The Room and large portion of Homecoming also weren't taking place in the town.
That's because the series lore is all retarded, and has been creatively bankrupt since the second game:
3 is a sequel to
1,
4's flimsy connections to 2 were for the sake of branding it a Silent Hill game, and the other entries have kept attempting and failing to reproduce
2's narrative crutch of "
I SO guilty of thing I forget." The canonical reason
The Room takes place in South Ashfield Heights is because you're forced to navigate
Walter's conjured Otherworld memories of Silent Hill (rather than Alessa's) after he cursed that apartment with some bullshit that apparently involved him committing suicide
twice.
Homecoming is even more retarded; with Konami seemingly having removed Shepherd's Glen from the franchise canon (otherwise it would have been listed alongside Old Silent Hill, Brahms, Paleville, etc. on the highway sign at the beginning of the remake).
Homecoming dating the events of
2 as having taken place in 1993 has also been retconned by the remake taking place circa '83.
Homecoming's canon explanation for Silent Hill bullshit popping off is that the Shepherds cursed their own town through refusing to sacrifice Alex.
The one thing about
Homecoming I enjoyed is that it addressed something conspicuously absent from the previous games; which is the majority of cult members in Silent Hill who never got their comeuppance (the film explicitly doomed the entire town whereas, in the original game, Alessa caused only Cheryl, Harry, Cybil, Dahlia, Lisa, and Kaufmann to abruptly disappear). In
Homecoming, we see what is presumably
most of the Shepherd's Glen cult members brutally murdered as a consequence of their bullshit, with any survivors no longer experiencing the prosperity afforded by the town leaders' ritual sacrifices of their firstborn children.
The problem with setting a story titled
Silent Hill in a haunted town called Silent Hill is that it forces the writers to excuse any time the story
doesn't take place in the town. And being as they seemingly intended the franchise to be an anthology series starting with
2, the writers sabotaged themselves further by writing themselves into the corner of insisting every story be premised in the setting of the haunted town functioning strictly as a crucible for the protagonist's sins they forgot for no reason.
One
could set any number of horror stories in the titular, spooky town, without any of the threats informing the player's sense of dread even needing to be overtly supernatural - But the time to do so would have been 2004. Instead, every game since
4 is tied down with tropes to do with
Otherworld,
Guilty of Something I Forgot, The Town's Job is to Rub My Nose in My Shit, Dick Monsters, etc. Maybe that's why I haven't felt compelled to play one of these games since 2008 - As with most goyslop franchises (Star Wars, Capeshit, etc.), there's a perverse quality of entertainment to be derived from seeing firsthand how far the bar has been lowered.
