Adaptation: The map, Midwich Elementary School, is from Silent Hill 1. The Killer, Pyramid Head, is from Silent Hill 2. The survivor, Heather Mason is from Silent Hill 3. This adaptation has encompassed the most fan-favorite parts of the entire trilogy into 1 package. Pyramid Head's adaptation isn't 1-to-1 to the model from the game like Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil, they took some creative liberty by making him buffer and lean back waaay more.

Killer: In Silent Hill, all he did was drag his knife around to get the game moving, but in DBD, they gave his knife basically godlike powers. It doesn't tear the ground apart as it shows in the trailer, the look of the trails still suffices cause the maps are the entity and you're making her bleed. You can basically draw whatever you want on the ground; a heart, a smiley face, a ****, etc. I don't really care much about the tunneling aspect of PPHead, I just really find it satisfying to hit the punishment attack through walls because the audio design is just sublime. They made his animation when pushing the knife into the ground look more sluggish/mismatched with the audio for some reason after an update and tweaked his posture for the worse. Apparently, on launch, he was even better than he was now because it just incentivizes to spam your punishment over and over again on loops until the survivor leaves it, whilst earlier he just had a quick M1 from an M2 without a sluggish cooldown like every other killer in the game. His walking animation was changed too where he no longer struts uncannily slanting backward and instead slouches like a diffident forced to chase survivors with no energy. Unlike pre-nerf Deathslinger who came right before him in 2020, PPHead had ample telegraphing and counterplay (unless you're behind a wall and he sees your aura through I'm All Ears or something).

But spamming his power like Doctor to get random potshots is also viable now because of the basically null cooldown you get after releasing each punishment.

The best time to hit survivors with Pyramid Head is when they are locked in animation such as vaulting a window or dropping a pallet, but if you are late to put down your knife, you still have a 50-50 chance to release the punishment to the right or the left of the window or pallet and you'll hit them depending on what direction they went to based on your mind-game. The fact that his mini-projectile can go downslope is also unique because Demogorgon or the Artist literally cannot do that.

His perks and add-ons are boring and after I got P3-50 on him after playing him exclusively ever since I bought the DLC on February 2021, I just played Vanilla with Range add-ons from time to time.

Unlike Michael, his secondary Mori isn't the same as his primary one. The primary one is quite grandiose and has a level of choking/crushing the survivors' entire body with barbed wire. While the Final Judgement is just a quick chop and then back to business.

Music: Akira Yamaoka apparently helped make the music for this chapter by providing instrument samples/parts and Michael used his trusty Steel Hammer to make it fit the vibe of DBD as well. The 16 meter Ding Dings are so iconic now and the chase music has all types of 8-bit sounds, wind chimes hitting rapidly and sounds of metal scraping (but it's still overall very noisy and I prefer the 16m and 8m ambiance over the chase music itself.) The lobby music is very peaceful, with chimes and a melody that slightly deviated from the DBD tune by going one octave higher.

Survivor: Cheryl is the cutest survivor, whether it's Goth Cheryl, Standard Cheryl, Sweater Cheryl, Glitched Set Cheryl, and Cybil too. Her perk 'Soul Guard' is interesting because it is the only perk in the game that benefits you for being cursed by a Hex. She can also summon the entity at will to do anything for her. This pretty much proves that she is above god.

Map: Like I mentioned in my Journal, this was the first map that I played on because I first played the game during the Free Weekend on the 4th year anniversary when Silent Hill dropped. Just like Haddonfield, it plays a sound when you spawn into the map, only this time it's a loud siren that you hear in your sleep thinking that you're late from class, and now you're gonna be punished. It's a beautiful map, unlike Haddonfield, with a lot of details, easter eggs, and intractability. This map causes an irritating bug where the chase music becomes choppy/ starts and stops randomly whilst in a chase and they really should find and fix that because it is very abrupt in the way that it resumes the chase music once you get a full view of the survivor. A smaller issue is that going from the ground floor to the first floor can only be done on the 4 corners of the map, and unlocking the exit gates as the last survivor is pretty much impossible because there is direct line of sight from the center for both the gates and the RNG for the gates never change.

Overall, this was probably my favorite DLC in DBD and this was also one of the peaks of the game. I main'd Pyramid Head for the longest time. P3 Goth Cheryl is my Survivor Main. And Midwich is probably my favorite map now that Hawkins has been removed.

Daniel is a detective going Door to Door in a run-down cyberpunk apartment complex, with the vibe portrayed through shady tenants, sketchy back alleys, and weirdly familiar corridor layouts. I would define the art style as calculated eye-candy — a means through which it tricks the player into thinking it's of more quality than it is.

It's the opposite of Psychonauts, where you're just waiting to leave the camp and enter people's minds, but here, everything outside the mind-walking sequences is fine, but entering someone's mind is just a walking simulator chore like the linear Layers of Fear sections where random low-budget sh*t happens. (Sh*t = random polygons and artifacts catastrophically colliding on screen)

At least threats you can die to are more prevalent so you can be scared even if the gameplay is merely 'walk forward > go to a throwaway space with cheap graphics > open another door > walk forward with sh*t happening in front of you > the room changes behind you when you're not looking...' just like Layers of Fear. I still wish I knew that stealth was a mechanic in Helena's dream sequences (crouching to avoid the monster in the office area and the drones in the tall grass field) and that running grabs attention. (All inspired by Resident Evil 4's formula after all, but poorly executed cause the game lacks any mechanical depth for replayability or even the first playthrough through similar repeated segments)

Just like the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes, there is a persistent threat in the form of the blue monster/tyrant that can kill you. That was honestly one of the scariest things in this game because nothing else actually kills you or forces you to retry a section... So the scariest thing about this game was repetition, which modern game developers can use even in non-horror titles as one of the only ways to scare gamers... which is a saddening trend and a disrespect to our time...

It's nice that there's the giant hub area i.e. the apartments for you to keep track of where you are outside of the dream-eater sequences, rather than aimlessly walking forward in shape-shifting regions like in Layers of Fear. Despite having the apartment as a hub-world, I was disappointed to find out that it doesn't let you continue exploring it regardless of which ending you picked and forces you to start a new game. It'll be a useful practice to maintain a couple of savestates for achievements.


Even though visual fidelity is inconsistent compared to their previous game Layers of Fear, you can't even call it Eurojank cause it didn't have ambitions so big that the resources couldn't support making it. It had a small vision, and it reached its target without any real glitches (though the glitch effects were overdone). Where they thought it struggled in visuals, they sold a remaster in 2020 months before Cyberpunk 2077 launched so it could get piggyback off the proximity in theme and developer origins. But the sound design and soundtrack with all of the heartbeats was very creepy indeed and could stand the test of time as an aging ode to cyberpunk themes.

When Synchrozine is low, it has that weird text-flickering filter intensifying when you move your camera depending on how low it is (similar to the filter in Saints Row 4). Along with many other glitch effects and stylistic motion blur smearing alternatives as seen in things like Arcane with the Hextech glitches as some not very nausea inducing effects for some stylistic transitions.

There is no HUD throughout the game apart from a small white dot in the center of the screen. The videos of real people's faces and eyes are quite creepy with the way they edited them, but sometimes the faces don't match the voices and that bugged me.


I've been sitting on this review for 2.5 years and between that AI became globalized and I lost motivation to publish this thinking it'll just look like more slop. But I guess reviewing some slop-like game from my now slop memory should give me the spark to clear my unreviewed list.

Get the System Redux edition if you want some additional content and a faux-raytraced look but this one still holds up for an 8th-generation title and even though it has been delisted for 4 years, you can find keys for the same price as the new one discounted. There are many better horror games to play first and it was my mistake that I played this before many of the classics.

Check out my Layers of Fear review since I've mentioned it a few times.