Silent Hill Review
For this year's Halloween I am going to visit Team Silent's legendary creepy nightmare town for the first time... Hold me.
Developer: Team Silent
Publisher: Konami
Release Date: 16th July 1999 (EU), 23rd February 1999 (NA), 4th March 1999 (Japan)
Platform: PlayStation
Silent Hill has been heralded over the years as one of the best psychological horror games of all time, and rightfully so. It is also one of the best survival horror games of the PS1. Resident Evil was already seeing its third release along with Dino Crisis by the time Silent Hill came out, and if Team Silent weren’t clever or creative enough to have created something different to stand out against its competitors it might well have gotten lost. But their genius paid off telling a disturbing story of a man trying to find his lost daughter after a car crash in a creepy town overcome with darkness wrought with metaphors and symbolism of nightmarish horrors, a great distance away from zombies and dinosaurs.
I grew up not knowing a whole lot of Silent Hill, thought more of Silent Hill 2 and 3, but somewhere in the background I knew well enough it existed. I saw the film in my 20’s but it wasn’t until the past year I got to finally play the game for myself. And I am so happy I did.
For the uninitiated, the story sees Harry Mason going on a vacation with his daughter, Cheryl, to Silent Hill but not before having a car crash swerving to avoid a girl in the middle of the road. He then awakens within Silent Hill with Cheryl missing and greeted by a cop, Cybil. Harry wanders on through the town, its school, hospital, sewers, and waterfront, bumping into Cybil more along the way, only to uncover mysterious, ritualistic and nightmarish horrors. Creatures such as skinned dogs, giant bat things, tiny squeaking ghosts, giant moths, burrowing worms, and possessed nurses impede your progress as the world around you warps and changes. Depending on what you do and don’t do throughout the game there are five possible endings you can get; the good ending which sees you stopping Dhalia Gillespie’s witchcraft summoning her cult’s demon Incubus, freeing her daughter Alessa who gives Harry the reincarnation of herself and Cheryl as a new baby. The good+ ending which sees you save Cybil as well as you both leave. The bad ending where Cybil dies and so does Alessa as you stop Dhalia’s plans but revealing everything was but a dream as Harry died in the car crash. Or the bad+ ending where it’s the same as the bad ending but Cybil was saved and they both leave after killing Alessa. The final joke ending sees Harry getting abducted by aliens, which how ridiculous and shocking was that to experience when this game first came out? After all of that time spent in this nightmarescape trying to figure where to use this special gemstone only to be shot in the gut by an alien and whisked away into space and just end it there? Games need more surprise and ridiculous endings like that.
There’s a lot more going on within the story of Silent Hill with twists and side characters that are worth experiencing for yourself more than reading about here.
I think psychological horror is my favourite kind of horror because it plays more on your imagination and emotions than any other kind of horror. I mean, slasher films? They’re the comicbook movies of the horror genre. Not scary in the slightest. Well, maybe for Nightmare on Elm Street. But psychological horrors that pluck out things you’ve seen in your dreams and nightmares and realises them into reality? That is terrifying, and Silent Hill does psychological horror like this splendidly. What’s creepier and more unsettling than visiting a town that is usually busy and rife with life to then suddenly be still and quiet? It feels unnatural. Something is wrong there.
One of the best ways Silent Hill sells its psychological horror wonderfully is its visuals. When you’re first wandering around everything is foggy as the snow falls (yes, it’s snow, the film changed it to ash) and it very cleverly uses the game’s limited draw distance. It sneakily hides away its gruesomely designed creatures within the fog as your radio static blares, warning you something is nearby, a more terrifying spider-sense, until a dog leaps out at you. Areas such as the school and hospital are carefully designed and laid out making them feel wrongly abandoned. Then, as things turn to the Otherworld, everything becomes rusty and dark, bloody corpses hang from the walls while other walls themselves look like they’re made of stretched flesh, and the monsters become more hostile. It is a stark contrast between the two worlds and the nightmarish Otherworld is a nasty place to wander around in. It feels tense, you want to be out of there as soon as possible, and yet because it is so wonderfully designed you can’t help but admire it all. And then there’s the end area, Nowhere, which amalgamates all the past areas you’ve been to. It’s fantastic and it uses the limitations of PS1 graphics incredibly. Masahiro Ito created a horrific atmosphere with his art design creating wonderful monsters and backgrounds which is inexplicably one of the game’s greatest strengths.
Another area this game excells in with its design is sound and music. Akira Yamaoka composed the game’s soundtrack and also the sound design for the game. The soundtrack is half the reason for the game’s succesful haunting atmosphere. It is eerie and moody and once you get into the Otherworld it becomes noisy and chaotic in the best of ways with sounds of metal banging harshly and even sounds of dentist’s drills. Perfectly horrifying sounds. But every little bit you hear and don’t hear is horrifying. The creatures snarls and growls are unsettling, the absence of sound in silent areas is uncomfortable and wrong, the sounds of the footsteps echoing and clanging are nervewracking. Yamaoka was masterful in his approach to this game’s soundscape delivering this game’s intended atmosphere flawlessly.
Its gameplay is really good too and a lot of fun to control. It has tank controls like Resi but they feel more natural, I feel, to move around. But I think that is also due in part to a very good camera system. Pressing L2 helps you redirect the camera to look where you want, making things a lot easier, but even then the camera isn’t ever really in an awkward position. There are some impressive camera angles it sets up making things more uneasy, such as when you first enter Silent Hill and you wander down an alleyway the camera twists and rotates as you turn a corner underneath it. Very nice. As for the rest of its controls, you hold up to go forward, hold square to run, down to step back, L1 and R1 to sidestep. Its inventory system is different to the Resi games as well where it doesn’t limit you to what you can carry. You have limted ammo (200 bullets for pistol for example) but if you like you can still pick up more ammo along the way even though you’ve reached the maximum amount, though it won’t add to it. You can pick up lots of weapons along the way such as varying strengths of melee weapons to a shotgun and rifle. Of course there are plentiful puzzle and objective items you grab along the way. As for how these items sit in your inventory , I feel it could have been laid out better and more straightforward instead of one long looping queue, though this was rectified in Silent Hill 2. You hold R2 to aim and X to shoot or swing your melee weapon. Otherwise I never really had a problem with any of the controls. They feel tight, Harry’s easy to move about, combat isn’t too difficult, though at first it is a little tricky to grasp but even that doesn’t take long to get it.
There was a good few moments I had in playing that it took me out of the horror a little with how it plays for one reason or another. For example, in the hospital you get the emergency hammer, a nasty weapon. “Highly damaging, but hard to use” the description says, but I had no difficulty with it at all. Well, maybe next to getting grabbed by two nurses stopping me from swinging. I know the NHS has fucked you lot over and you desperately need hugs but now is not the time. Anyway, once you stand and wait for the enemy to come to you and you start swinging it is so satisfying to use. At that point I used that way more than the handgun, even if I had an abundance of ammo to go through. It even got to a point where walking through the Otherworld side of the hospital the music was clanging and bashing intensely, it was supposed to be conveying fear to me, and yet after swinging that hammer at a few nurses then slowly pacing down a rusty hallway with that music playing I felt more like a slasher monster myself than someone in peril. I felt like something the creatures should fear instead of me fearing them. It amused me.
And of amusements there’s a lot of them. There’s a lot of suspensful and eerie scares but some kinda silly, like the little shadowy ghosts that squeaks like a kids toy and falls over. But there is one scare where at the end when you’re gathering items to unlock a door in Nowhere, you need to fix a chain before taking a dagger out of a cabinet. If you take that dagger out before fixing the chain you’ll be caught by tentacles and it’s game over. I was so pleasantly surprised to see that happen that it got me wondering then what I had to do to resolve it. But that shock stunned me, I loved it.
There’s more than a fair few puzzles to solve as well. I only had a problem with maybe two of them, but for the most part all of the puzzles are very straightforward to solve, especially given how you navigate and explore the area at first. There’s no wild backtracking like Resident Evil does, nor as many puzzles to solve either. The only more complex puzzles it has are its riddles, of which I had to resort to a walkthrough for. But for every other item based puzzle I was provided with enough context clues to figure it out and for that I felt smart and rewarded for solving them by myself. The maps you find are incredibly helpful as well as they help direct you to where you need to go nice and plainly for objectives and puzzles.
23 years on, Silent Hill is still a remarkable horror game and so much fun to play. Visually it still works spectacularly, it sounds as wonderfully nasty as ever, and it plays greatly. Its themes and metaphorical and symbolic horrors still work and haven’t aged a day. There’s a lot of great ideas executed very well and it’s very quickly become one of my favourite horror games. I’m very happy I got to experience it, especially for Halloween. For a team who were about ready to quit Konami, they sure gave it their all if this was to be their last game they ever made. That desperation paid off in divdends and they created a game and a series that I don’t think could have come about any other way.
Of course, I need to dive into Silent Hill 2 now. Already jumped into 3 and that I’ve been thoroughly enjoying too.
Where to Purchase (As of 31/10/22):
PS3 Store: £4.99/$5.99
eBay: £70-£1,800/ $150-$2000
Amazon: $175-$270
CeX: £75