I’ve seen a lot of requesting for 10-stars runs for any of the Silent Hills, but hey, why not for the “worst possible” star runs? According to Conquerer’s Silent Hill 4 FAQ, the star requirement for 0.2 stars would be…

Difficulty: Easy
Play time: Over 11 hours 30 minutes
Saves: 10
Continues: 10
Enemies Defeated: 1 star per 6 enemies
Memos found: 32/52 or less
Ending: doesn’t matter
Freebies: 0.2 stars

*some spoilers follow*

In Silent Hill’s logic, worst possible stars equals the worst possible performance. The fabled Received of Wisdom is just a scared simpleton who hates to read memos and runs away from everything, still fumbling enough to manage to get himself killed 10+ times during the course of the plot. Of course, the only fitting end for such a comedically awful protagonist is the 21 Sacraments, in which the bad guy wins, and Receiver of Wisdom is painfully ground to pieces.

…then again, Silent Hill’s logic isn’t perfect, and the ranking system IS a bit arbitrary in this game. Why would the game reward Henry for reading the memos, if being the Receiver of Wisdom is not a good thing? Maybe the game is actually on Walter’s side, and the players are further persuaded to read the memos like good little sacrificial lambs, and not exorcise the hauntings, and let Eileen get ground up, by making the good endings so non-descript as they are. Hey, this might actually be true…

Regardless, getting that low score would be a genuinely legendary feat. In my calculations, 0.2 is impossible because of mandatory enemies you have to kill – at least about 17 of ‘em. If Conquerer’s data is correct, we would have to reduce kill count by 6 to get an even worse score, and that I can’t see happening unless some new major glitch is found. All other stats are decently easy to mess up, though for the perfectionists Memos is something else to be careful with – I believe there are only 10 memos necessary to pass the game.

For the recond, I messed up my “practice run” because of a strange phenomena I’ve since attributed to One Truth. When I finished my game, all of a sudden the rank showed I got 28 kills, completely out of the blue! I thought what could’ve possible gone wrong, and then remembered that when fighting One Truth, I hit almost every of the wallmen once with an axe. They didn’t die, but they almost certainly counted as kills this way. So this is something to wary. In my new run I found One Truth on first try (here is a good place to utilize those Continues, you know), and in the end the kill count was only 17.

Another thing I’m not sure of is if Walter’s kills add to the Enemies Defeated-count. Maybe it’s my paranoia from God of War II, in which kills made by anyone are listed as Kratos’ kills… In any case, in my new run I always left the area and returned whenever Walter made his trademark laugh. I think one innocent Hummer may’ve died even after this precaution.

After my new run is complete, I’ll post the results here.