first backloggd game to record my thoughts for! the first silent hill game was my first foray into older playstation games with shitty controls, and honestly at this point i think it has grown on me as something i quite love. the atmosphere of this game creeps the shit out of me, and even though there is nothing truly terrifying visually in this game, i think the menacing story and the misty environment truly encapsulate real fear very well. the story is excellently crafted and the town is as mysterious as it seems, making the player want to seek more. overall just a genuinely eerie yet super intriguing experience to play through, and i love harry and how much he cares for his little girl.

Things I thought were cool: the school, the hospital, Lisa Garland, "nothing", the vibes
Things I didn't like: FUCK RUNNING THROUGH THE STREETS OF SILENT HILL OH MY GOD I HATED IT
AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE GIVE ME SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE SOUND OF THE RADIO
SILENT HILL HAS GREAT MUSIC - USE IT

Lets look at the hospital as our example here I thought exploring the hospital was incredibly fun I really enjoyed it I thought the limited space and exploring the rooms was fun and was interested to see what was in them and loved the atmosphere and design of the nightmare realm
Now trying to reach the hospital made me want to kill myself, it was not fun it made me angry and filled me with a profound sadness every time I reached the end of a road and went oh... now I get to spend another 10 minutes just WALKING AROUND WITH NOTHING BUT THE SOUND OF THE DAMN RADIO

There is no better epitome of the classic survival horror game than Silent Hill, even if Resident Evil 2 just loses out by the nature of its basic narrative (which is not a detriment by any means). Travel, survival, exploration, horror, and the agony it never ends until the end encapsulates the experience, especially on a 10 Star run (an achievement I am glad to have played for). I love the way Team Silent use the familiar small town horror to show a degradation whose sociopolitical ramifications are not difficult to identify, a reading I hope to write on at some point with the other games.

É tão lindo que, mesmo passados mais de 20 anos passados, tudo aqui continua funcionando tão bem: as mecânicas; a história; a ambientação etc. Um verdadeiro clássico! Por questão pessoal, apenas queria um maior desenvolvimento do indivíduo Harry Mason. Entendo, e sei que funciona, o personagem-tipo "pai em busca da filha" neste primeiro Silent Hill, mas uma exploração aprofundada do lado humano do protagonista, como acontece às demais personagens (Lisa Garland e Alessa Gilespie são os melhores exemplos disso), apenas acrescentaria à já complexa narrativa do título. Quem sabe em um futuro (porém improvável) remake?

Meu primeiro jogo da franquia, bem melhor do que eu esperava, por conta das atuações e por eu quase nunca ver ninguém falar sobre esse jogo eu tinha a impressão de que ia ser bem mais ou menos, mas acabei me surpreendendo.
Os gráficos são ok, não sei comparar se era bom ou ruim pra época, a ambientação e trilha sonora é excelente, os designes dos monstros são bons se levar em consideração os gráficos, gostei bastante da história mesmo dando pra adivinhar uma parte da trama envolvendo a filha do harry, só não vai ser 5 estrelas por conta das atuações que por mais que seja meio engraçado acaba tirando o clima do jogo.

A good ps1 horror. The main reason you'd play this is for the atmosphere. It's out of this world. It's really good. It's like really cool.

The gameplay is basically checking every nook and cranny of the map for items and then finding whatever weird use case the item has, like a point-and-click game. It's also spooky. oo.

Needs another playthrough from me.

This game is near perfect, in my opinion. Everything pulls together to add to the particular nightmare-focused horror that this game is going for. Some of the more subtle terrors in the game remind me of nightmares I had in childhood, which made the game feel uniquely designed to unsettle me in particular. I also deeply enjoy that after your first playthrough, the horror drops, you get overpowered goodies, and the game seems to invite you behind the horror curtain so that subsequent playthroughs are less serious and more so something to be laughed at. It feels as if the developers decided that the jump scares couldn't be scary forever so they might as well allow the player to have fun with the game in a more relaxed way when they replay it. Overall, a wonderful game that you should play if you're at all interested in survival horror.

An incredibly rough sketch of what was to come, Silent Hill really feels Team Silent flexing their muscles, taking an opportunity with what would otherwise ostensibly just be a Resident Evil competitor and turning it into an immediately memorable- and as I said with SH2, -forward thinking & borderline arthouse. The tiny gap between this and 2 speaks a lot to them really wanting to go for that psychological/visceral angle from the get-go.

But, speaking about the actual game itself, it's rough. The story is really hard to follow, even if you do the easy to miss sidequest, and unfortunately deeply suffers from Harry Mason. Well, he's certainly charming, but one of the biggest issues of the story is this sort of meandering momentum it has. Harry Mason, despite ostensibly wanting to save his daughter, is just kind of... There, in stark contrast with the more propulsive & protagonist-oriented stories of 2 and 3. Likewise, the gameplay's definitely picked up rust over the years, all stuff that gets ironed out in the future. Boy! I can't stop talking about the other games. It's just hard not to.

What I see Silent Hill as is a cultivation of aesthetics, as it were. Visually, it is still jaw droppingly gorgeous, & Team Silent really define themselves as people being able to stage a scene. The best moments of this game are when it's not talking, but in moments of chunky, pixelated, blood-and-rust covered forms loping out of the dark to the sounds of a machine tearing itself apart. Even in this raw, unrefined form, the aesthetic and identity of Silent Hill as a place and franchise are unmatched.

This has to be one of the greatest games on the PS1. The atmosphere of this game which is unparalleled by the rest of the series IMO, still influences not only modern horror video game titles but how we look back on the PS1 era in retrospect. The presentation is nuts for a PS1 title the graphics have sort of aged in their own unique way similar to the original metal gear solid or tron movie its a combination of not just the limitations of the hardware but the art style that can still shine through it all that creates a really distinct look you can never really recreate.

Akira Yamaoka hereafter, stays with this franchise to do its soundtrack which is a great call, I like how this soundtrack compared to the rest of the entries in this series has an overbearing industrial sound that works so well with the nightmare versions of the locations you visit in this game and the confusion that comes with trying to distinct the soundtrack from the in game sound works so well to create that feeling of unease for the player.

You could argue that the games characters are pretty forgettable besides Lisa of course, or the voice acting is bad but if anything that works in favor for the game the hardware limitations of the PS1 allowed the game to only deliver one voice line at a time which is why the dialogue exchanges in this game feel like they awkwardly drag. But if anything that adds more to the eerie feeling of the game and the humans are more a backdrop to the town which is the real shining star of these games The beast you have to path through and holds so much ambience Silent Hill.