Silent Hill

by belajjal on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 07:15 - Comments: 0

"The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh."
That is what welcomes you as the intro starts and it sets the mood perfectly for what you will experience in this game. This is a game based on psychological fear rather than moments that make you jump. The game is Konami's response to Capcom's Resident Evil success and where RE had dogs busting through windows Silent Hill had morbid nurses and children crying in closed lavatories.

Harry Mason crashes his car trying to evade running over a little girl on the road. When he comes to his daughter, Cherryl, is gone and he sets out to find her. When he exits the car he sees her wander off into the fog that sits heavily over the town. Harry chases after her and winds up in an alley where the world suddenly transforms into rusty metal and bloody corpses pinned to the walls. Suddenly small children with knifes attack the defenseless Harry who passes out. He wakes up in a cafe, wondering if he just had a nightmare. A female cop, Cybil, found him passed out in the alley and brought him there. Cybil tells Harry she didn't see anything strange but suddenly a winged creature crashes through the window. Harry takes it down with a gun Cybil gave him and sets out to continue his search for Cherryl. He follow clues leading to the school in Silent Hill town. Once again the darkness, rust and blood transform the world as Harry explores an alternate version of the school. The story continues through out the town, involving other survivors, pagan cults and drugs.

Both gameplay and graphics are dated by today's standards, especially after RE4 rewrote the survival horror genre. I played using an emulator which enhanced the graphics quite a bit bit models are still blocky and badly animated. The limitations of the PlayStation 1 made the creators set a deep fog limiting the viewing distance but this actually plays in it's favor. The game still manages to sink you into it's world, mostly thanks to the excellent music and sounds. Most of the time it's just disturbing noise, metal scraping against metal or screams but sometimes blossoms out in to moody melodies.

The story is almost as written by David Lynch, twists and turns that can be interpreted in many ways. You can find large articles on the internet trying to pin down the Silent Hill lore and they are really complex. The games in the series are both canon and not, Silent Hill 2 is more or less stand alone but shares some of the lore (they don't contradict each other, just plays out separate in the same world). Silent Hill 3 is a direct sequel to the first game. I haven't played 4 or 5 yet. The movie is loosely based on the first game as well.

The game scared me, not as much as it did when I played it in the 90's though. The fear is creeping and you tend to feel really uneasy through most of the game. I loved it back then and I still do, but I think the sequel is better. Highly recommended if you are interested in survival horror roots when they were genuinely scary, not just blast fests in sunny Africa.

tags: silent hill