If you were in charge of a new Silent Hill game, what would you do in terms of character backstory/motivation and monster design theme? CAVEAT: There has to be a monster with a Pyramid Head-like role and at least one monster with tits

*Cracks knuckles* I can do this. Actually…

…I will do it NINE TIMES.

#1) A famed biologist who lost a colleague on an expedition and took credit for their findings. Their version of the town is actually a sunny place overgrown with flowers. Instead of dreary, dirty color schemes this one would go for a “sickeningly vivid” psychedelic feel.

Pyramid Head expy: a gnarled, twisted humanoid, like a figure made of pale roots, whose face is nothing but a whirling cloud of bees.

Nurse expy: plant ladies whose huge, fleshy heads loosely resemble a buzzing, writhing wasp with its face buried in a meaty orchid, all part of their body.

#2) A fisherman whose carelessness and greed cost his whole crew. His Silent Hill is caked with coral and barnacle-like growths, and physics work as if everything is underwater.

Pyramid Head expy: a shambling heap of red seaweed with a blindingly lit porthole face, able to emerge from even a thin puddle of water.

Nurse expy: mermaid-like dolls with rusted hooks for tails and hands, and painted-on googly eyes. In other words, “fishing lures” for humans.

#3) Someone who commited murder while still only a small child who barely knew better. Their Silent Hill is a cartoonish playground where nothing is consistent in size.

Pyramid Head expy: a woman in a dress with impossibly long legs. In fact, every appearance would be shot so you never see this being above the waist - like a looming “adult” - but she’ll suck you into the air if she gets close enough.

Nurse expy: let’s go with headless barbie doll things, like they have that weird plastic knob a barbie’s head attaches to. They wouldn’t move like people, but like scurrying cockroaches on their backs.

#4) Someone who leaked private information to the internet that ruined someone else. Nudes? Maybe nobody wants to play a character that shitty so maybe they were like, an accomplice who didn’t know what they were helping do at the time? Their Silent Hill is covered in unnecessary blinking lights, buttons, circuitry and wiring almost like unchecked plant growth.

Pyramid Head expy: a robotic figure hanging puppet-like by cables, with a big computer monitor for a head. The whole thing actually looks obsolete, like it’s made out of that ugly off-yellow plastic from 70’s electronics. The screen constantly displays footage of abstract organic shapes writhing in and around each other like some sort of hideous, alien porn.

Nurse expy: also robot like, with outlandishly exaggerated figures and horrible, rubbery mouths on the ends of hoses, basically like someone built a sex robot who had no concept of the uncanny valley.

#5) The sole survivor of a wealthy and horribly corrupt, racist family. Not a bad person themselves, but guilty of hiding proof of their family’s deeds. Their Silent Hill is a mockery of upper class excess. Hideous gold trim and gaudy crystal shit everywhere. Winding marble architecture.

Pyramid Head expy: crap, crap, Evil Within already has a monster with a safe for a head. Uhhh…crap. Okay. How about a strangely proportioned figure dressed up in a fancy suit, and they’ve got an awful bird-like head. I don’t know why but I feel like bird monsters go well with a rich asshole theme.

Nurse expy: drawing from what I just said…harpy maids!

#6) A doctor who accepted a shitload of money to promote a quack cancer pill and perscribe it to patients. Yeah, this entire Silent Hill would be medical themed, but it still wouldn’t recycle the bubble nurses and it totally wouldn’t just be Awful Hospital the Video Game, I swear. The pill would have been derived from a mushroom, and his Silent Hill would be fungus-encrusted.

Pyramid Head expy: a moldy, dripping figure with a conical white mask, like a plague doctor. We can have two bird-faced ones, shut up! Mushrooms erupt visibly all around it, including on you if it gets close enough.

Nurse expy: fungus-encrusted female anatomical models, the kind where half the body shows off the muscles and organs.

#7) Someone who was complacent with animal abuse in some way, maybe the only person who had a chance to expose it but didn’t want to lose their job. Maybe they worked for a corrupt animal rights group that wound up selling “rescued” animals for scientific testing? Their Silent Hill has a whole lot of cage bars, monsters that are leashed in place (but still pretty dangerous, like chain chomps are in Mario games) and layers of hairy, matted filth.

Pyramid Head expy: a huge, shaggy black dog, almost just a heap of dirty fur, with one of those veterinary cones for a head. FOR a head, not on its head. Maybe a long tongue tries to pull you inside.

Nurse expy: like some of PETA’s grosser and more uncomfortable ad campaigns, the “sexy” humanoid monsters in this one could act like animals, and be crammed into little cages. Their limbs would still fit through enough to run around and maul you, though. Faces like fleshy animal masks? Maybe that’s too over the top.

#8) A news reporter who spun sensationalized lies for easy ratings, until an innocent person took their own life. Their Silent Hill has a media and eye motif; newspapers and magazines plastering walls and floors, eyeball imagery everywhere, etc.

Pyramid Head expy: a monstrous figure whose body is kind of shaped like a trenchcoat and whose head is like an old fashioned news camera. You slowly weaken and die as long as it can see you at all.

Nurse expy: formed from mis-matched, cut-up photos of magazine models, like walking collages. As you damage them they’ll lose parts and rearrange into less humanoid forms. Graphics-wise, maybe they’d use a billboarding effect, always facing the camera?

#9) Maybe this is not in good taste, but Downpour was about a guy in the prison system, so why not a Silent Hill where the protagonist is an abusive police officer? We could try Downpour’s prison theme over again the right way.

Pyramid Head expy: why settle for just one being? You could be pursued by a whole chain gang of indistinct humanoid entities, acting like one winding centipede-type creature. Maybe you never get the chance to even see where it ends.

Nurse expy: distortions of firing range training dummies, so riddled with holes that many hunks of them, including their faces, are completely gone.

I could probably just keep on going, too. Applying new themes to something is so easy. When Silent Hill II came out and all its monsters were faceless women and they turned out to have a very specific meaning, I assumed that was gonna be the thing for every Silent Hill, a new style, a new symbolic theme unique to the new protagonist. Instead they just repeated the same Silent Hill II style imagery with very LOOSE new metaphors, and it got super old, super fast.

Making all this shit up just now as I went along, for nothing but a tumblr reply, a lot of it might be really corny but I am 100% confident all of my ideas just now were better than Downpour. Not that that’s hard.