Gotta agree with ya on all that Brandon. I'll be keeping my eyes out on this thread on everyones impressions after this releases to keep my excitment tamed till my copy arrives.
Honestly I'm not really sure what my final "prognosis" on Downpour is. I think it certainly has a lot of qualities about it that I felt were lacking or just completely non-existent in Shattered Memories, but when it comes to the story or how scary it all actually is, who knows?
With this series, I've found that you just never know for sure until you're at the end. I hated Shattered Memories, but then the ending was pretty amazing so that made me lighten up about the game. I thought Homecoming looked great and while I liked the game enough, it was very lackluster in a lot of places.
It's just so hard to know before actually playing it which is why I don't board the hate train every time some shitty pictures are released with bad textures; if the game sucks it won't be because of the graphic fidelity or bad looking combat. All of the games have bad looking and even worse playing combat, so that won't be anything new at all.
Mainly the disbanding of Team Silent is what got a lot of people into the doom and gloom mode concerning the franchise, and they have every right and reason to feel that way, but that's not to say that someone else out there can't do a good job. A lot of people seemed to like Shattered Memories so clearly it's not all doom and gloom.
I will personally be judging the game on its own merits; I'm not looking for a SH game like the first 3 or 4 because that team no longer exists, and that's why I'm excited about the notion that Downpour is taking elements of the older games but infusing them into a new kind of visual style as I noted in the OP. I would rather them make it fresh without trying to "copy" the older games just because that's what the fans want.
Homecoming I felt tried too hard to be like the older ones, but that game didn't understand the sensibilities of the older games. For example there were vagina doors with teeth that you had to slice open with a knife. It was pointless and in your face, while the other games took such fuckupery and did a good job with concealing some of it with shadows and placing them within camera angles that make it hard to make out exactly what it is that you're looking at-- it's the power of the unknown. Something is there, you can sort of see it but you have no idea what it is or what it's doing there. This is ten-fold more effective than flat out showing the player everything. The older games were completely messed up, but there was a sense of restraint in the execution nonetheless that made
all the difference.
Like in SH3, when you're in the bowels of the church at the end, there are places in the environment that look like exteriors-- parts that it seems like you're looking out of a window into an empty and bottomless sky, drenched in a red-orange hue-- although you're supposed to be underground, it looks like you're miles up in the sky. That's what I loved about the older games, they took twisted visuals and executed them in a way that made you want to analyze and think about it. Homecoming did the direct opposite by making a big deal about its twisted visuals.
Thus, I want Downpour to retain some things about the older games while bringing a fresh visual palette to the series that isn't trying so damn hard to be something that it cannot be and based on some of the videos I've seen, they seem to be doing exactly that.