As its original press advertised, so much more than a Resident Evil clone.
Whilst Resident Evil was a milestone in survival horror, Silent Hill opened a whole new rusty window of opportunities for scary games.
Perhaps there's a little nostalgia for the nuanced PS1 graphics but the look of the game is incredibly distinct, setting the standard for its many sequels. Unlike in Silent Hill 2's many sad, empty spaces, the original game always feels moments away from danger and never feels safe.
The snowy town of thick fog and the pitch black voids with rustic grate flooring, alongside Akira Yamaoka's iconic sound design are key to one of the most oppressive atmospheres in any game ever.
Whilst the monsters are interesting in design, it does feel like they improve in the next few sequels, but I'd choose fighting fleshy pterodactyls over zombies any day.
Silent Hill is one of the most iconic horror franchises in popular gaming culture, although sadly due more to the likes of Pyramid Head and major aspects of the sequels. For this reason, it should be reiterated that the original holds up and is still one of the best games not only in its franchise but of all time.

‘Silent Hill’ feels less cohesive compared to ‘Silent Hill 2’. What I mean by that is how random and freakish the whole experience is due to how it’s scares, enemies, and locations don’t really have any personal connection to the main character like 2’s does. This gave way for a very insanely bizarre and, again, random experience. The game just fucks with your head with a barrage of disturbing concepts being thrown at you. Honestly, I felt as if the devs just threw everything against the wall to see what stuck and it really was a neat and unique experience. The sound design, industrial, distorted, music, and oppressive atmosphere elevated the fucked up nature of the world and gave me some genuine scares. All that being said I wasn’t a huge of fan of the narrative as a whole due to how abrupt the ending was and I never cared about the cult aspect the game explored. Also, the combat was tense at times but I never really felt engaged with it like it did with the puzzles and building expiration. Still, an incredibly impressive classic horror experience that hasn’t aged the best mechanically but still holds some of the best atmosphere building I’ve seen in a game. (also sorry if this has grammatical errors I’m stupid at times)

It was my cousin who is really into this franchise that first got me to try playing the games myself, and I know Silent Hill 2 is the one everyone talks about, but wow, the first entry was really something on its own as well. Some awkward dubbing and lack of depth in fighting bosses aside, this game was super well-rounded for the length and scope of game it is, and I had a blast soaking in its atmosphere.

I appreciate how the industry is always pushing the boundaries of graphical capabilities, player customizability, amount of content that can be stuffed into a game, etc., but when it comes to my taste in games, I'm not always necessarily up-to-date on catching up with all the latest releases, and I tend to find myself playing a fair amount of older games at any given time. And the complaints I often hear about people talking about how "man this game used to look amazing for the time, but now it looks ugly and outdated" never sat right with me. For me, it's like technology in film. You make the best possible art with what you have available to you, and I actually find myself really getting into imagery that I know doesn't look realistic, that it's stylized, but it has character and personality. I like the escapist artifice. That's why I love the look of old games, the low-poly, the simpler textures, when used with an artist's eye, I love that look. Either the look will endure, or it wasn't that great to begin with and we were just captivated with graphical standards of the time and not artistry.

This is all to say, maybe Silent Hill is too rudimentary for some of you to get into at this point we're at now two decades out from its release. That being the start of more psychological horror in games gives it meaningful impact, but that we've come so far since then to really be worth revisiting. That it's kind of too far back into the history of that genre. I don't know. But for me, I think it holds up really well. For how long the game is and how much ground it covers, I think its mechanics work great for its heavily atmospheric storytelling. Its blocky low-poly look with very pixelated textures may be primitive to some, but I love it. I actually hope nostalgia culture gets to the point where we start seeing some games return to the stylistic trademarks of this point in time, not out of necessity but out of creative expression. Of the fixed camera angles, of a simplistic and minimalistic look. I'd love to make something that kind of goes for a similar vibe in its models to this game. I love the idea of seeing a small American town and all of the assets to be found there rendered in such a simple and minimalist look. Even with simplistic graphics, the monster designs are still properly grotesque. The low-poly pixel art look is definitely something I'm big on. And the FMV cutscenes in the game are some of the best I've seen for PS1, as I've seen some really uncanny PS1 FMV. The way the characters move, and their subtle and natural facial acting, is really impressive for the time, and still looks really good to me.

An especially strong element to this game I feel is the pacing. We get an opening that foreshadows a lot of elements but not enough to really understand the full extent of what we're in for, and we have a basic starting premise. Your car crashed and you need to find your daughter. This foggy town is a bit mysterious but nothing too crazy. And then super early on, we get just the right taste that the normalcy we came with is going to go away, as the angles start getting more off-kilter searching through the alleyway, and we hear a distorted siren, and eventually become attacked by monsters. When Harry Mason comes to and learns a little bit more about the town, we get a sense of security in the diner as he gets his bearings. But the game quickly indicates that security isn't something you can really count on for long. By happenstance, I moved to a different camera angle just as I swore I saw something fly by the window outside the diner, too quick and unclear to make out what it was. It then reveals itself, disrupting the safety of the diner and setting a precedent that this town is full of nightmarish creations that are out to get you, and they're everywhere. What's great about the pacing in the game is that while it makes it quickly, strongly apparent that normalcy is being challenged by otherworldly elements as you explore the alleyway, it brings it back to a more peaceful starting point in the diner, and then gradually ratchets up the monsters and gruesome imagery and unsettling atmosphere over the course of the rest of the game. So the point is made early on that this will be a game where creepy, bizarre things happen, but it lets the actual threat and dark atmosphere slowly increase over an extended period of time, with moments where the player is safe, but an overall increasing trajectory of threat and darkness. And the game also balances a mix between periods of time where the player is forced to explore a certain area with opportunities to be free to check out all of what the different parts of town have to offer. I know that I didn't even get to explore all of it, and I can see how a player could've had the opportunity to be even more immersed spending more extensive time just figuring out what all the locations on the map have to offer while fighting off the monsters that come, getting a feel for the layout of the roads and coming up with a mental model for it all. Obviously not a massive world, but the presence of fog, monsters making traversal not so simple, and the changing nature of the landscape add to how the physical space of Silent Hill is processed by the player.

Another thing that has to be talked about with this game is the audio. Holy crap. The dubbing isn't the best in the world, especially with awkward pauses, but the soundtrack and sound design are something else. This soundtrack has to be one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game, with incredible industrial texture and dark ambient energy, and the way it's mixed in how certain melodies will fade in and out of each other depending on where you are is so seamless. The overall sound design is incredible in how it all mixes together. I've found myself becoming a little more gravitated toward more industrial, noise, and ambient music lately and this game fit that so well.

The writing is also really solid in this game, and an element that I feel holds up. What I love is that enough is told to the player to give an impression of what's happening, but it's still vague enough that it isn't completely spelled out. I did a little bit of extra reading to clarify some things for myself, but I could tell that the hooks for plot threads and character details are already there in the game. There's a lot of environmental storytelling, details when you investigate certain items that subtly all work toward telling the story of this town and its inhabitants. The characters don't talk too much about themselves and you have to infer a lot about them. You get a basic sense of who these characters are, but there's still a lot you don't know about them, and that mystery adds a lot to the impression they make on you.
The gameplay mechanics are simple, but effective for the kind of mood narrative this game is going for. You move around with tank controls, which can be clumsy, but I think they help with how the camera (which is actually relatively good compared to some camera systems of the time) changes positions often. They add to feeling like a clumsy everyman fighting normal monsters, but they do become more tricky when you're supposed to dodge and stuff in the boss fights, and I mean with the mechanics in this game it was going to be tricky to really make super captivating boss fights. The basic gameplay model is geared around puzzles and combat. The combat is simple but adequate and properly clumsy for the tension the game is going for, but yeah it doesn't allow for super interesting gameplay against the bosses. I was able to do well on ammo and health without worrying too bad for the most part on normal mode. The puzzle aspect of the game involves the more moment-to-moment puzzles you'll encounter, grabbing items and remembering details for future use later, and the more overall narrative puzzles as to where Cheryl is and the nature of Silent Hill. The puzzles can be pretty creative to figure out. I cheated on a few, but I can't remember any that were so BS that I don't think I could've figured it out on my own with enough time and the right ideas. Some are pretty clever.

I think that if you're open to older games, you should definitely give the original Silent Hill a try if you've never played it. Even with the stuff the sequel built off of this foundation, I still feel it's a solid game that holds up on its own, even if the bosses won't blow you away, and it has some trademarks of an older game with the "eh" dubbing and the inability to really control where the camera is independent of the character. The audio is unbelievably good, the atmosphere is powerful, the environmental storytelling is strong, and I think the look still holds up in its own retro way.

Revisited so I can go through the rest of the series. Also I'm in a big horror mood so I'll be playing lots of stuff like this through Halloween. Not quite my favorite Silent Hill game but it's not far behind 2 and 4.

One of my favorite games in terms of aesthetics. The limitations they had to work with on the PS1 work heavily in the games favor. Add in the music (notably less melodic than the other SH games on average), wonderful settings, and characters and we've got a big fave of mine.

Tears Of... is the best song ever.

As a very late-comer to the Silent Hill franchise, I finally sat down and finished this game, and there are a lot of great things; the atmosphere is one of palpable dread throughout, combat is surprisingly smooth for a first outing in the series - not nearly as clunky as the first Resident Evil (1996) imho, and a lot of puzzles have those great "a-ha" moments when you figure it out.

Only a few elements that brought the score down for me - some of the puzzles were far too difficult to figure out, especially in the later sections of the game, but I've heard they're slightly more forgiving in the later games which is good to hear. Other than this, I found the story a little too abstract, and I found it hard to get sucked into it for this reason, in spite of the fact that I really cared about Harry and seeing him succeed. Somehow I was absorbed by every element of this game except its story!

Onwards now, to my first ever playthrough of Silent Hill 2!

A bit of an interesting one.

I was avoiding this franchise from like leagues away, mostly cuz I don't do horror and I knew that these games will scare me, but already after finishing the first one I don't regret it a bit. Playing with the lights out really gave a whole new level to how absolutely perfect the atmosphere of the game is, just completely intricately paced from beginning to end. The horrors of the town slowly developed and enveloped the entire aesthetic as things never really stopped being intrinsically unsettling and spooky on most fronts. My favorite moments have to be the hospital in terms of art design, but the sewer to the amusement park really takes the cake on the heartpounding rush side of things. The sound design is absolutely excellent too, with the radio sound etched in my mind in a good way, as well as the industrial vibes that bleed through the hospital and dark overworld. Music's pretty swell here too.

It's really a shame then, that when removed from that aesthetical core, the game starts to have its edges dulled. And I do mean removed, the gameplay of juking monsters and """"managing"""" resources wears itself thin by about halfway through, to where all intents and purposes the atmosphere begins to be enveloped by its own form of mediocrity. You do get some neat moments, I quite liked the first boss and I think a few of the actual puzzles here are really interesting to figure out. But generally once you're used to the controls and have gotten through the hospital, you've done everything. There's also not really much here to say in terms of the story, mostly following rather straightforward beats in an incredibly obfuscated way. It does lead to a couple genuinely great moments, but a lot of it is so incredibly background that I don't think it deserves attention.

Real emphasis on how fucked the resource management is though for a second, what is most definitely the one way this game could ramp the hell up out of the tension is so massively overtuned to where you'll never run out of anything unless you realllllly try.

This kind of sums up to an experience that really peaks early and ends with more of a whimper than it really deserves, at least for me. I even went out of my way to dodge more enemies instead of just shooting them, and that still didn't save sections that could've been a lot more crazy to go through. Definitely still ABSOLUTELY worth your time, but with expectations set very low.

I still can't believe I love this game as much as I do.
The atmosphere and sound design are absolutely unforgettable. The industrial aesthetics of the sound design coupled with the hellish aesthetics of the Otherworld are truly phenomenal for an early horror game like Silent Hill. It kinda blows my mind that this PS1 horror game is genuinely scary. I guess because the early Resident Evil games aren't super scary (I mean they do get me tense with the strategic item management and how I have to be extremely cautious with every enemy but it's not the atmosphere, still love those games though) I didn't have many expectations for this but holy shit it cannot be understated how fantastic the sounds that emanate from this game are, they really help immersing the player into the creepy and distorted atmosphere of the game and it's really something to behold coming from a game of the 5th generation.
I guess my main issue that holds me from giving this game a 10/10 is the item management. It's really hard to run out of ammo in this game and I really wish it was more strategic like the Resident Evil games. In those you have to carefully think what item to keep, what item to leave in the item chest, when to use certain items, when to shoot at the enemies, it's really thought-provoking while Silent Hill just provides you with a bajillion pistol bullets to the point where I think I only ran out of bullets in this game once or twice. It could've had a bigger approach to what Resident Evil did with the item management but eh sure whatever.