Harry wakes up in a wrecked car and the passenger seat is empty. Heather is missing. He crawls out of the ruins of the vehicle and stumbles onto the street, swallowed by a thick fog. The ghost town you find yourself in is smothered out of any visible signs of life. Snow is falling gently. Only your footsteps echo in company as you prod along the lonely streets. A mirage of your daughter vanishes behind the corner and you shout at her desperately to wait. You sprint into the alleway to catch her, but when you turn around the corner, you only find the massacred remains of flesh and blood in place of your missing girl. The spine of an animal is the only thing you can make out in the mush of guts that resembles anything. That is when everything starts to tighten, when you feel short of breath. A siren wails in the distance, it’s prolonged cry piercing the air with unresolvable panic. You run ahead, but you can’t be sure if you are running to something or away from it. The tight fixed camera angle of the alleyway gets narrower and you're beginning to squeeze yourself into the nightmare; the camera can’t even hold its footing. It trembles out of fear, swaying frantically, distancing as far away from Harry as it can, looking for an escape. It gets darker and darker, until Harry is forced to put a match out to not lose himself. In the darkness the world is shaking with banging and screaming, the camera is spinning all around. A trail of blood leads to an appalling crucified corpse, rotting with meat tangled in rusty barbed wire all round blocking the way. The light has almost faded and you can’t escape the maze. In the insanity of banging metals and scraping pipes you get attacked by something you can’t describe. Small creatures gnaw at your feet and stab you with their knives and you can’t do anything. You don’t know what's happening yet, utterly helpless you just wait for the nightmare to end. Right then Harry wakes up, gasping for air. His eyes are wide open, but the nightmare hasn’t ended. Silent Hill awaits you.
That is how you open your game. Hooked right away I was surprised the more I progressed through it. How, despite its ancient two decade plus age, a end of the millennium video game piece of technology could preserve its tone and stand its aesthetic ground. More than that, I even started seeing it as timeless. There is potential in retro texture work and low poly models that wasn't apparent to me before as it is now; horror might take advantage of more than any other genre. The jagged corners of the pre anti-aliasing days and the muddled texture work give clear enough information, but they also suggest. I can see that rusty door and its brown unappealing colouring, yet I can only imagine what horrors that gave it its tint. Objects just seem that much stranger, as if the way you see them is the closest someone could make them out from memory. This isn’t something unique to Silent Hill, but I hope we see these technical limitations of the past as an aesthetic choice in the future more and more.
The proportions are also way off, which adds to this unsettling feeling. Everything is a bit too big, a bit too wide. The streets are so much wider than they should be that there exists a space between opposite pavements, where you can walk, but not see either side of the street. Just fog and nothingness. It all accumulates in this surreal dreamy quality that is rarely matched to this day. What helps greatly too, is the effectiveness of the cinematography, if we might call it that. Fixed camera angles just shouldn’t have left mainstream gaming. They paint a picture and create tension in a way modern interactive right analog stick cameras can’t. It hits different when you press the handle of an old creaky door and enter a room where you don't see what is in front of you, but rather, see the character looking at the space beyond with the wall behind his back. The camera doesn’t let you see much and it induces anxiety, as you hear something coming closer way over the edges of the screen.
I don’t know what black magic and ritual sacrifice Team Silent performed to make this sound the way it does, but they made the official soundtrack to all your darkest nightmares. Absolutely legendary work.
What this ultimately is about as a narrative is of little importance. In a classical sense the story isn’t any good. It barely has a plot for things to keep moving and it completely loses me every time it ventures into ramblings of esoteric bullshit, occult crackpot gibberish and alien rubbish. The established atmosphere is so effective that explanations of things damage the psychological undertone that is present throughout the game. When it relies on writing it’s abhorrent. The Twin Peaks influence here is apparent, but the Lynchian approach to dialogue just doesn’t work out. It’s stilted and uninteresting and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. It’s not all bad though, because by the end, there is a death scene so peculiar and strangely sad that I remembered it for days after. There seems to be so much beneath the uppermost layer of this game. I'm sure that is why it has the following it does. I can’t wait to try the sequel.
That is how you open your game. Hooked right away I was surprised the more I progressed through it. How, despite its ancient two decade plus age, a end of the millennium video game piece of technology could preserve its tone and stand its aesthetic ground. More than that, I even started seeing it as timeless. There is potential in retro texture work and low poly models that wasn't apparent to me before as it is now; horror might take advantage of more than any other genre. The jagged corners of the pre anti-aliasing days and the muddled texture work give clear enough information, but they also suggest. I can see that rusty door and its brown unappealing colouring, yet I can only imagine what horrors that gave it its tint. Objects just seem that much stranger, as if the way you see them is the closest someone could make them out from memory. This isn’t something unique to Silent Hill, but I hope we see these technical limitations of the past as an aesthetic choice in the future more and more.
The proportions are also way off, which adds to this unsettling feeling. Everything is a bit too big, a bit too wide. The streets are so much wider than they should be that there exists a space between opposite pavements, where you can walk, but not see either side of the street. Just fog and nothingness. It all accumulates in this surreal dreamy quality that is rarely matched to this day. What helps greatly too, is the effectiveness of the cinematography, if we might call it that. Fixed camera angles just shouldn’t have left mainstream gaming. They paint a picture and create tension in a way modern interactive right analog stick cameras can’t. It hits different when you press the handle of an old creaky door and enter a room where you don't see what is in front of you, but rather, see the character looking at the space beyond with the wall behind his back. The camera doesn’t let you see much and it induces anxiety, as you hear something coming closer way over the edges of the screen.
I don’t know what black magic and ritual sacrifice Team Silent performed to make this sound the way it does, but they made the official soundtrack to all your darkest nightmares. Absolutely legendary work.
What this ultimately is about as a narrative is of little importance. In a classical sense the story isn’t any good. It barely has a plot for things to keep moving and it completely loses me every time it ventures into ramblings of esoteric bullshit, occult crackpot gibberish and alien rubbish. The established atmosphere is so effective that explanations of things damage the psychological undertone that is present throughout the game. When it relies on writing it’s abhorrent. The Twin Peaks influence here is apparent, but the Lynchian approach to dialogue just doesn’t work out. It’s stilted and uninteresting and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. It’s not all bad though, because by the end, there is a death scene so peculiar and strangely sad that I remembered it for days after. There seems to be so much beneath the uppermost layer of this game. I'm sure that is why it has the following it does. I can’t wait to try the sequel.
Bound_by_Art
5 months ago