It was my cousin who is really into this franchise that first got me to try playing the games myself, and I know Silent Hill 2 is the one everyone talks about, but wow, the first entry was really something on its own as well. Some awkward dubbing and lack of depth in fighting bosses aside, this game was super well-rounded for the length and scope of game it is, and I had a blast soaking in its atmosphere.
I appreciate how the industry is always pushing the boundaries of graphical capabilities, player customizability, amount of content that can be stuffed into a game, etc., but when it comes to my taste in games, I'm not always necessarily up-to-date on catching up with all the latest releases, and I tend to find myself playing a fair amount of older games at any given time. And the complaints I often hear about people talking about how "man this game used to look amazing for the time, but now it looks ugly and outdated" never sat right with me. For me, it's like technology in film. You make the best possible art with what you have available to you, and I actually find myself really getting into imagery that I know doesn't look realistic, that it's stylized, but it has character and personality. I like the escapist artifice. That's why I love the look of old games, the low-poly, the simpler textures, when used with an artist's eye, I love that look. Either the look will endure, or it wasn't that great to begin with and we were just captivated with graphical standards of the time and not artistry.
This is all to say, maybe Silent Hill is too rudimentary for some of you to get into at this point we're at now two decades out from its release. That being the start of more psychological horror in games gives it meaningful impact, but that we've come so far since then to really be worth revisiting. That it's kind of too far back into the history of that genre. I don't know. But for me, I think it holds up really well. For how long the game is and how much ground it covers, I think its mechanics work great for its heavily atmospheric storytelling. Its blocky low-poly look with very pixelated textures may be primitive to some, but I love it. I actually hope nostalgia culture gets to the point where we start seeing some games return to the stylistic trademarks of this point in time, not out of necessity but out of creative expression. Of the fixed camera angles, of a simplistic and minimalistic look. I'd love to make something that kind of goes for a similar vibe in its models to this game. I love the idea of seeing a small American town and all of the assets to be found there rendered in such a simple and minimalist look. Even with simplistic graphics, the monster designs are still properly grotesque. The low-poly pixel art look is definitely something I'm big on. And the FMV cutscenes in the game are some of the best I've seen for PS1, as I've seen some really uncanny PS1 FMV. The way the characters move, and their subtle and natural facial acting, is really impressive for the time, and still looks really good to me.
An especially strong element to this game I feel is the pacing. We get an opening that foreshadows a lot of elements but not enough to really understand the full extent of what we're in for, and we have a basic starting premise. Your car crashed and you need to find your daughter. This foggy town is a bit mysterious but nothing too crazy. And then super early on, we get just the right taste that the normalcy we came with is going to go away, as the angles start getting more off-kilter searching through the alleyway, and we hear a distorted siren, and eventually become attacked by monsters. When Harry Mason comes to and learns a little bit more about the town, we get a sense of security in the diner as he gets his bearings. But the game quickly indicates that security isn't something you can really count on for long. By happenstance, I moved to a different camera angle just as I swore I saw something fly by the window outside the diner, too quick and unclear to make out what it was. It then reveals itself, disrupting the safety of the diner and setting a precedent that this town is full of nightmarish creations that are out to get you, and they're everywhere. What's great about the pacing in the game is that while it makes it quickly, strongly apparent that normalcy is being challenged by otherworldly elements as you explore the alleyway, it brings it back to a more peaceful starting point in the diner, and then gradually ratchets up the monsters and gruesome imagery and unsettling atmosphere over the course of the rest of the game. So the point is made early on that this will be a game where creepy, bizarre things happen, but it lets the actual threat and dark atmosphere slowly increase over an extended period of time, with moments where the player is safe, but an overall increasing trajectory of threat and darkness. And the game also balances a mix between periods of time where the player is forced to explore a certain area with opportunities to be free to check out all of what the different parts of town have to offer. I know that I didn't even get to explore all of it, and I can see how a player could've had the opportunity to be even more immersed spending more extensive time just figuring out what all the locations on the map have to offer while fighting off the monsters that come, getting a feel for the layout of the roads and coming up with a mental model for it all. Obviously not a massive world, but the presence of fog, monsters making traversal not so simple, and the changing nature of the landscape add to how the physical space of Silent Hill is processed by the player.
Another thing that has to be talked about with this game is the audio. Holy crap. The dubbing isn't the best in the world, especially with awkward pauses, but the soundtrack and sound design are something else. This soundtrack has to be one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game, with incredible industrial texture and dark ambient energy, and the way it's mixed in how certain melodies will fade in and out of each other depending on where you are is so seamless. The overall sound design is incredible in how it all mixes together. I've found myself becoming a little more gravitated toward more industrial, noise, and ambient music lately and this game fit that so well.
The writing is also really solid in this game, and an element that I feel holds up. What I love is that enough is told to the player to give an impression of what's happening, but it's still vague enough that it isn't completely spelled out. I did a little bit of extra reading to clarify some things for myself, but I could tell that the hooks for plot threads and character details are already there in the game. There's a lot of environmental storytelling, details when you investigate certain items that subtly all work toward telling the story of this town and its inhabitants. The characters don't talk too much about themselves and you have to infer a lot about them. You get a basic sense of who these characters are, but there's still a lot you don't know about them, and that mystery adds a lot to the impression they make on you.
The gameplay mechanics are simple, but effective for the kind of mood narrative this game is going for. You move around with tank controls, which can be clumsy, but I think they help with how the camera (which is actually relatively good compared to some camera systems of the time) changes positions often. They add to feeling like a clumsy everyman fighting normal monsters, but they do become more tricky when you're supposed to dodge and stuff in the boss fights, and I mean with the mechanics in this game it was going to be tricky to really make super captivating boss fights. The basic gameplay model is geared around puzzles and combat. The combat is simple but adequate and properly clumsy for the tension the game is going for, but yeah it doesn't allow for super interesting gameplay against the bosses. I was able to do well on ammo and health without worrying too bad for the most part on normal mode. The puzzle aspect of the game involves the more moment-to-moment puzzles you'll encounter, grabbing items and remembering details for future use later, and the more overall narrative puzzles as to where Cheryl is and the nature of Silent Hill. The puzzles can be pretty creative to figure out. I cheated on a few, but I can't remember any that were so BS that I don't think I could've figured it out on my own with enough time and the right ideas. Some are pretty clever.
I think that if you're open to older games, you should definitely give the original Silent Hill a try if you've never played it. Even with the stuff the sequel built off of this foundation, I still feel it's a solid game that holds up on its own, even if the bosses won't blow you away, and it has some trademarks of an older game with the "eh" dubbing and the inability to really control where the camera is independent of the character. The audio is unbelievably good, the atmosphere is powerful, the environmental storytelling is strong, and I think the look still holds up in its own retro way.
I appreciate how the industry is always pushing the boundaries of graphical capabilities, player customizability, amount of content that can be stuffed into a game, etc., but when it comes to my taste in games, I'm not always necessarily up-to-date on catching up with all the latest releases, and I tend to find myself playing a fair amount of older games at any given time. And the complaints I often hear about people talking about how "man this game used to look amazing for the time, but now it looks ugly and outdated" never sat right with me. For me, it's like technology in film. You make the best possible art with what you have available to you, and I actually find myself really getting into imagery that I know doesn't look realistic, that it's stylized, but it has character and personality. I like the escapist artifice. That's why I love the look of old games, the low-poly, the simpler textures, when used with an artist's eye, I love that look. Either the look will endure, or it wasn't that great to begin with and we were just captivated with graphical standards of the time and not artistry.
This is all to say, maybe Silent Hill is too rudimentary for some of you to get into at this point we're at now two decades out from its release. That being the start of more psychological horror in games gives it meaningful impact, but that we've come so far since then to really be worth revisiting. That it's kind of too far back into the history of that genre. I don't know. But for me, I think it holds up really well. For how long the game is and how much ground it covers, I think its mechanics work great for its heavily atmospheric storytelling. Its blocky low-poly look with very pixelated textures may be primitive to some, but I love it. I actually hope nostalgia culture gets to the point where we start seeing some games return to the stylistic trademarks of this point in time, not out of necessity but out of creative expression. Of the fixed camera angles, of a simplistic and minimalistic look. I'd love to make something that kind of goes for a similar vibe in its models to this game. I love the idea of seeing a small American town and all of the assets to be found there rendered in such a simple and minimalist look. Even with simplistic graphics, the monster designs are still properly grotesque. The low-poly pixel art look is definitely something I'm big on. And the FMV cutscenes in the game are some of the best I've seen for PS1, as I've seen some really uncanny PS1 FMV. The way the characters move, and their subtle and natural facial acting, is really impressive for the time, and still looks really good to me.
An especially strong element to this game I feel is the pacing. We get an opening that foreshadows a lot of elements but not enough to really understand the full extent of what we're in for, and we have a basic starting premise. Your car crashed and you need to find your daughter. This foggy town is a bit mysterious but nothing too crazy. And then super early on, we get just the right taste that the normalcy we came with is going to go away, as the angles start getting more off-kilter searching through the alleyway, and we hear a distorted siren, and eventually become attacked by monsters. When Harry Mason comes to and learns a little bit more about the town, we get a sense of security in the diner as he gets his bearings. But the game quickly indicates that security isn't something you can really count on for long. By happenstance, I moved to a different camera angle just as I swore I saw something fly by the window outside the diner, too quick and unclear to make out what it was. It then reveals itself, disrupting the safety of the diner and setting a precedent that this town is full of nightmarish creations that are out to get you, and they're everywhere. What's great about the pacing in the game is that while it makes it quickly, strongly apparent that normalcy is being challenged by otherworldly elements as you explore the alleyway, it brings it back to a more peaceful starting point in the diner, and then gradually ratchets up the monsters and gruesome imagery and unsettling atmosphere over the course of the rest of the game. So the point is made early on that this will be a game where creepy, bizarre things happen, but it lets the actual threat and dark atmosphere slowly increase over an extended period of time, with moments where the player is safe, but an overall increasing trajectory of threat and darkness. And the game also balances a mix between periods of time where the player is forced to explore a certain area with opportunities to be free to check out all of what the different parts of town have to offer. I know that I didn't even get to explore all of it, and I can see how a player could've had the opportunity to be even more immersed spending more extensive time just figuring out what all the locations on the map have to offer while fighting off the monsters that come, getting a feel for the layout of the roads and coming up with a mental model for it all. Obviously not a massive world, but the presence of fog, monsters making traversal not so simple, and the changing nature of the landscape add to how the physical space of Silent Hill is processed by the player.
Another thing that has to be talked about with this game is the audio. Holy crap. The dubbing isn't the best in the world, especially with awkward pauses, but the soundtrack and sound design are something else. This soundtrack has to be one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game, with incredible industrial texture and dark ambient energy, and the way it's mixed in how certain melodies will fade in and out of each other depending on where you are is so seamless. The overall sound design is incredible in how it all mixes together. I've found myself becoming a little more gravitated toward more industrial, noise, and ambient music lately and this game fit that so well.
The writing is also really solid in this game, and an element that I feel holds up. What I love is that enough is told to the player to give an impression of what's happening, but it's still vague enough that it isn't completely spelled out. I did a little bit of extra reading to clarify some things for myself, but I could tell that the hooks for plot threads and character details are already there in the game. There's a lot of environmental storytelling, details when you investigate certain items that subtly all work toward telling the story of this town and its inhabitants. The characters don't talk too much about themselves and you have to infer a lot about them. You get a basic sense of who these characters are, but there's still a lot you don't know about them, and that mystery adds a lot to the impression they make on you.
The gameplay mechanics are simple, but effective for the kind of mood narrative this game is going for. You move around with tank controls, which can be clumsy, but I think they help with how the camera (which is actually relatively good compared to some camera systems of the time) changes positions often. They add to feeling like a clumsy everyman fighting normal monsters, but they do become more tricky when you're supposed to dodge and stuff in the boss fights, and I mean with the mechanics in this game it was going to be tricky to really make super captivating boss fights. The basic gameplay model is geared around puzzles and combat. The combat is simple but adequate and properly clumsy for the tension the game is going for, but yeah it doesn't allow for super interesting gameplay against the bosses. I was able to do well on ammo and health without worrying too bad for the most part on normal mode. The puzzle aspect of the game involves the more moment-to-moment puzzles you'll encounter, grabbing items and remembering details for future use later, and the more overall narrative puzzles as to where Cheryl is and the nature of Silent Hill. The puzzles can be pretty creative to figure out. I cheated on a few, but I can't remember any that were so BS that I don't think I could've figured it out on my own with enough time and the right ideas. Some are pretty clever.
I think that if you're open to older games, you should definitely give the original Silent Hill a try if you've never played it. Even with the stuff the sequel built off of this foundation, I still feel it's a solid game that holds up on its own, even if the bosses won't blow you away, and it has some trademarks of an older game with the "eh" dubbing and the inability to really control where the camera is independent of the character. The audio is unbelievably good, the atmosphere is powerful, the environmental storytelling is strong, and I think the look still holds up in its own retro way.
Baka_Ouji
3 years ago