I spent a lot of my life overlooking Silent Hill 1, and I don’t think I’m alone in that as a Silent Hill fan, as a general Gamer, and having played a few of the later ones of these I KNOW that’s true of later Silent Hill developers lol.
The second game in the series is well known for being in the weird position of being the odd duck that diverges the most from what would become the norms of the original set of Silent Hillses and also the one that most pierced public consciousness, but I think a lot of what’s here to ground the first game really strengthens it as an actual video game that you play? I promise this is a segue I’m gonna stop comparing this game to 2 now.
The town of Silent Hill as presented in the game Silent Hill feels the most like a real place that it ever will in this entire series, even as it retains the bizarre qualities that instantly mark it as something suspicious and hostile. Yes, the streets are too wide and in a weird twist on normal video game logic a lot of the buildings you enter feel too big on the outside compared to the inside, and these inconsistencies lend themselves to the persistent feeling of offness that is aided by, y’know, the monsters and the fog and the static hiss from your radio. But these weird inconsistencies of the town’s anatomy WOULD just feel like normal quirks of video game geography if such close attentiveness wasn’t paid to the mundane details of normal townie life that so many modern games can’t find in themselves. The signage in this game is out of this world good. Silent Hill is a sleepy beach town in Michigan or Pennsylvania with a population of like 800 and one school and I know this because I’ve been there, I’ve been to this bar, I’ve been to this pier, I’ve seen that chainsaw in that window, I’ve seen that bowling alley named after that lady whose name is not super well-suited to naming stuff after. And having such a tangible reality to the locations you visit grounds everything; this game predates the conception of Silent Hill as a purgatorial space for people to work out there own demons, and instead is – and feels – like a real place that something awful has happened to.
This is reflected everywhere: in the state of the world, in the way characters respond to each other and to the events they’re perceiving, in the actors’ performances, even in the flow of the story. There is the expected dreaminess to the plotting and mechanics of getting from place to place. Occasionally Harry will black out and wake up across town or with people mysteriously flitting in and out of his presence. But the sequence of events, the actual A to B to C of the story being told here is extremely straightforward. The game goes pretty far out of its way to make sure you know exactly what’s going on and when and why and how, and I think that’s to its benefit. A very wise friend of mine once said that a lot of horror just boils down to what if a fucked up guy looked at you and Silent Hill 1 might have the least amount of fucked up guy looks at you in the entire series but it has the ETHOS of it down pat. The scares are straightforward too: a kid crying in a bathroom but no one is in there; a corpse nailed to a wall; a scary little kid with a knife and oh no there’s a fence where there wasn’t one! These things are immediate and in your face and rarely subtextual but that doesn’t make them not scary.
And that’s also not to say that Silent Hill 1 isn’t rife with psychological horror and subtext, it’s just, like, actual subtext. People say Silent Hill 2 has psychological subtext and symbolism but those are very loose uses of those words; that’s just, like, regular text! It’s a great game, not a subtle one lmao. Silent Hill 1 has a lot to say about the anxiety of parenthood, our responsibilities to our children, the violence of isolation. It just ALSO says AHH AHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT A GIANT MOTH AHHH, which is also good.
Aesthetically, I don’t think Silent Hill has ever looked better and possibly never could have looked better than on the PS1. The grit and the grunge is perfectly at home in the jaggy polys and muddy texture work, even as you can see the console pushing to its limits to render some of the most gorgeous environments and interiors it will ever produce. Set pieces are visual feasts, with the two onscreen nightmare world transitions being actual marvels, particularly the one at the beginning of the game that happens during live gameplay. There are standout visual moments littered throughout this game from start to finish, despite a relatively small suite of areas and a really limited color pallet. Its short length surely helps.
One other thing that CANNOT be understated about this game is that it is highkey hilarious, one of the funniest games of all time. Horror and Comedy trade on the exact same impulses of tension and release, and while bad horror often veers into comedy, a good horror game is just as capable of having fun as it is at scaring you and Silent Hill is truly masterful at both. There are some goofs that clearly aren’t intentional, like characteristic bad PS1 line reads. BUT there’s also stuff that feels winking, and scares so fun that I refuse to believe they’re anything but intentional gotchas. Take the infamous cat scare. Pretty funny. They got you. Then later it happens again, but there’s no cat, then you get control again, and like two seconds after you’re relaxed a corpse falls out of a locker. ICONIC, incredible scare. ALSO very funny, they fuckin got me dude, good one. Or the late game moment where a random refrigerator has a random tentacle monster that randomly eats you out of nowhere if you don’t solve an extremely simple puzzle out of the blue with a bespoke cutscene and everything in a moment unlike any other in the game. Fuck you, absolutely owned, hope you saved recently asshole! OR or or, what about the game’s one (1) sidequest, which has you running all over town for like an HOUR AND A HALF, finding keys and opening safes and constantly making you think you’re gonna find useful items and stuff and you never do never do never do until at the very end you find what seems to be a very important item and then a character you met one time at the very beginning of the game comes in threatens to kill you takes the item and leaves, and Harry literally just shrugs and goes “well THAT was a waste of time.” OWNED. OWNED. LMAO. Funniest game ever made.
And that’s not even talking about the big man Harry Mason himself, a truly wonderful video game himbo, the ur video game dad and the greatest of them, one of the stupidest guys ever to do it but we love him! He has committed no great sins, he has no deep guilt, he is simply a guy who wants to find his daughter, even as things spin more and more wildly out of his control. Always three steps behind everyone else, never able to articulate himself properly when it counts, but nevertheless an extremely good dude who is just trying his best, I sincerely love this guy.
I didn’t really talk about the part where you play this game but it’s really good! It’s short, the puzzles are all actually good unlike in its sequel, and you can mostly just like run past the enemies which is nice. I had a good time running around but I wasn’t so empowered as to just like, feel cool and invincible the whole time.
Great game!
The second game in the series is well known for being in the weird position of being the odd duck that diverges the most from what would become the norms of the original set of Silent Hillses and also the one that most pierced public consciousness, but I think a lot of what’s here to ground the first game really strengthens it as an actual video game that you play? I promise this is a segue I’m gonna stop comparing this game to 2 now.
The town of Silent Hill as presented in the game Silent Hill feels the most like a real place that it ever will in this entire series, even as it retains the bizarre qualities that instantly mark it as something suspicious and hostile. Yes, the streets are too wide and in a weird twist on normal video game logic a lot of the buildings you enter feel too big on the outside compared to the inside, and these inconsistencies lend themselves to the persistent feeling of offness that is aided by, y’know, the monsters and the fog and the static hiss from your radio. But these weird inconsistencies of the town’s anatomy WOULD just feel like normal quirks of video game geography if such close attentiveness wasn’t paid to the mundane details of normal townie life that so many modern games can’t find in themselves. The signage in this game is out of this world good. Silent Hill is a sleepy beach town in Michigan or Pennsylvania with a population of like 800 and one school and I know this because I’ve been there, I’ve been to this bar, I’ve been to this pier, I’ve seen that chainsaw in that window, I’ve seen that bowling alley named after that lady whose name is not super well-suited to naming stuff after. And having such a tangible reality to the locations you visit grounds everything; this game predates the conception of Silent Hill as a purgatorial space for people to work out there own demons, and instead is – and feels – like a real place that something awful has happened to.
This is reflected everywhere: in the state of the world, in the way characters respond to each other and to the events they’re perceiving, in the actors’ performances, even in the flow of the story. There is the expected dreaminess to the plotting and mechanics of getting from place to place. Occasionally Harry will black out and wake up across town or with people mysteriously flitting in and out of his presence. But the sequence of events, the actual A to B to C of the story being told here is extremely straightforward. The game goes pretty far out of its way to make sure you know exactly what’s going on and when and why and how, and I think that’s to its benefit. A very wise friend of mine once said that a lot of horror just boils down to what if a fucked up guy looked at you and Silent Hill 1 might have the least amount of fucked up guy looks at you in the entire series but it has the ETHOS of it down pat. The scares are straightforward too: a kid crying in a bathroom but no one is in there; a corpse nailed to a wall; a scary little kid with a knife and oh no there’s a fence where there wasn’t one! These things are immediate and in your face and rarely subtextual but that doesn’t make them not scary.
And that’s also not to say that Silent Hill 1 isn’t rife with psychological horror and subtext, it’s just, like, actual subtext. People say Silent Hill 2 has psychological subtext and symbolism but those are very loose uses of those words; that’s just, like, regular text! It’s a great game, not a subtle one lmao. Silent Hill 1 has a lot to say about the anxiety of parenthood, our responsibilities to our children, the violence of isolation. It just ALSO says AHH AHH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT A GIANT MOTH AHHH, which is also good.
Aesthetically, I don’t think Silent Hill has ever looked better and possibly never could have looked better than on the PS1. The grit and the grunge is perfectly at home in the jaggy polys and muddy texture work, even as you can see the console pushing to its limits to render some of the most gorgeous environments and interiors it will ever produce. Set pieces are visual feasts, with the two onscreen nightmare world transitions being actual marvels, particularly the one at the beginning of the game that happens during live gameplay. There are standout visual moments littered throughout this game from start to finish, despite a relatively small suite of areas and a really limited color pallet. Its short length surely helps.
One other thing that CANNOT be understated about this game is that it is highkey hilarious, one of the funniest games of all time. Horror and Comedy trade on the exact same impulses of tension and release, and while bad horror often veers into comedy, a good horror game is just as capable of having fun as it is at scaring you and Silent Hill is truly masterful at both. There are some goofs that clearly aren’t intentional, like characteristic bad PS1 line reads. BUT there’s also stuff that feels winking, and scares so fun that I refuse to believe they’re anything but intentional gotchas. Take the infamous cat scare. Pretty funny. They got you. Then later it happens again, but there’s no cat, then you get control again, and like two seconds after you’re relaxed a corpse falls out of a locker. ICONIC, incredible scare. ALSO very funny, they fuckin got me dude, good one. Or the late game moment where a random refrigerator has a random tentacle monster that randomly eats you out of nowhere if you don’t solve an extremely simple puzzle out of the blue with a bespoke cutscene and everything in a moment unlike any other in the game. Fuck you, absolutely owned, hope you saved recently asshole! OR or or, what about the game’s one (1) sidequest, which has you running all over town for like an HOUR AND A HALF, finding keys and opening safes and constantly making you think you’re gonna find useful items and stuff and you never do never do never do until at the very end you find what seems to be a very important item and then a character you met one time at the very beginning of the game comes in threatens to kill you takes the item and leaves, and Harry literally just shrugs and goes “well THAT was a waste of time.” OWNED. OWNED. LMAO. Funniest game ever made.
And that’s not even talking about the big man Harry Mason himself, a truly wonderful video game himbo, the ur video game dad and the greatest of them, one of the stupidest guys ever to do it but we love him! He has committed no great sins, he has no deep guilt, he is simply a guy who wants to find his daughter, even as things spin more and more wildly out of his control. Always three steps behind everyone else, never able to articulate himself properly when it counts, but nevertheless an extremely good dude who is just trying his best, I sincerely love this guy.
I didn’t really talk about the part where you play this game but it’s really good! It’s short, the puzzles are all actually good unlike in its sequel, and you can mostly just like run past the enemies which is nice. I had a good time running around but I wasn’t so empowered as to just like, feel cool and invincible the whole time.
Great game!