U.K., and those plans were scrapped.
• Already Met Everyone: Travis, his family, and the Butcher are the only characters unique to this game.
• The Artifact:Since all the pre-rendered cutscenes were already created before the game was re-written, looking closely shows it's actually a masked man that Travis swerves to avoid, not Alyessa, "Mr.Twilight", a masked Cultist who'd eventually be revealed to be Kaufmann, this entire plot thread was removed but the cutscene still shows him. On a more minor note, a cutscene near the end shows Travis wielding a pump-action shotgun, which is a clear holdover from pre-release versions, as the final release instead gives him a double-barreled boxlock.
• Berserk Button: For Travis, it's the idea of a parent abusing their child.
• Beware of Hitchhiking Ghosts: Travis stops his truck to avoid hitting a hooded figure. As soon as he gets out of the truck to check on this person, he sees Spectral Alessa in his rearview mirror and Silent Hill's signature fog starts rolling in.
• Big Damn Fire Exit: Travis has enough time to enter the burning Gillespie house and rescue Alessa from it, even if he takes his sweet time trying all of the locked doors (though he earns an accolade, an outfit, and an axe if he's fast enough). At times, the Halo of the Sun shows up to extinguish some parts blocked by flames.
• Big Damn Hero: Travis is possibly the most selfless and altruistic of Silent Hill protagonists yet. He willingly stays in town to help out the girl he just rescued from a burning building, while disinterestedly confronting his troubled past just because it's on the way. Of course, as the story goes on and the horrors get more personal, Travis reveals that even he has limits.
• Big Red Devil: The Final Boss is this.
• Bloody Handprint: Alessa leaves one on the glass of a mirror; touching it transports Travis to the Otherworld for the first time.
• Book Ends: Travis leaving Silent Hill is an almost exact mirror of how he entered the town.
• Breakable Weapons: Having a large inventory of backup weapons is why you end up stuffing something like half a dozen TVs into your Hyperspace Arsenal.
• Buffy Speak: Travis, while holding up a piece of the MacGuffin (The Flauros): "Hey! I've got your... your THING for you!" Justified in that he had just faced the most traumatic event of his whole life. He wasn't exactly in the right state of mind. Plus, neither he nor the player (unless they've played Silent Hill) actually know what it is at that point.
• The Butcher: Travis, either literally or as his Shadow Archetype.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The whole game, but specific callbacks to Silent Hill include a redone version of Dahlia and Alessa's conversation shortly before the poor girl was sacrificed, a redone version of Dahlia and Kaufmann's conversation about the summoning spell to draw Cheryl back to Alessa, and the graveyard in which Harry and his wife find Cheryl.
  • One of the memos Travis can find is a version of the "Manifestations of Delusions" article that Harry finds in the first game.
• Dark and Troubled Past: But of course! Nary a person steps into Silent Hill without one of those.
• Degraded Boss: Happens twice. You see the first (Straight-Jacket) and third (Caliban) bosses stalking the streets of Silent Hill not long after you first fight them.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: A list of patients at the mental hospital includes a crossdresser, which can be chalked up to the time the game is set and Silent Hill's facilities not having the greatest priorities.
• Demonic Dummy/Creepy Doll: The Ariels.
• Department of Child Disservices: Social services are utterly useless to help Alessa, noting that her mother appears to be very religious and that her claims about cult rituals are "clearly" just her imagination running loose.
• Dramatic Irony: Near the end of the game, Travis angrily asks Alessa when they're gonna get to see what's in her sick little head. Oh, if he only knew...
• Earn Your Bad Ending: You have to go out of your way to slaughter monsters to get the bad ending, and you have to do it on a New Game Plus.
• Episode Zero: The Beginning: Its Japanese title. Also, the English title has a stylized "zero" for the "O" in "Origins" (generally rendered as "0rigins").
• Everything Fades: Zig-zagged. Rank and file enemies will leave corpses that don't vanish until new enemies spawn in the same area, but bigger monsters like the Caliban and Giant Carrion will either fade or dissolve in a cloud of greenish-black smoke — likely to avoid the carcasses either blocking pathways if solid or causing immersion-breaking clipping issues if not.
• Expy: The Butcher looks like a more muscular and "sexually repressed" version of Pyramid Head.
• Hero Ball:
  • At several points, Travis has no good reason to stick around the highly dangerous Silent Hill. His initial motivation of finding out what happened to Alessa is quickly resolved (he does believe it when he is told by Lisa that she is dead), and unlike the other protagonists of the series he has no personal investment in getting to the bottom of the town's mysteries, and his determination to do so seems to be purely for the reason that there would be no plot otherwise.
  • Lampshade hung by Dr. Kaufmann just before the final boss fight.
    Dr. Kaufmann: I'm surprised to see you. We had assumed you'd just leave.
• Hollywood Darkness: Not only are things much more visible than ever before in the "dark", but you're also allowed to check your map and interact with/pick up objects when the flashlight is off. This makes it easy as pie to hoard weapons and supplies in indoor areas, since you can simply keep the light off and weave past most enemies without them ever noticing you and safely snag any goodies that might be laying around the area.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Travis, like most other Silent Hill protagonists, can carry a lot of stuff on him. It's a lot more noticeable in this game, however, given the ability of Travis to carry multiple portable televisions, typewriters, etc.
• I Can't Reach It:
  • Travis simply refuses to leave the demon-infested hospital before he finds the girl, who's probably already dead for all he knows.
  • He also refuses to enter the pool at the Motel, despite there being an important item in there. You have to go to the Otherworld, where the pool is somehow drained.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Moon Gauntlets in New Game Plus. The majority of regular enemies are easily taken down with a quick one-two from these and they're completely indestructible, but they are still a melee weapon, so you'll likely want to switch to a firearm for the bigger, nastier monsters you'd rather not get in close to and they're not as handy on the open streets, where sneaking up on enemies is significantly harder to do.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The unlockable Tesla rifle doesn't pack the biggest punch out of all available guns, but it does have rapid fire, infinite ammunition, and no need to reload, making pretty much every monster encounter a breeze.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Quite a few examples through the game, but the most prominent one is when Travis is blocked by a hallway chain he could easily step over.
• Interrupted Intimacy: At the motel, Travis walks in (or, rather, falls in) on Lisa and Kaufmann dressing after having had sex.
• Ironic Nursery Rhyme: "Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes the butcher to chop off your head". Based on a real nursery rhyme called "Oranges and Lemons", which is totally innocuous up until the chilling last verse.
• Joke Ending: The game swaps to a very Animesque style for its UFO ending, where Travis attempts to enter the motel room where his parents died, only for the key to not work. Suddenly, an alien appears with the dog from the second game's dog ending. The alien explains that since Travis left his truck in the middle of the road at the start of the game, the aliens moved the truck to their planet, and invites Travis to visit and pick up the truck. Travis agrees, and enthusiastically asks if he can pilot the UFO, to which the alien asks "Do you drive stick", and they both laugh as they get pulled up by the tractor beam.
• Letters 2 Numbers: It's spelled "Silent Hill Zero-rigins," though you might get some strange looks calling it that.
• Market-Based Title: It's called "Silent Hill 0" in Japan.
• Non-Appearing Title: The first song played in the game is titled "O.R.T." This stands for Oral Rehydration Therapy - which is extremely relevant to Alessa, considering it's used to treat burn victims. Of course, the song itself isn't about this type of therapy, and is never even mentioned.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Travis's mother became psychotic, tried to kill herself and Travis in a murder-suicide and was committed to a sanitarium and his father subsequently hanged himself while Travis was out playing.
  • Dahlia, though it probably would have been better if she had just abandoned her daughter.
• Press X to Not Die: Just about every monster in this game has an attack that triggers a quick-time event. Only one is instantly fatal (and it gives you plenty of time), but it's still annoying.
• Silliness Switch: Many of the unlockable costumes. Play through the game with Travis as a spaceman! Or a Mexican wrestler outfit! Or in a Shiba Inu fursuit!
• Solve the Soup Cans: At the motel, Travis has to drain a pool in order to get a thing lying on its bottom. The thing is that the water level in the pool is barely waist-height so Travis could easily just climb down there and fish it out, but there is no prompt to make him to do so.
• Sprint Meter: Travis can't run very long (compared to other Silent Hill protagonists) before he gets winded unless he downs an energy drink or is wearing the Sprinter outfit. It's justified somewhat in that he's a trucker (a mostly sedentary job), interactions with the game world reveal that Travis is a smoker, and he probably inhaled some smoke from the fire he went into at the beginning of the game as well, making things worse. The fact that Helen tried to gas Travis and herself to death when he was a child could also be a factor.
• Suddenly-Harmful Harmless Object: The first Ariel Travis encountered was idle. The second ones moved and attacking after he passed by it and they become monsters exclusive to Artaud Theater.
• Theme Naming: The monsters in Artaud Theater (Ariel, Caliban) are all named after characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest, which is being staged when Travis drops by. The theater itself references a french poet and playwrite that experienced a descent into mental illness.
  • The Two-Back monsters found in Riverside Motel refer to "the beast with two backs", a metaphor for intercourse coined by Shakespeare in another of his plays, Othello.
    • This extends to Silent Hill 3 (the bookstore puzzle) and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (several of the mementos refer to Shakespeare's plays).
• The Killer in Me: If the Bad Ending is canon, Travis is implied to be a serial killer and The Butcher is a manifestation of his "dark side".
• Tragic Monster:
  • Both of Travis's parents are incarnated as literal monsters during the game. Travis is not too pleased with Alessa about this.
  • Travis in the Bad Ending, wherein it is implied he was The Butcher all along.
• Unwitting Pawn:
  • Travis pretty much doesn't do anything or go anywhere unless directed to by the clues he finds.
  • Spanner in the Works: He does ultimately end up blowing the Order's plans to hell for the next seven years, though.

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