realistically, what is there to say about silent hill that hasn't been said already? both positive and negative appraisals of this game have run the gamut. i feel intimidated trying to be original in this review because anything i'm going to say has been said at least 20 times over. that said, i do at least want to give an attempted academic effort on this task.

i think context is most important when look at this game. you can easily say that games like resident evil, clock tower, maniac mansion, or even sweet home penned the survival horror genre, but i feel as though silent hill is the one game that has transcended enthusiast circles and made the largest impact of those early forebears. when you say silent hill, even the music girlies who haven't touched a playstation controller in a decade will know not only the aesthetic you're going for, but also the music. there's this hazy dream quality to silent hill that makes it universal. sure, i'm not a father nor have i ever had to search for my daughter. but have i felt displaced in a world that was simultaneously uncaring and hostile? absolutely, and the vast majority of people on earth could say the same thing.

the sound design of this game cannot be understated. again, i know i am preaching to the choir when i sing the praises of akira yamaoka, but the way that this game uses noises and soundscapes is so totally unlike other contemporaries of its time. noise is used as a warning, as a pretense for anxiety, as something to dread yet cherish because of its informative value. even unassuming areas that have no enemies in them like the nightmare school square or the zodiac puzzle in nowhere have these foreboding tracks that play in them; even knowing the lack of any form of danger in those rooms, i'm still on edge because of the evocative soundscape. for shits and giggles, i did a playthrough of this game on mute, and the difference is stark and immediate. it felt as though i was playing a beta of the game because of how much depth the gameplay lacked without the ambiance granted by yamaoka's audio. the sound in this game doesn't just elevate its design, it gives it the legs it needs to even stand in the first place.

i'm generally of two incongruent minds when it comes to the enemy encounters in this game. by and large, i think they succeed in not only making the player feel helpless, but the sheer number of them also guarantees that you're not going to be able to kill everything you run into (at least, not until NG+ and using bullet assist). it's not quite as elegant as resident evil's design in making you feel overwhelmed without actually numerically being overwhelmed, but it works for this game due to its open-ended nature. exteriors are usually large enough to make dodging enemies fairly easy once you know the behavior patterns, incentivizing you to save your combat experiences for when you're exploring interiors. people who complain about the conservative nature of ammo and healing in this game miss the point: you're not meant to be powerful, and survival is meant to be a genuinely difficult goal to accomplish on a first playthrough. the game is short enough (much like other horror games of the time) where should you need to start over from the beginning, it's not the death sentence of time investment that it would be in a modern 2023 game. there's something principled about that which i respect, it's a design ethos you rarely see nowadays. learn our systems or just start over and do it better. no exceptions.

but, even then, i still have a distaste for some aspects of gameplay. there are certain areas of silent hill where enemies are so numerous that they not only cause the framerate to plummet, but it makes dodging them a harrowing and hair-pulling affair. fuck those weird monkey things, they will sooner condemn their bloodline to extinction than give up chasing you once they've seen you. and while i do enjoy the boss fights in theory, outside of big mouth, they tend to just be healing checks due to the difficulty of actually dodging their attacks consistently. i guess this is more mitigated by the fact that there's not many bosses in the game, but it still rubs me wrong that the final boss is essentially a damage race and if you run out of healing, you have basically no recourse. there's a bit of whiplash going from praising this design last paragraph to now admonishing it, but it's about context. i didn't mind having to restart my first resident evil playthrough about 2 hours in because i had thoroughly fucked myself in regards to resources because it felt like i was still learning the game. i doubt i could summon the same amount of patience if i reached the end of silent hill and got hard walled by a healing check of a final boss.

it feels borderline disrespectful to even consider giving this game a lower rating due to the legacy and cultural impact it has had. don't get me wrong, i had a great fondness for my time with this game, but i almost feel compelled to oversell this game as way of demonstrating status. this game took one of the most damnable limitations of the generation (draw distance) and made it into a defining aspect of its setting (fog that blankets the town). there's such a creative ingenuity there that feels obvious from an outside perspective, but has a deceptively difficult simplicity to it. forgive me for spending the lion's share of this review grappling with silent hill's legacy more than itself qualitatively, but again, what can i say that hasn't been said? if you have not played this game, you owe it to yourself to do so. i don't consider myself the type to get easily scared from horror media nowadays, but this game consistently put me on edge in a way that i rarely find media is capable of doing. this game is a monument while also still being fresh 2 decades removed from launch.

Reviewed on May 31, 2023


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