Well since the Western games are licensed by Konami, the expansions they added to the town are all officially canon. That said, I personally treat them as canon as Michael Myers in Halloween being powered by an ancient dark demon worshiped by the Thorn Cult. Which is to say, not at all.
I'll add that something I really appreciate about SH1 is that it feels like Toyama and his team really put in the research and effort to make Silent Hill look like an actual small American resort town. I do not get that vibe with Double Helix and Vatra. Double Helix just threw a penitentiary in the middle of the damn shopping district and made the town resemble the way it looked in the movie. Vatra added a subway, and the town in Downpour doesn't even look anything like a resort town. It instead looks much more like a European industrial-esque town.
I speculate that a reason more people are starting to defend the HD Collection and Downpour now more than before is because those are the only ones that have been widely available on consoles (specifically PlayStation Now and the X-Box Store).
Before the Dead by Daylight DLC attracted a lot of newcomers (which is good for the series), the HD Collection was universally panned and Downpour was generally considered to be in competition with Homecoming as the weakest entry. Although it always had fans/defenders, it appears to be getting a minor reprisal now, with a lot of people praising it as the best post-Team Silent game and saying that Vatra Games deserves another chance.
I myself don't agree with that, for a lot of the reasons others have talked about here. I guess I can see the appreciation for the open world and Alan Wake-ish survival horror, but a good Silent Hill game it honestly isn't. This is the game where they turned the Otherworld into a carnival theme park ride and introduced a sentient friendly ghost mailman from the 1880s...
For Downpour, I honestly feel like part of the appreciation it gets is just because of the fact that it was trying to resemble a more classic survival-horror type game during a time when other horror franchises were either dead or shifted their focus to action. And also because of the fact that it made an attempt to be more "fresh" and "original" than the previous Western Silent Hill titles (Origins and Homecoming). If I recall correctly, one of the things that Vatra even had been stressing before release was that they would not borrow from the previous games like Homecoming did, that they would not reuse previous monster designs or locations. Which is commendable, but that doesn't get bonus points from me when the result is that they created the worst monsters designs in the entire franchise and created a part of the town completely inconsistent with what Toyama and his team established. And while it tries having elements from classic survival-horror games, like fixed camera angles and "bad" combat, it has a bunch of mainstream game elements too, like regenerating health and auto saves which also end up horribly impacting the framerate. The game is filled with a whole host of design elements and ideas, and it fails to mix them all consistently or do any of them competently. I've said it before, but I would compare Downpour to the 2008 Alone in the Dark game. It had some really cool and innovative ideas for it's time, but it also had tons of terrible ideas and absolutely did not do anything reasonably well.
And for all of Downpour's claims at being "original" it still fell into the same pitfall of trying to mimic SH2 and in the process misunderstanding the point of James' story like the previous Western games (with maybe the exception of Shattered Memories).
This might also sound controversial, but I honestly have more respect for Homecoming because of how blatant it is with cribbing from SH2. It doesn't try to hide it at all, to the point it just straight-up puts Pyramid Head in the game. Whereas Origins and Downpour make more of an attempt to hide the fact that they're trying to copy from SH2, which honestly gets more scorn from me. Instead of Pyramid Head, they use the Butcher and the Boogieman. Because those are totally original and not at all Pyramid Head knockoffs...
That, and I think Homecoming genuinely tells its story better than Origins and Downpour do. It mixes the cult story with the personal story a hell of a lot better than Origins. Alex Shepherd also had something resembling a personality and a motivation for going through all the horror in the game, which is more than I can say for Travis and Murphy. They are the worst characters possible for games that are trying to tell a SH2-type story. They basically have the same amount of personality and effort put into their characters as Henry in SH4 did. Origins and Downpour are, imo, what would happen if you made Henry the protagonist of Silent Hill 2 instead of James.
I'm more forgiving to Origins because I'm aware of the production troubles that game had, and despite everything, I think Climax managed to turn it into a fairly decent PSP horror game. Downpour however, I keep saying it, but it's clear that Vatra did not have both the budget and experience necessary to competently pull off the scope of the game. They should have attempted something more low scale, not try their hand at a semi open-world survival horror that tries appealing to both classic horror fans and mainstream audiences. If you don't have the practice and resources necessary for a project of that complexity, don't try it because it will almost certainly be awful. And Downpour is astonishingly bad in so many respects. I legit consider it to be one of the worst horror games to have been released during the PS3/XBox 360 era.
