This review contains spoilers
I feel as if Capcom and Konami have this unspoken rivalry with each other. Both are arguably gaming’s most prominent third-party developers that have been active since the early days of console gaming. Both of their notable slew of franchises are some of the most popular and critically lauded in gaming history, supporting the range of systems both companies have been featured on. There are distinctive parallels between their franchises that might hint at some friendly competition. Where Capcom has Ghost n’ Goblins, Konami has Castlevania. Where Capcom has Breath of Fire, Konami has Suikoden. In the late ’90s, however, Capcom was sitting pretty on the throne of the survival horror genre with their breakout hit Resident Evil. Capcom sat on their royal seat with their legs crossed, held up in their mighty fortress with the smuggest of grins on their faces. From the top of their perch, they taunted Konami saying that Solid Snake was a hamster and Richter Belmont smelled of elderberries. Okay, that isn’t exactly what happened, but the success of Resident Evil inspired Konami to conjure up their own survival horror game to compete with Capcom. A lightbulb appeared over the director of Konami's head as he gathered a pack of misfits from the Konami offices, a talented but contentious bunch with a taste for the esoteric and the macabre. They were the cool kids' table that even Hideo Kojima wasn't allowed to sit with. This team of developers at Konami was known as “Team Silent”, a codename relating to the team’s final product: Silent Hill. With Silent Hill, Konami did more than just offer an experience that competed with Resident Evil. Silent Hill was heralded with the status of the scariest game of all time. Playing Resident Evil might have caused some people to get startled whenever they heard a bump at night, but playing Silent Hill kept people from sleeping, rocking back and forth in the fetal position with the lights on. Several generations later, with many sequels under its belt, the first Silent Hill somehow maintains its landmark status as the king of interactive terror.
Whenever I discuss a game from the early 3D generation, I feel inclined to talk about how well it’s aged. I don’t feel like contesting the preserved qualities from other past generations, but it always makes a point to mention this for this particular generation. Perhaps this is because this generation has always seemed antiquated to me. After all, I grew up with the generation that succeeded it, which greatly refined primitive 3D graphics. There wasn’t a grace period where games from this era looked cutting edge as they’ve always looked awkward and rudimentary to me. Silent Hill is no exception, as the game has aged like cheese. The graphics are unrefined and pixelated, the character models are stiffer than cardboard, and the voice acting is some of the most endearingly bad voice work from an era synonymous with terrible voice acting. I cracked on Hideo Kojima, but Team Silent could’ve used some of the presentational prowess he used in Metal Gear Solid. However, Silent Hill is a rare case in which these dated aspects are not a glaring detriment marred by the progress of the medium of gaming. Somehow, these aspects preserve the effectiveness of the fear factor Silent Hill is renowned for, making it just as effective as it once was decades ago.
As with Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill’s graphics and voicework are not necessarily synonymous with its overall presentation. Metal Gear Solid did a wonderful job depicting an artful espionage story despite the limitations of the PS1. Over time, the stronger qualities of the game still retain their effectiveness. Silent Hill is intended to be a spine-chilling, psychological horror story meant to explore the dark recesses of the human psyche. Silent Hill does not achieve this through the presentation but through masterful pacing that feels like a nightmarish progression. This is achieved as early as the infamous opening scene of the game. Harry Mason, the poor sap in for a wild ride, to say the least, wrecks his car in the middle of the night, trying to swerve away from what appears to be an adolescent girl in the middle of the road. Once he recuperates from the accident, his seven-year-old daughter Cheryl goes missing. He follows what appears to be his daughter as she disappears.
The blinding fog is a suitable base to set up the ominous setting, but this scene gets much worse. Harry follows Cheryl into a narrow alleyway, where he spots the bloody remains of an unidentifiable creature. This odd, ghastly encounter gets progressively weirder and more hair-raising as Harry continues to trek down the alleyway. Suddenly, the alleyway gets calamitously dark, and Harry finds himself in a blood-splattered maze formed from rusty, metallic fences. At the center of this maze is a decaying corpse that looks like it was crucified on the barbed wire of the fence. Little creatures with knives appear to kill Harry, and he has no means of defending himself from them. The gate he entered won’t budge, so he also has no means of escape. Once the creatures kill him, Harry wakes up in a cafe feeling incredulous about whether or not the experience he just had was merely a dream. The players just experienced the most harrowing beginning of any game up to this point. The progression of this sequence is exactly what a nightmare feels like. It starts with a base level of discomfort as the scene gets more perilous to a climactic point of sheer terror. The player feels as shocked and disoriented as Harry when he wakes up in a cold sweat. This unparalleled opening sequence isn’t even the pinnacle of the horror of Silent Hill. Believe it or not, it gets much scarier after this.
Objectively, Silent Hill’s age conspicuously shows through every facet of its presentation. It’s endemic to the primitive blemishes of the PS1 era without much of it aging gracefully two decades later. This is the case for most PS1 games, so this doesn’t come as a surprise. However, what does come as a surprise is that not only do the dated aspects not deter the experience, but they aid it. A key element to a lot of effective horrors is ambiguity. Resident Evil’s enemies were all recognizable creatures that reflected people's fears in real life, either in an exaggerated size or scale. As hair-raising as facing a giant, man-eating snake or the living dead in eerily lit corridors, the fear factor on the player only extends to their discrepancies with these creatures. Silent Hill is much more psychological and knows that the key to horror lies in the fear of the unknown. Team Silent’s creativity flourishes in the nightmarish creature designs seen throughout the game. Every first encounter with these creatures will most likely warrant the player screaming, “what the fuck is that?!” with wide-eyed bewilderment. All of the creatures in Silent Hill are tormented-looking figments of this town, with some even having uncanny recognizability. Many creatures also have a percentage range of skin on their bodies, a disturbing aspect of their designs. Some of the monsters look like unfortunate burn victims, and others, like the dogs and the flying creatures in the overworld, have no skin. The skinless creatures in the overworld resemble dogs and what appears to be something of a pterodactyl, covering all ground in the town, so the player never feels safe. The enemies inside the various barren buildings in Silent Hill are even creepier. Most of them resemble humanoid beings like the small creatures in the school or the nurses/doctors in the hospital, but they are anything but human. These enemies are abominations from the creatively dark minds of the Team Silent offices. These enemies are hostile toward the player, but they aren’t vicious and bloodthirsty. Their demeanor seems tormented and as if they lack mental faculties. They act as if they wish to be put out of their misery. When the player hits them in defense, they make an anguished cry and writhe on the floor once they are beaten down. The player is relieved that the threat is down, but they are still uneasy about what they just encountered. The bosses resemble bugs, but even the most knowledgeable entomologist couldn’t decipher what species they are. The dated graphics aid the uneasiness because it’s difficult to discern what any of the enemies are. This was most likely intentional because their designs are so ghastly. If the graphics were clearer, the effectiveness of the enemy encounters would falter as a result. It’s unnerving that players can’t decipher what’s coming at them, especially after decades of graphical progress.
The effectiveness of the dated graphics also extends to the foregrounds as well. Even if someone hasn’t played Silent Hill, they are still aware of the dense, blinding fog that has become synonymous with the series. The fog is meant to accentuate the creepy atmosphere with a wintry mix accompanying it for a better effect. It’s not only used to create a mood with an aesthetic. When Harry is moving around in the town, the player might notice that the fog is so thick that they cannot see more than ten feet in front of them. This is because the developers could only program so much in the overworld with the graphical limitations that they implemented the fog to compensate. The developers only rendered what they felt was necessary for the player to see directly in front of them, resulting in the player constantly having a restricted range of sight when traversing the town. One can assume that if the developers weren’t so constricted, the player would be able to have somewhat of a lucent view of the town of Silent Hill. Traversing through the overworld of the town is leagues more hectic with the fog, obviously because not being able to discern what dangers surround the town gives the player more anxiety. It’s also much more likely to get lost due to being unable to see around. Without these technical limitations, Silent Hill may not have even had the pea soup fog the series upholds.
Inside buildings and structures, Silent Hill compensates for the technical limitations with complete darkness. This is not the candle-lit, luminescent eeriness that lights the night in Resident Evil. Silent Hill is where even the moon is too afraid to shine, which greatly affects the strained atmosphere of any nighttime setting in the game. Once Harry wakes up in the cafe, he finds a flashlight on the counter. The player won’t find the flashlight useful sprinting across town but will never want to turn it off once they scurry through one of the town’s abandoned buildings. It even surprised me that the player can turn off the flashlight, considering there is never any respite from the complete darkness in these buildings. Even more surprising is that the game is spookier once the player turns off the flashlight in these areas. The developers render more of the foreground for the player than in the overworld, but the player only sees what is directly in front of the minute lighting provided by the flashlight. Anything the player would see with the flashlight on is the stuff of nightmares, alarming them while they are forced to see them progress onward. Turning the flashlight off is somewhat relaxing comparatively, despite the complete darkness. Horror games are not intended to be set in broad daylight, but most horror games before Silent Hill at least established a spooky mood with some gothic lighting. Calling Silent Hill spooky would be a laughable understatement. The darkness here is a void of despair, demanding that the player navigates through lengthy swathes of the game with minimal lighting. Because the fog was implemented due to limitations, I can only assume that the darkness here was also due to this.
The dated controls also factor into the effectiveness of Silent Hill’s horror just as much as the dated graphics. Rigid movement controls in early 3D games were so common that they were dubbed “tank controls” by gamers, and these were especially common in early horror games like Resident Evil. Though they felt uncomfortable and unnatural compared to real movement, they enhance the horror factor of these games because they make the player feel more vulnerable. However, moving like this as the super-soldiers of Resident Evil didn’t make sense because all the characters seemed capable of physical prowess. Harry, on the other hand, is a mere writer and a poor schmuck who is a victim of circumstance. He’s an average joe with a non-physically intensive career path (I would know), so the tank controls appropriately fit him. His run is only slightly quicker than his walking speed, he flinches when he bumps into a wall, and he swings his weapons like he’s never even picked up a baseball bat once in his life. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine were assigned to deal with the horrors of Resident Evil because they could deal with the challenges. Harry Mason, on the other hand, is put in a situation far beyond his element, which is a testament to true survival horror.
The only dated aspect of Silent Hill that is a detriment to the overall experience is the voice acting. Bad PS1-era voice acting can be endearing, like in the case of the first Resident Evil, because the game exudes a campy tone anyways. The same cannot be said for the dark, spine-chilling experience that is Silent Hill. Harry Mason is intended to be a joe-schmoe, everyman character, so his voice is intended to be plain. Considering the situation and what he’s up against, one would think he’d be a tad more emphatic. Instead, his lines are delivered as blandly as humanly possible no matter the situation. Harry experiences the most blood-churning, visceral horrors in gaming history, and all he can utter are inquisitive musings like “what is that?” Meanwhile, the player is even afraid to process what they just experienced. Perhaps the lack of vocal energy is supposed to emphasize Harry’s every-man status, but I find fault with this. As a fellow everyman myself, my skin would be blanched at the horrors of Silent Hill. I guffawed a couple of times Harry opened his mouth to ask himself what was going on, an unintentional source of levity, I’m sure. Other characters like police officer Cybill and Dr. Kaufmann express their lines with the same monotone, deadpan delivery. I could argue that this dissociation between the characters and the player is due to a hint of surrealism, but I just don’t buy it. The bad voice acting is similar to many other games from this era.
As a survival horror game, Silent Hill borrows many of the fundamentals from Resident Evil. The common tank controls have already been established, but Silent Hill also borrows the same sense of survival strategy from Resident Evil. The main thing to consider in any survival horror game is scarce resources. While Silent Hill doesn’t implement the same cramped inventory system as Resident Evil, ammo is even more deficient, and there are no juggernaut weapons like the revolver and grenade launchers. Harry’s arsenal includes standard firearms, such as a pistol, shotgun, and hunting rifle. The last weapon isn’t even available to the player until more than halfway into the game. Harry also has a selection of melee weapons, such as a lead pipe and a large red hammer. The melee weapons are used to conserve ammo but vary in effectiveness against enemies. The player’s health is also indicated with the exact three color schemes as Resident Evil. Health items, on the other hand, are simplified as there is no botanical mixing involved. Health drinks restore a small portion of health, medkits a medium portion, and ampoules restore a large portion of health. The health items are also as scarce as ammo is. The player will stumble upon all these items organically, but I felt the need to explore the overworld and find items to prepare for the challenges ahead. This is something I never felt necessary for Resident Evil. A unique aspect that wasn’t in Resident Evil was the addition of a radio. The game mitigates the total darkness in various sections by giving Harry a radio that signals that monsters are nearby. The device ensures that although the player might not see the danger, at least it cautions them that it’s close. The sound the radio makes is just as harrowing as the marginal light from the flashlight as its ring pierces the eardrums of every Silent Hill veteran. The player also has the option of turning the radio off like the flashlight, and I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would turn that off either.
Silent Hill isn’t just Resident Evil with a psychological tinge. Silent Hill was obviously built from the survival horror template that Resident Evil established, but Silent Hill is its own beast. Team Silent is obviously a group of people with a smattering of eclectic influences, all of which are incorporated artfully into this game. Some notable influences are obviously horror films, but specifically horror films that dabble in surrealism. The design of the “otherworld” resembles the hellish illusions from Adrian Lyne’s film Jacob’s Ladder. The premise of a quaint town with a dark, surrealistic underbelly is reminiscent of Twin Peaks. The game also takes aesthetic inspiration from the works of Junji Ito and Francis Bacon. Arcane elements from various religions are also implemented into the game, mostly as references and parts of the puzzles. To flaunt their artistic knowledge even further, the streets of Silent Hill are named after famous science fiction authors, the three keys found in the overworld are named after characters from The Wizard of Oz, and the three teachers at the elementary school are named after members of Sonic Youth (a reference that made me giddy when I first saw it like the complete dork I am). These demented Japanese hipsters wanted to express their influences to make something of a highbrow horror experience. Konami tasked them to compete with Resident Evil and didn’t underestimate the collective literate acumen of these people to take this survival horror template and run away with it.
In terms of gameplay, Silent Hill might also take inspiration from games outside of the survival horror sphere like The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Silent Hill’s Zelda influence seems apparent in the way the town is designed and the progression that takes place throughout the game. I’ve been referring to the town of Silent Hill as the game's overworld because it’s very similar to something like Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time. It’s a hub with interconnected paths with a few minor stops in between. Nothing in the hub is too consequential to the progress of the game, but rather a space between all of the landmark areas and a means to travel between them. It’s a relative space to revel in the potential of early three-dimensional design. The only difference between Hyrule Field and Silent Hill is that instead of a spacious field with a small number of enemies and many obvious routes, Silent Hill is a hectic, dingy hellhole where enemies run rampant and where there are zero obvious routes. Many of the paths in Silent Hill that seem obvious are blocked off and impenetrable. The factor of Silent Hill’s world and progression that reminds me even more of Zelda is that the landmarks Harry visits trying to find his daughter remind me of the dungeons from the Zelda series. I’ve even caught myself referring to the school and the hospital as “Silent Hill dungeons” because their Zelda influence is obvious to me. Once Harry enters these places from a path in the overworld, navigating them becomes a large precedent in progressing the game’s story. Each building comes with a separate map different from the one in the overworld that exclusively gives the player a layout of the entire building. A good number of the doors in each building will be either locked without any hope of opening or opened with a key from another room. This gives the player the incentive to explore as many rooms as possible while keeping a mental note of what is in every significant room. Progressions through the buildings are done by finding keys to the locked doors and solving puzzles. Any Zelda fan will recognize these aspects because they are the makeup of every Zelda dungeon. One difference is that the puzzles Silent Hill presents can be a tad perplexing. The puzzles usually offer hints in the corner of the room, but the clues are presented in the least straightforward ways possible. There is no reason to overthink these puzzles as they are simpler than they seem, but I still feel that Team Silent made the puzzles a little esoteric to further flaunt their credentials.
The Symphony of the Night influence might be more of a stretch, but it still seems applicable here. For those who are unaware, the second half of Symphony of the Night has the player exploring the same castle, this time with the map literally flipped on its head with new challenges. In Silent Hill, the same is done through the “otherworld”, a horrifying, uncanny nether realm that represents the darkest regions of the human psyche. Navigating through the dark, abandoned Midwich Elementary was scary enough, but it’s Candyland compared to the otherworld. Harry enters the otherworld for the first time through a clock tower in the courtyard of the elementary school. It suddenly starts to rain, and an arcane symbol appears in the middle of the courtyard to signal that something has changed. In the hospital, every room seems impenetrable until Harry enters the elevator. At first glance, there are only three floors, but more glances will add a fourth floor, another entrance to the other world. This moment is so subtle, but it’s one of the scariest moments in the game. The otherworld has a few harrowing idiosyncrasies no matter what area it’s mirroring. It’s a jet-black, industrial hellscape painted with rust and blood. Hanging, massacred corpses of unknown origin drape over the otherworld like ornate decorations. The only foundation keeping Harry between his life and plummeting to dark oblivion are metallic cages and rusty, industrial steel. The otherworld is a surrealistic nightmare made to make the player uncomfortable and fuck with their heads.
Unexplainable phenomena like Cheryl calling Harry on a disconnected phone and a disturbing sequence showing Cheryl’s visage on a series of televisions is an onslaught on the player’s senses. Once the player enters the otherworld for the first time, they’ll get a dreadful sense of deja-vu as they realize this is the makeup of the nightmare sequence in the beginning. Silent Hill’s masterful pacing and progression into the rabbit hole of a nightmare has occurred once again, but this time Harry can’t just jolt himself awake. The player has to work with the nightmare, navigating through it, uncovering the exit, and earning respite from it, and that’s a distressing affair. One particular dungeon at the end of the game called “Nowhere” is a dungeon that takes place entirely in the otherworld. It has the same ghoulish features as anywhere else in the other world, but it’s the longest otherworld section in the game with nowhere to turn back and no map to aid the player. The absolute darkness, surreal design, and the industrial clings and clangs and dentist drills of the soundscape were enough for me to utter “...make...it...stop...” whispered under my breath with sheer discomfort. Never has any section in any video game made me this unnerved and uncomfortable. “Nowhere” itself is an achievement in horror gaming.
It also helps that Silent Hill’s plot is one of the most horrifying premises in horror media. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that the premise of this game didn’t meet any controversy and censorship upon its release. As Harry searches for Cheryl, he starts to uncover the dark history of this town, and it’s quite graphic, to say the least. He meets a frazzled older woman named Dahlia Gillespie, who gives him an artifact known as the Flauros to protect him from the monstrosities that plague the town. He then meets Dr. Kaufmann, a doctor specializing in exorcisms, and Lisa, a nurse who strangely lives in the otherworld section of the hospital. Harry then starts chasing a girl who looks like his daughter Cheryl but is actually an adolescent girl named Alessa, Dahlia’s daughter. She is a dead ringer for Cheryl, and that’s because Cheryl is the reincarnation of Alessa. Alessa’s body was immolated in a ritual conducted by the evil cult based in Silent Hill that Dahlia is a member of. The ritual was intended for young Alessa to give birth to Samael, an arcane demon that the cult worships that will bring forth an age of darkness upon the world. Complications occurred, causing the ritual to fail, and part of Alessa became Cheryl, Harry’s adopted daughter. However, Alessa’s spirit remained in the town and manifested in the otherworld. All of the terrifying things in the otherworld are symbols that mirror Alessa’s anguished cognition, such as the mean kids in school and her distaste for bugs. Even the nurse Lisa is a ghostly apparition manifested as a memory of the nurse who cared for Alessa in the hospital. This plot takes elements from The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and manages to be as shocking as both. That is one messed up little girl.
Silent Hill’s story has multiple endings like other horror games before it. Once Harry completes the “nowhere” dungeon, Dahlia and Alessa are found in the center of a spacious, dark room, ready to execute the ritual again and birth Samael. Depending on a few circumstances that have to be met, Cybil and Dr. Kaufmann are here as well. The “bad ending” has Harry defeat an incubator, and Cheryl is dead for good, leaving Harry crestfallen. The “good ending” involves Harry fighting the rebirthed Samael, a bug-like version of the dark angel Baphomet. He’s also an incredibly cheap boss with a lightning bolt attack that I’m convinced is undodgeable. I tanked this boss with my health items, but it was still an aggravating fight. The game even gives the player some leeway, and Samael dies if the player enters the fight with no ammo. Once Samael is defeated, either way, Alessa has reincarnated again, and Harry leaves with Cybil to raise another version of a rebirthed Alessa. Given the sequels of this game in retrospect, the good ending is the canon ending, but I found that the bad ending was a more appropriate gut punch to such a visceral experience.
Konami knew they had something special with Silent Hill. They let the creative juices of their most eccentric employees roam free, conjuring up something that made Capcom scurry away from their horror throne, squealing like a little girl and hiking up its skirt while it was running away. Silent Hill isn’t just a horror game; it’s an experience that has left an impression on every gamer. It’s an experience that highlighted our collective fears of the dark and presented new terrors to give a fresh meaning to them with creativity and artful surrealism. It’s an experience that tickles at our almond-shaped amygdalas and gives us a horrific sensation that people in 1999 didn’t know was possible. Like many early 3D titles on the PS1, it’s showing its age like the liver spots on an old man’s head, but somehow the meat of the experience transcends the looming inevitability of passing time. Only a true masterpiece can accomplish this, and I can confidently give the first Silent Hill that prestigious title.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com
Whenever I discuss a game from the early 3D generation, I feel inclined to talk about how well it’s aged. I don’t feel like contesting the preserved qualities from other past generations, but it always makes a point to mention this for this particular generation. Perhaps this is because this generation has always seemed antiquated to me. After all, I grew up with the generation that succeeded it, which greatly refined primitive 3D graphics. There wasn’t a grace period where games from this era looked cutting edge as they’ve always looked awkward and rudimentary to me. Silent Hill is no exception, as the game has aged like cheese. The graphics are unrefined and pixelated, the character models are stiffer than cardboard, and the voice acting is some of the most endearingly bad voice work from an era synonymous with terrible voice acting. I cracked on Hideo Kojima, but Team Silent could’ve used some of the presentational prowess he used in Metal Gear Solid. However, Silent Hill is a rare case in which these dated aspects are not a glaring detriment marred by the progress of the medium of gaming. Somehow, these aspects preserve the effectiveness of the fear factor Silent Hill is renowned for, making it just as effective as it once was decades ago.
As with Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill’s graphics and voicework are not necessarily synonymous with its overall presentation. Metal Gear Solid did a wonderful job depicting an artful espionage story despite the limitations of the PS1. Over time, the stronger qualities of the game still retain their effectiveness. Silent Hill is intended to be a spine-chilling, psychological horror story meant to explore the dark recesses of the human psyche. Silent Hill does not achieve this through the presentation but through masterful pacing that feels like a nightmarish progression. This is achieved as early as the infamous opening scene of the game. Harry Mason, the poor sap in for a wild ride, to say the least, wrecks his car in the middle of the night, trying to swerve away from what appears to be an adolescent girl in the middle of the road. Once he recuperates from the accident, his seven-year-old daughter Cheryl goes missing. He follows what appears to be his daughter as she disappears.
The blinding fog is a suitable base to set up the ominous setting, but this scene gets much worse. Harry follows Cheryl into a narrow alleyway, where he spots the bloody remains of an unidentifiable creature. This odd, ghastly encounter gets progressively weirder and more hair-raising as Harry continues to trek down the alleyway. Suddenly, the alleyway gets calamitously dark, and Harry finds himself in a blood-splattered maze formed from rusty, metallic fences. At the center of this maze is a decaying corpse that looks like it was crucified on the barbed wire of the fence. Little creatures with knives appear to kill Harry, and he has no means of defending himself from them. The gate he entered won’t budge, so he also has no means of escape. Once the creatures kill him, Harry wakes up in a cafe feeling incredulous about whether or not the experience he just had was merely a dream. The players just experienced the most harrowing beginning of any game up to this point. The progression of this sequence is exactly what a nightmare feels like. It starts with a base level of discomfort as the scene gets more perilous to a climactic point of sheer terror. The player feels as shocked and disoriented as Harry when he wakes up in a cold sweat. This unparalleled opening sequence isn’t even the pinnacle of the horror of Silent Hill. Believe it or not, it gets much scarier after this.
Objectively, Silent Hill’s age conspicuously shows through every facet of its presentation. It’s endemic to the primitive blemishes of the PS1 era without much of it aging gracefully two decades later. This is the case for most PS1 games, so this doesn’t come as a surprise. However, what does come as a surprise is that not only do the dated aspects not deter the experience, but they aid it. A key element to a lot of effective horrors is ambiguity. Resident Evil’s enemies were all recognizable creatures that reflected people's fears in real life, either in an exaggerated size or scale. As hair-raising as facing a giant, man-eating snake or the living dead in eerily lit corridors, the fear factor on the player only extends to their discrepancies with these creatures. Silent Hill is much more psychological and knows that the key to horror lies in the fear of the unknown. Team Silent’s creativity flourishes in the nightmarish creature designs seen throughout the game. Every first encounter with these creatures will most likely warrant the player screaming, “what the fuck is that?!” with wide-eyed bewilderment. All of the creatures in Silent Hill are tormented-looking figments of this town, with some even having uncanny recognizability. Many creatures also have a percentage range of skin on their bodies, a disturbing aspect of their designs. Some of the monsters look like unfortunate burn victims, and others, like the dogs and the flying creatures in the overworld, have no skin. The skinless creatures in the overworld resemble dogs and what appears to be something of a pterodactyl, covering all ground in the town, so the player never feels safe. The enemies inside the various barren buildings in Silent Hill are even creepier. Most of them resemble humanoid beings like the small creatures in the school or the nurses/doctors in the hospital, but they are anything but human. These enemies are abominations from the creatively dark minds of the Team Silent offices. These enemies are hostile toward the player, but they aren’t vicious and bloodthirsty. Their demeanor seems tormented and as if they lack mental faculties. They act as if they wish to be put out of their misery. When the player hits them in defense, they make an anguished cry and writhe on the floor once they are beaten down. The player is relieved that the threat is down, but they are still uneasy about what they just encountered. The bosses resemble bugs, but even the most knowledgeable entomologist couldn’t decipher what species they are. The dated graphics aid the uneasiness because it’s difficult to discern what any of the enemies are. This was most likely intentional because their designs are so ghastly. If the graphics were clearer, the effectiveness of the enemy encounters would falter as a result. It’s unnerving that players can’t decipher what’s coming at them, especially after decades of graphical progress.
The effectiveness of the dated graphics also extends to the foregrounds as well. Even if someone hasn’t played Silent Hill, they are still aware of the dense, blinding fog that has become synonymous with the series. The fog is meant to accentuate the creepy atmosphere with a wintry mix accompanying it for a better effect. It’s not only used to create a mood with an aesthetic. When Harry is moving around in the town, the player might notice that the fog is so thick that they cannot see more than ten feet in front of them. This is because the developers could only program so much in the overworld with the graphical limitations that they implemented the fog to compensate. The developers only rendered what they felt was necessary for the player to see directly in front of them, resulting in the player constantly having a restricted range of sight when traversing the town. One can assume that if the developers weren’t so constricted, the player would be able to have somewhat of a lucent view of the town of Silent Hill. Traversing through the overworld of the town is leagues more hectic with the fog, obviously because not being able to discern what dangers surround the town gives the player more anxiety. It’s also much more likely to get lost due to being unable to see around. Without these technical limitations, Silent Hill may not have even had the pea soup fog the series upholds.
Inside buildings and structures, Silent Hill compensates for the technical limitations with complete darkness. This is not the candle-lit, luminescent eeriness that lights the night in Resident Evil. Silent Hill is where even the moon is too afraid to shine, which greatly affects the strained atmosphere of any nighttime setting in the game. Once Harry wakes up in the cafe, he finds a flashlight on the counter. The player won’t find the flashlight useful sprinting across town but will never want to turn it off once they scurry through one of the town’s abandoned buildings. It even surprised me that the player can turn off the flashlight, considering there is never any respite from the complete darkness in these buildings. Even more surprising is that the game is spookier once the player turns off the flashlight in these areas. The developers render more of the foreground for the player than in the overworld, but the player only sees what is directly in front of the minute lighting provided by the flashlight. Anything the player would see with the flashlight on is the stuff of nightmares, alarming them while they are forced to see them progress onward. Turning the flashlight off is somewhat relaxing comparatively, despite the complete darkness. Horror games are not intended to be set in broad daylight, but most horror games before Silent Hill at least established a spooky mood with some gothic lighting. Calling Silent Hill spooky would be a laughable understatement. The darkness here is a void of despair, demanding that the player navigates through lengthy swathes of the game with minimal lighting. Because the fog was implemented due to limitations, I can only assume that the darkness here was also due to this.
The dated controls also factor into the effectiveness of Silent Hill’s horror just as much as the dated graphics. Rigid movement controls in early 3D games were so common that they were dubbed “tank controls” by gamers, and these were especially common in early horror games like Resident Evil. Though they felt uncomfortable and unnatural compared to real movement, they enhance the horror factor of these games because they make the player feel more vulnerable. However, moving like this as the super-soldiers of Resident Evil didn’t make sense because all the characters seemed capable of physical prowess. Harry, on the other hand, is a mere writer and a poor schmuck who is a victim of circumstance. He’s an average joe with a non-physically intensive career path (I would know), so the tank controls appropriately fit him. His run is only slightly quicker than his walking speed, he flinches when he bumps into a wall, and he swings his weapons like he’s never even picked up a baseball bat once in his life. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine were assigned to deal with the horrors of Resident Evil because they could deal with the challenges. Harry Mason, on the other hand, is put in a situation far beyond his element, which is a testament to true survival horror.
The only dated aspect of Silent Hill that is a detriment to the overall experience is the voice acting. Bad PS1-era voice acting can be endearing, like in the case of the first Resident Evil, because the game exudes a campy tone anyways. The same cannot be said for the dark, spine-chilling experience that is Silent Hill. Harry Mason is intended to be a joe-schmoe, everyman character, so his voice is intended to be plain. Considering the situation and what he’s up against, one would think he’d be a tad more emphatic. Instead, his lines are delivered as blandly as humanly possible no matter the situation. Harry experiences the most blood-churning, visceral horrors in gaming history, and all he can utter are inquisitive musings like “what is that?” Meanwhile, the player is even afraid to process what they just experienced. Perhaps the lack of vocal energy is supposed to emphasize Harry’s every-man status, but I find fault with this. As a fellow everyman myself, my skin would be blanched at the horrors of Silent Hill. I guffawed a couple of times Harry opened his mouth to ask himself what was going on, an unintentional source of levity, I’m sure. Other characters like police officer Cybill and Dr. Kaufmann express their lines with the same monotone, deadpan delivery. I could argue that this dissociation between the characters and the player is due to a hint of surrealism, but I just don’t buy it. The bad voice acting is similar to many other games from this era.
As a survival horror game, Silent Hill borrows many of the fundamentals from Resident Evil. The common tank controls have already been established, but Silent Hill also borrows the same sense of survival strategy from Resident Evil. The main thing to consider in any survival horror game is scarce resources. While Silent Hill doesn’t implement the same cramped inventory system as Resident Evil, ammo is even more deficient, and there are no juggernaut weapons like the revolver and grenade launchers. Harry’s arsenal includes standard firearms, such as a pistol, shotgun, and hunting rifle. The last weapon isn’t even available to the player until more than halfway into the game. Harry also has a selection of melee weapons, such as a lead pipe and a large red hammer. The melee weapons are used to conserve ammo but vary in effectiveness against enemies. The player’s health is also indicated with the exact three color schemes as Resident Evil. Health items, on the other hand, are simplified as there is no botanical mixing involved. Health drinks restore a small portion of health, medkits a medium portion, and ampoules restore a large portion of health. The health items are also as scarce as ammo is. The player will stumble upon all these items organically, but I felt the need to explore the overworld and find items to prepare for the challenges ahead. This is something I never felt necessary for Resident Evil. A unique aspect that wasn’t in Resident Evil was the addition of a radio. The game mitigates the total darkness in various sections by giving Harry a radio that signals that monsters are nearby. The device ensures that although the player might not see the danger, at least it cautions them that it’s close. The sound the radio makes is just as harrowing as the marginal light from the flashlight as its ring pierces the eardrums of every Silent Hill veteran. The player also has the option of turning the radio off like the flashlight, and I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would turn that off either.
Silent Hill isn’t just Resident Evil with a psychological tinge. Silent Hill was obviously built from the survival horror template that Resident Evil established, but Silent Hill is its own beast. Team Silent is obviously a group of people with a smattering of eclectic influences, all of which are incorporated artfully into this game. Some notable influences are obviously horror films, but specifically horror films that dabble in surrealism. The design of the “otherworld” resembles the hellish illusions from Adrian Lyne’s film Jacob’s Ladder. The premise of a quaint town with a dark, surrealistic underbelly is reminiscent of Twin Peaks. The game also takes aesthetic inspiration from the works of Junji Ito and Francis Bacon. Arcane elements from various religions are also implemented into the game, mostly as references and parts of the puzzles. To flaunt their artistic knowledge even further, the streets of Silent Hill are named after famous science fiction authors, the three keys found in the overworld are named after characters from The Wizard of Oz, and the three teachers at the elementary school are named after members of Sonic Youth (a reference that made me giddy when I first saw it like the complete dork I am). These demented Japanese hipsters wanted to express their influences to make something of a highbrow horror experience. Konami tasked them to compete with Resident Evil and didn’t underestimate the collective literate acumen of these people to take this survival horror template and run away with it.
In terms of gameplay, Silent Hill might also take inspiration from games outside of the survival horror sphere like The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Silent Hill’s Zelda influence seems apparent in the way the town is designed and the progression that takes place throughout the game. I’ve been referring to the town of Silent Hill as the game's overworld because it’s very similar to something like Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time. It’s a hub with interconnected paths with a few minor stops in between. Nothing in the hub is too consequential to the progress of the game, but rather a space between all of the landmark areas and a means to travel between them. It’s a relative space to revel in the potential of early three-dimensional design. The only difference between Hyrule Field and Silent Hill is that instead of a spacious field with a small number of enemies and many obvious routes, Silent Hill is a hectic, dingy hellhole where enemies run rampant and where there are zero obvious routes. Many of the paths in Silent Hill that seem obvious are blocked off and impenetrable. The factor of Silent Hill’s world and progression that reminds me even more of Zelda is that the landmarks Harry visits trying to find his daughter remind me of the dungeons from the Zelda series. I’ve even caught myself referring to the school and the hospital as “Silent Hill dungeons” because their Zelda influence is obvious to me. Once Harry enters these places from a path in the overworld, navigating them becomes a large precedent in progressing the game’s story. Each building comes with a separate map different from the one in the overworld that exclusively gives the player a layout of the entire building. A good number of the doors in each building will be either locked without any hope of opening or opened with a key from another room. This gives the player the incentive to explore as many rooms as possible while keeping a mental note of what is in every significant room. Progressions through the buildings are done by finding keys to the locked doors and solving puzzles. Any Zelda fan will recognize these aspects because they are the makeup of every Zelda dungeon. One difference is that the puzzles Silent Hill presents can be a tad perplexing. The puzzles usually offer hints in the corner of the room, but the clues are presented in the least straightforward ways possible. There is no reason to overthink these puzzles as they are simpler than they seem, but I still feel that Team Silent made the puzzles a little esoteric to further flaunt their credentials.
The Symphony of the Night influence might be more of a stretch, but it still seems applicable here. For those who are unaware, the second half of Symphony of the Night has the player exploring the same castle, this time with the map literally flipped on its head with new challenges. In Silent Hill, the same is done through the “otherworld”, a horrifying, uncanny nether realm that represents the darkest regions of the human psyche. Navigating through the dark, abandoned Midwich Elementary was scary enough, but it’s Candyland compared to the otherworld. Harry enters the otherworld for the first time through a clock tower in the courtyard of the elementary school. It suddenly starts to rain, and an arcane symbol appears in the middle of the courtyard to signal that something has changed. In the hospital, every room seems impenetrable until Harry enters the elevator. At first glance, there are only three floors, but more glances will add a fourth floor, another entrance to the other world. This moment is so subtle, but it’s one of the scariest moments in the game. The otherworld has a few harrowing idiosyncrasies no matter what area it’s mirroring. It’s a jet-black, industrial hellscape painted with rust and blood. Hanging, massacred corpses of unknown origin drape over the otherworld like ornate decorations. The only foundation keeping Harry between his life and plummeting to dark oblivion are metallic cages and rusty, industrial steel. The otherworld is a surrealistic nightmare made to make the player uncomfortable and fuck with their heads.
Unexplainable phenomena like Cheryl calling Harry on a disconnected phone and a disturbing sequence showing Cheryl’s visage on a series of televisions is an onslaught on the player’s senses. Once the player enters the otherworld for the first time, they’ll get a dreadful sense of deja-vu as they realize this is the makeup of the nightmare sequence in the beginning. Silent Hill’s masterful pacing and progression into the rabbit hole of a nightmare has occurred once again, but this time Harry can’t just jolt himself awake. The player has to work with the nightmare, navigating through it, uncovering the exit, and earning respite from it, and that’s a distressing affair. One particular dungeon at the end of the game called “Nowhere” is a dungeon that takes place entirely in the otherworld. It has the same ghoulish features as anywhere else in the other world, but it’s the longest otherworld section in the game with nowhere to turn back and no map to aid the player. The absolute darkness, surreal design, and the industrial clings and clangs and dentist drills of the soundscape were enough for me to utter “...make...it...stop...” whispered under my breath with sheer discomfort. Never has any section in any video game made me this unnerved and uncomfortable. “Nowhere” itself is an achievement in horror gaming.
It also helps that Silent Hill’s plot is one of the most horrifying premises in horror media. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that the premise of this game didn’t meet any controversy and censorship upon its release. As Harry searches for Cheryl, he starts to uncover the dark history of this town, and it’s quite graphic, to say the least. He meets a frazzled older woman named Dahlia Gillespie, who gives him an artifact known as the Flauros to protect him from the monstrosities that plague the town. He then meets Dr. Kaufmann, a doctor specializing in exorcisms, and Lisa, a nurse who strangely lives in the otherworld section of the hospital. Harry then starts chasing a girl who looks like his daughter Cheryl but is actually an adolescent girl named Alessa, Dahlia’s daughter. She is a dead ringer for Cheryl, and that’s because Cheryl is the reincarnation of Alessa. Alessa’s body was immolated in a ritual conducted by the evil cult based in Silent Hill that Dahlia is a member of. The ritual was intended for young Alessa to give birth to Samael, an arcane demon that the cult worships that will bring forth an age of darkness upon the world. Complications occurred, causing the ritual to fail, and part of Alessa became Cheryl, Harry’s adopted daughter. However, Alessa’s spirit remained in the town and manifested in the otherworld. All of the terrifying things in the otherworld are symbols that mirror Alessa’s anguished cognition, such as the mean kids in school and her distaste for bugs. Even the nurse Lisa is a ghostly apparition manifested as a memory of the nurse who cared for Alessa in the hospital. This plot takes elements from The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and manages to be as shocking as both. That is one messed up little girl.
Silent Hill’s story has multiple endings like other horror games before it. Once Harry completes the “nowhere” dungeon, Dahlia and Alessa are found in the center of a spacious, dark room, ready to execute the ritual again and birth Samael. Depending on a few circumstances that have to be met, Cybil and Dr. Kaufmann are here as well. The “bad ending” has Harry defeat an incubator, and Cheryl is dead for good, leaving Harry crestfallen. The “good ending” involves Harry fighting the rebirthed Samael, a bug-like version of the dark angel Baphomet. He’s also an incredibly cheap boss with a lightning bolt attack that I’m convinced is undodgeable. I tanked this boss with my health items, but it was still an aggravating fight. The game even gives the player some leeway, and Samael dies if the player enters the fight with no ammo. Once Samael is defeated, either way, Alessa has reincarnated again, and Harry leaves with Cybil to raise another version of a rebirthed Alessa. Given the sequels of this game in retrospect, the good ending is the canon ending, but I found that the bad ending was a more appropriate gut punch to such a visceral experience.
Konami knew they had something special with Silent Hill. They let the creative juices of their most eccentric employees roam free, conjuring up something that made Capcom scurry away from their horror throne, squealing like a little girl and hiking up its skirt while it was running away. Silent Hill isn’t just a horror game; it’s an experience that has left an impression on every gamer. It’s an experience that highlighted our collective fears of the dark and presented new terrors to give a fresh meaning to them with creativity and artful surrealism. It’s an experience that tickles at our almond-shaped amygdalas and gives us a horrific sensation that people in 1999 didn’t know was possible. Like many early 3D titles on the PS1, it’s showing its age like the liver spots on an old man’s head, but somehow the meat of the experience transcends the looming inevitability of passing time. Only a true masterpiece can accomplish this, and I can confidently give the first Silent Hill that prestigious title.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com