The first four Silent Hill games are works that hold a lot of personal value for me. These games are really special and I recommend that everyone play through all four at some point. There's something extremely magical and profound about what Team Silent was doing during that time period: something really clicked there. So, I was excited to learn that there was a visual novel written by the person who wrote the script of Silent Hill 1 on the Game Boy Advance and I figured I should play it.

I was incredibly disappointed.

The first half, Harry's story, is simply a retelling of the original Silent Hill with extremely little variation. While that narrative is still compelling in its most basic form, it's a lot more boring when the atmosphere and the exploration are completely stripped from it - with prose that wasn't translated in a particularly compelling way, either. I find it extremely funny how puzzles will just solve themselves in front of you. Why even bother with the inclusion? What's the point?

Cybil's half of the story was what interested me more when I picked up this game, and while it is largely original to this game, it also left me with a lot of questions about what the game was even going for. There are some interesting decisions there that completely change the ramifications of the plot, such as Harry dying, but overall it just feels like a strange series of events. We never even really learn about the religious abuse that undercurrents throughout the town here. Cybil just has a Fucked Up journey, I guess.

At the end of the day, I'm not really sure what the purpose of this thing is. Is it just meant to port Silent Hill 1 to the GBA? I'm certain there were better ways of doing it, but this is serviceable enough in that regard. But why do it like this? Why include a whole second route that seems completely incoherent? What was the purpose here? It's utterly bizarre, but not in the way that Silent Hill often is, where it piques my imagination.

It's just kind of strange.