(Note: The following is the blurb I wrote for Silent Hill as part of user Pangburn's epic "Sight and Sound Poll"-style project where he essentially established Backloggd's definitive canon. Can't say enough good things about that massive undertaking and the work he put in - and for making me write this. Despite SH being my own "canon" favorite game for, I don't know, fifteen years or something now, I've never written about it. I find it extremely difficult to articulate its qualities - which in my mental laziness I feel like should be totally self-evident - and it's effected me in such a strongly and weirdly personal way that I don't feel I have the vocabulary to describe it. But I do love it, and he knew that, and despite me initially demurring like a chickenshit, he got me to stand up and be counted for this absolutely beyond-godlike classic. So, since I don't know that I'll ever find my way to writing more about it outside of passionate defenses and references in random comments, I figured I should repurpose it here, for posterity. Anyway.)
Building further on the steady development of its progenitors SWEET HOME, ALONE IN THE DARK, and RESIDENT EVIL, Silent Hill expanded the scope of video game horror both outward and inward. Rather than a mansion or series of interconnected buildings, it gave players a sprawling, fully three-dimensional town full of terrors to explore, yet focused on assaulting them mainly with their own fear of the unknown, clouding the story, characters, monsters, and environments in metaphor and dream logic, keeping them submerged in an oppressive sense of dread that made opening any new door genuinely unnerving. The aesthetic - essentially unmatched on the PlayStation - married Japanese sensibilities with the nightmarish imagery of its developers' favorite western horror media, and created a dark and atmospheric, crisp yet deliberately obscured look and sound that threw the doors open wide for a whole subgenre of J-Horror games that would follow. Silent Hill's project and effect on the player can be understood through its most indelible image, one that continues to define scary video games to this day - a normal person alone on an abandoned city street, faced with an enveloping gray fog ahead, crippled by the fear of taking even one step farther into it.
Building further on the steady development of its progenitors SWEET HOME, ALONE IN THE DARK, and RESIDENT EVIL, Silent Hill expanded the scope of video game horror both outward and inward. Rather than a mansion or series of interconnected buildings, it gave players a sprawling, fully three-dimensional town full of terrors to explore, yet focused on assaulting them mainly with their own fear of the unknown, clouding the story, characters, monsters, and environments in metaphor and dream logic, keeping them submerged in an oppressive sense of dread that made opening any new door genuinely unnerving. The aesthetic - essentially unmatched on the PlayStation - married Japanese sensibilities with the nightmarish imagery of its developers' favorite western horror media, and created a dark and atmospheric, crisp yet deliberately obscured look and sound that threw the doors open wide for a whole subgenre of J-Horror games that would follow. Silent Hill's project and effect on the player can be understood through its most indelible image, one that continues to define scary video games to this day - a normal person alone on an abandoned city street, faced with an enveloping gray fog ahead, crippled by the fear of taking even one step farther into it.