Nobody gets it perfect on their first try, but some get a lot closer to it than others.
When something exists for as long as you've been around, it doesn't tend to impress. We're born onto an oxygen-rich planet with a sun and a moon and seasons and weather and days and nights, but these have all been around for as long as humanity has been, so nobody's really all that surprised by them anymore. Electricity in the home is a fairly recent development in the history of the imperial core, but most of the first people to get power have died off by now; us, the ones left, have almost all lived in a world where electricity has always been there. Video games at large are certainly a very new development, and your grandparents probably grew up long before the first consoles released. For you, statistically speaking, video games have always been here.
For me, Silent Hill has always been here.
I didn't really become self-aware until sometime in the later months of 2001, and Silent Hill had already been out and influencing developers for two whole years by that point. I was late to the party, to be certain. I've never been conscious of a world without Silent Hill in it. When you're in a position like mine (and judging by the site demographics, most of you are, too), it becomes difficult to truly appreciate the influence that this has had. Everyone "knows" that Silent Hill is probably one of the most important horror games ever made, but it's another thing entirely to experience it for yourself, to see the origin point; everything branching off from this central root like little fingers, stretching just far away enough until they're distinct enough to become something new. Fatal Frame, Signalis, Deadly Premonition: all titles with other inspirations, to be certain, yet enough of their branches reaching directly back to Silent Hill as veins to a heart.
What you're looking at here is primordial ooze; bubbling, boiling-hot muck that will one day form the foundations of all that is to come. It drips from the stitches holding together the stretched-hide wallpaper and weeps from the sores of the skinless monstrosities roaming the rusted steel streets. It pours in from the gaps of reality. "Blood and pus flow from the bathroom faucet", Lisa Garland writes in her diary, and there's no better way to describe Silent Hill than with that.
Silent Hill is a town unplugged from life support. It's a decaying corpse long before the nightmares start becoming real. The only usable roads are the ones that leave town, and the rest have fallen into disrepair. The young people are leaving in droves — seemingly the only ones to realize that there's nothing here left worth sticking around for. Around the corners of the tourist traps that keep the town's blood pumping, in the dark places where no one ever looks, a black market drug ring works through every night. They churn out bottle after bottle of little white pills, flooding the streets with product. The real, hard stuff. Addictive, hallucinogenic. The type of shit that you'd kill for another dose of. When you can make something that moves that fast, the only thing you need is a distributor. Some people will do anything for money.
Silent Hill 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and Silent Hill 2 occupied that same position for the several years before I’d gotten around to its sequel. In spite of that, though, I’d never actually played the first Silent Hill. The second game in the series is essentially standalone, which means it's more or less fine as a starting point, but the third is a direct continuation of the first. I went into Silent Hill knowing exactly how the game ends, because Silent Hill 3 assumed that I already knew. Oops.
The game starts slow. Real slow. Too slow, for certain. It makes me feel like a bit of a Philistinic dipshit to say it, but there’s a line between slow-burn horror and dragging your feet, and Silent Hill steps well over the former and into the latter. I mean, I get it. There’s very clear intent here — stumbling through an ocean of fog so thick that it actually hurts your eyes trying to make out whatever’s lurking within, groping blindly at painted-on doors and litter on the ground in the hopes of finding something to advance the narrative — but in practice, it's mostly made up of sprinting down a road for a minute or two before realizing you're going down another fucking dead end. Enemies in the early parts of the game are too slow to keep up with Harry at a full sprint, meaning you’re not really in any danger unless you slam face-first into a wall while one is on your heels. Given how wide the streets are, avoiding enemies is pretty trivial, and outrunning them until they de-aggro is even easier. This gets far more complicated as the game goes on, the passageways get narrower, and the monsters get faster and more aggressive, but the town of Silent Hill isn’t especially interesting to run through at the start.
Luckily, it’ll only take about half an hour tops before you get to the school, and that becomes the point where the game immediately picks up and never stops going. You really don’t spend a lot of time in that opening part of Silent Hill; once you clear the school, you cross the bridge to a different part of town and never return. There’s a constant forward momentum that keeps pushing at your back like a strong wind, always demanding you keep driving forward. Monster chases get longer, and the game will start actively fucking with you by playing loud crashes and roars during sprints down long corridors. There isn’t really anything there (provided you’re enough of a Darwin Award winner to actually stick around and find out), but the masterful sound design works in tandem with the tank controls to ensure that you really never want to waste time lingering turning around to check it out. Your radio is squealing at you, the monsters are growling and snapping, the music sounds like someone taking a rotary saw to a concrete sidewalk. Stopping to investigate will often mean eating a hit, if not dying outright. So keep moving. Don’t look back.
It ties in nicely with Harry Mason's character, especially in regards to how given he is to just charging forward into the gaping maw of danger to find his daughter. Unlike a lot of the intense, angry, Liam Neeson Taken-types that have cropped up in a lot of popular media, Harry is just kind of a cool guy. He loves Cheryl and he's willing to fling himself deeper into this hellish town to find her, no matter how many people tell him she's definitely already been killed by the roaming monsters; he wants to protect and help the other people stuck in the town with him, even at his own expense. He's there for Cybil, for Lisa, for Kaufmann. I like Harry. It's refreshing to see a game starring a guy who's completely normal and just wants the best for everyone else, especially when you put him in the middle of the most evil setting imaginable and he still doesn't compromise on those ideals.
The constant escalation offers some great thematic cohesion, reflecting this building fear of running out of time. As Harry chases down one dead lead after another, the town devolves deeper and deeper into a nightmare-scape, no longer able to hold itself together in material reality. It culminates in the absolutely incredible Nowhere, a place constructed from the pure id of a dreaming girl who's been dying for nearly a decade straight — her divided soul keeping her perched on the line between life and the void. Doors lead to different floors despite no change in elevation, keys are hidden inside bags of jellybeans, symbols of protection need to be collected and bartered in order to progress. Harry's already spent enough time today destroying the one symbol that would have solved everyone's problems, so now he gets to collect five of them to open the boss door.
If you play Harry as a decent guy who tries to solve everyone's problems, you're rewarded with a shockingly positive ending for something that, until this point, has been so relentlessly horrific. It's almost completely unambiguous. Everyone who deserves their comeuppance gets it, and everyone who deserves a break gets one. After all of the suffering — felt by both the characters and by you — it's nice to feel your head breaking through the surface of the water to get a gasp for air.
While it feels a little quaint to call the game gorgeous, I can't find another word for it. This is probably the best looking game on the PS1, and now that we've got a glut of indie games going for the same low-poly look, Silent Hill looks remarkably fresh today. What's old is new again, I suppose. I do wish that they had prioritized the performance a little bit more, though, even if they would have needed to compromise on visuals; the game often dips down into the low double digits when there's a single monster chasing you in an open part of the map, and god help your frame rate if you ever get unlucky enough to be attacked by three monsters at the same time. A minor performance hit here and there is acceptable, but this likes to border on unplayable just a little bit too frequently.
Still, though, what's here is phenomenal. It never manages to hit the highs of Silent Hill 2 or 3, but this was their first try. It's already impressive before you take that into account. All it needed was a little more money and a little more time to be truly perfect, and that was a luxury only afforded to the following games after this showed sufficient potential. This one was the first, and it was made by employees who had been kicked down into Konami's basement in the hopes that they would quit. This might be the absolute best that anyone could have done, given the circumstances.
If you stick around past the credits, you’re treated to a little blooper reel of all the characters laughing and mugging for the camera, complete with Happy Days-esque name plates that fade in over a freeze frame while they do something silly. There’s something about making this the final sequence you leave the player with that really stuck with me; this is a game that’s confident. Team Silent is swinging dick. They made something that was impressive, and they knew it was impressive. Nothing reserved, nothing to be humble about. “Yeah, we can end our horror game on shots of Dahlia smooching the lens and Harry posing on a diner booth like he’s auditioning for Vogue. Of course we can. Why wouldn’t we? We’ve earned it. We just made Silent Hill.”
Damn right they did.
When something exists for as long as you've been around, it doesn't tend to impress. We're born onto an oxygen-rich planet with a sun and a moon and seasons and weather and days and nights, but these have all been around for as long as humanity has been, so nobody's really all that surprised by them anymore. Electricity in the home is a fairly recent development in the history of the imperial core, but most of the first people to get power have died off by now; us, the ones left, have almost all lived in a world where electricity has always been there. Video games at large are certainly a very new development, and your grandparents probably grew up long before the first consoles released. For you, statistically speaking, video games have always been here.
For me, Silent Hill has always been here.
I didn't really become self-aware until sometime in the later months of 2001, and Silent Hill had already been out and influencing developers for two whole years by that point. I was late to the party, to be certain. I've never been conscious of a world without Silent Hill in it. When you're in a position like mine (and judging by the site demographics, most of you are, too), it becomes difficult to truly appreciate the influence that this has had. Everyone "knows" that Silent Hill is probably one of the most important horror games ever made, but it's another thing entirely to experience it for yourself, to see the origin point; everything branching off from this central root like little fingers, stretching just far away enough until they're distinct enough to become something new. Fatal Frame, Signalis, Deadly Premonition: all titles with other inspirations, to be certain, yet enough of their branches reaching directly back to Silent Hill as veins to a heart.
What you're looking at here is primordial ooze; bubbling, boiling-hot muck that will one day form the foundations of all that is to come. It drips from the stitches holding together the stretched-hide wallpaper and weeps from the sores of the skinless monstrosities roaming the rusted steel streets. It pours in from the gaps of reality. "Blood and pus flow from the bathroom faucet", Lisa Garland writes in her diary, and there's no better way to describe Silent Hill than with that.
Silent Hill is a town unplugged from life support. It's a decaying corpse long before the nightmares start becoming real. The only usable roads are the ones that leave town, and the rest have fallen into disrepair. The young people are leaving in droves — seemingly the only ones to realize that there's nothing here left worth sticking around for. Around the corners of the tourist traps that keep the town's blood pumping, in the dark places where no one ever looks, a black market drug ring works through every night. They churn out bottle after bottle of little white pills, flooding the streets with product. The real, hard stuff. Addictive, hallucinogenic. The type of shit that you'd kill for another dose of. When you can make something that moves that fast, the only thing you need is a distributor. Some people will do anything for money.
Silent Hill 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and Silent Hill 2 occupied that same position for the several years before I’d gotten around to its sequel. In spite of that, though, I’d never actually played the first Silent Hill. The second game in the series is essentially standalone, which means it's more or less fine as a starting point, but the third is a direct continuation of the first. I went into Silent Hill knowing exactly how the game ends, because Silent Hill 3 assumed that I already knew. Oops.
The game starts slow. Real slow. Too slow, for certain. It makes me feel like a bit of a Philistinic dipshit to say it, but there’s a line between slow-burn horror and dragging your feet, and Silent Hill steps well over the former and into the latter. I mean, I get it. There’s very clear intent here — stumbling through an ocean of fog so thick that it actually hurts your eyes trying to make out whatever’s lurking within, groping blindly at painted-on doors and litter on the ground in the hopes of finding something to advance the narrative — but in practice, it's mostly made up of sprinting down a road for a minute or two before realizing you're going down another fucking dead end. Enemies in the early parts of the game are too slow to keep up with Harry at a full sprint, meaning you’re not really in any danger unless you slam face-first into a wall while one is on your heels. Given how wide the streets are, avoiding enemies is pretty trivial, and outrunning them until they de-aggro is even easier. This gets far more complicated as the game goes on, the passageways get narrower, and the monsters get faster and more aggressive, but the town of Silent Hill isn’t especially interesting to run through at the start.
Luckily, it’ll only take about half an hour tops before you get to the school, and that becomes the point where the game immediately picks up and never stops going. You really don’t spend a lot of time in that opening part of Silent Hill; once you clear the school, you cross the bridge to a different part of town and never return. There’s a constant forward momentum that keeps pushing at your back like a strong wind, always demanding you keep driving forward. Monster chases get longer, and the game will start actively fucking with you by playing loud crashes and roars during sprints down long corridors. There isn’t really anything there (provided you’re enough of a Darwin Award winner to actually stick around and find out), but the masterful sound design works in tandem with the tank controls to ensure that you really never want to waste time lingering turning around to check it out. Your radio is squealing at you, the monsters are growling and snapping, the music sounds like someone taking a rotary saw to a concrete sidewalk. Stopping to investigate will often mean eating a hit, if not dying outright. So keep moving. Don’t look back.
It ties in nicely with Harry Mason's character, especially in regards to how given he is to just charging forward into the gaping maw of danger to find his daughter. Unlike a lot of the intense, angry, Liam Neeson Taken-types that have cropped up in a lot of popular media, Harry is just kind of a cool guy. He loves Cheryl and he's willing to fling himself deeper into this hellish town to find her, no matter how many people tell him she's definitely already been killed by the roaming monsters; he wants to protect and help the other people stuck in the town with him, even at his own expense. He's there for Cybil, for Lisa, for Kaufmann. I like Harry. It's refreshing to see a game starring a guy who's completely normal and just wants the best for everyone else, especially when you put him in the middle of the most evil setting imaginable and he still doesn't compromise on those ideals.
The constant escalation offers some great thematic cohesion, reflecting this building fear of running out of time. As Harry chases down one dead lead after another, the town devolves deeper and deeper into a nightmare-scape, no longer able to hold itself together in material reality. It culminates in the absolutely incredible Nowhere, a place constructed from the pure id of a dreaming girl who's been dying for nearly a decade straight — her divided soul keeping her perched on the line between life and the void. Doors lead to different floors despite no change in elevation, keys are hidden inside bags of jellybeans, symbols of protection need to be collected and bartered in order to progress. Harry's already spent enough time today destroying the one symbol that would have solved everyone's problems, so now he gets to collect five of them to open the boss door.
If you play Harry as a decent guy who tries to solve everyone's problems, you're rewarded with a shockingly positive ending for something that, until this point, has been so relentlessly horrific. It's almost completely unambiguous. Everyone who deserves their comeuppance gets it, and everyone who deserves a break gets one. After all of the suffering — felt by both the characters and by you — it's nice to feel your head breaking through the surface of the water to get a gasp for air.
While it feels a little quaint to call the game gorgeous, I can't find another word for it. This is probably the best looking game on the PS1, and now that we've got a glut of indie games going for the same low-poly look, Silent Hill looks remarkably fresh today. What's old is new again, I suppose. I do wish that they had prioritized the performance a little bit more, though, even if they would have needed to compromise on visuals; the game often dips down into the low double digits when there's a single monster chasing you in an open part of the map, and god help your frame rate if you ever get unlucky enough to be attacked by three monsters at the same time. A minor performance hit here and there is acceptable, but this likes to border on unplayable just a little bit too frequently.
Still, though, what's here is phenomenal. It never manages to hit the highs of Silent Hill 2 or 3, but this was their first try. It's already impressive before you take that into account. All it needed was a little more money and a little more time to be truly perfect, and that was a luxury only afforded to the following games after this showed sufficient potential. This one was the first, and it was made by employees who had been kicked down into Konami's basement in the hopes that they would quit. This might be the absolute best that anyone could have done, given the circumstances.
If you stick around past the credits, you’re treated to a little blooper reel of all the characters laughing and mugging for the camera, complete with Happy Days-esque name plates that fade in over a freeze frame while they do something silly. There’s something about making this the final sequence you leave the player with that really stuck with me; this is a game that’s confident. Team Silent is swinging dick. They made something that was impressive, and they knew it was impressive. Nothing reserved, nothing to be humble about. “Yeah, we can end our horror game on shots of Dahlia smooching the lens and Harry posing on a diner booth like he’s auditioning for Vogue. Of course we can. Why wouldn’t we? We’ve earned it. We just made Silent Hill.”
Damn right they did.