Developed by US-based The Collective (which had merged with another company to become Double Helix by the time the game was released), Silent Hill: Homecoming follows Alex Shepherd, a recently discharged US soldier who returns to his hometown of Shepherd's Glen to find it disturbingly altered. The empty streets are falling apart, his mother is catatonic, and his little brother Josh is missing. Vowing to recover his younger sibling, Alex's descent into madness sees him uncovering the hideous connection between Shepherd's Glen and Silent Hill, while learning how the ties that bind can also cut.
Put into production at roughly the same time as Origins and released on PS3, Homecoming was Konami's first true attempt to give the series the triple-A treatment. "[For Konami US] it was like, 'Homecoming is the Big One,'" recalls Tomm Hulett, who worked as a producer on most of the Western Silent Hill games. "[They were saying,] 'This is Silent Hill Five: it's going to be the first one on a next-gen platform, it's going to be where you can finally get to see Silent Hill in HD and so on.'"
