This review contains spoilers
Despite being a huge horror game fan I somehow had never played a Silent Hill game. Which after playing it feels like I made a big mistake for a long time because this game is incredible and I wish I had played it sooner. Silent Hill is an absolutely fascinating original Playstation game that I think definitely lives up to the hype and renown that the series has grown for the original entries over the years. I will be discussing spoilers for the game as always so just a fair warning in advance.
In Silent Hill you play as Harry Mason as he struggles to try and find his daughter, Cheryl, somewhere in this mysterious and unsettling town in New England where he crashed his car. Harry slowly unravels this town's many secrets as he battles many horrific creatures and struggles to stay in the real world as he keeps getting pulled into a nightmare realm version of the town that was created by a cult that had tried to create their own god and started pulling the town into a demonic realm in the process. The story is engaging and pretty solid, I liked the characters and never felt like the story was going in any directions I didn't like, and I definitely felt like some of the story bits really added to the overall horror of the game with how unsettling a lot of the details of the story are, such as the fact that they kept a little girl alive in a dying state for years since she was going to be the incubator for the new god the cult was trying to create. Though an element that I think really added to the horror of the game, in a good way, were the controls.
The controls of this game are pretty clunky and and can take a good amount of time to get used too, but I think them being clunky and kind of awkward really works for the type of game that Silent Hill is. Harry Mason isn't some tactical military man with years of combat training, he's just some dude trying to find his daughter. So him feeling kind of stiff to control and hard to maneuver at times makes sense for him to a degree. At the same time, from a gameplay perspective it does also help the game feel scarier I feel. Not being able to control your character as smoothly or as gracefully as in other genres of games, like an action game for example, help adds to the feeling of struggle and horror as you try to traverse this horrific town. Games that use their controls as a way to help accentuate the style and tone of gameplay they're going for is interesting to me and this game definitely does it in a way that makes it feel still pretty playable while also making you feel part of the experience almost. Since I mentioned style and tone, I think next I need to talk about this game's atmosphere.
Silent Hill is a marvel in how it creates and manages to consistently keep up its atmosphere throughout the entire game. From the moment you first get control of Harry and get thrown into the fog covered world the game just creates this constant sense of unease. You don't know whats out there and you're alone and unarmed in this unknown place. Then once they start introducing more and more of the horror elements to the game it manages to keep feeling intense and and keep the pressure on you as it manages to create this feeling of something being around every corner. Its incredible really and is up there as one of the best horror games for me just for this ability to keep atmosphere alone.
What I find really impressive is that a huge part of this game's aesthetic and atmosphere, the suffocating fog that rests over the majority of the town, is only there because of hardware limitations. It's incredibly clear that this game being on the playstation one really hindered it as they couldn't render the town in a satisfactory manner with the way they wanted the town to function as an overworld; which is very apparent during nightmare world sections of the game where there is no fog and only a darkness that isn't pulled in enough to keep the player from seeing just how much pop-in and loading in there is for the town as you travel through it. So they added the never ending sea of fog that blankets the town during the day in order to let them use their idea while also hiding some of the messier technical aspects, and I'm just impressed with how this bandaid over a technical problem managed to make the game feel more at home as a horror game. The fog in Silent Hill hiding the nightmare creatures that lurk around, ready to kill you at a moment's notice if you get to close just feels right and really adds to the tense spooky atmosphere the town carriers and I'm honestly pretty glad they had to use the fog since I can't imagine how this game would function without the fog there to act as a constant sense of fear of the unknown for the player.
I do think part of the atmosphere working so well is tied to the game being as short as it is. I finished the game in a little under four hours and I am more than content with that length. I know the big for a lot of games today are to be as big and time consuming as possible, but horror games just cannot function that way. Eventually you'll stop getting scared or lose all the tension the game once had because you'll be used to it by that point. It was my biggset problem with Alien: Isolation back when I played that because it was a twenty hour horror game that stopped being scary around hour ten because you've seen all the scares the game could possibly throw at you at that point. Silent Hill feels like its just the right length to stay unnerving and tense while also not ending before the player has had enough which I feel really helps the game keep up its tense and spooky atmosphere that has been so well crafted over the course of the game. All that being said, there is one thing the game does that breaks this atmosphere and general horror vibe a bit.
One of my only two criticisms of this game is how it handles the combat; not in the gameplay itself but in the weapons you get as well as the amount of ammo you get for the guns. What I mean by this is that the game just kind of throws ammo at you to insane degrees. By the end of the first nightmare section I had almost two hundred pistol bullets and a decent chunk of shotgun ammo saved up, and this trend continued throughout the rest of the game up until I got a weapon about halfway into the game, the emergency hammer, that basically just invalidated every enemy outside of flying ones and bosses. Combat managed to maintain some tension through throwing more enemies at you at once and forcing you to struggle against a lot of them coming from all sides, but that quickly deteriorated as you could just swing he hammer a couple times and be done with the encounter once you took care of the first one in that encounter. It's not the biggest issue in the world, but it did take me out of a few combat encounters and bosses since I never really had to worry about or struggle with weighing whether it was worth it to waste some ammo since I always knew a truckload more was around the corner.
Now for the second thing I have a number of criticisms for in this game, its the puzzles. The way this game handles puzzles is really bizarre in that it almost has a reverse difficulty curve with the first real puzzle, the piano in the school, being the hardest and the ones later on all being relatively easy in comparison. The piano puzzle is effectively a puzzle without a clue due to how the clue is written and how much mental gymnastics you would need to take to solve it on your own with what you're given (unless you're me who was just absentmindedly pressing different keys on the piano while trying to figure out what to do and got it on accident. Which doesn't make the puzzle good but it does make it kind of funny that I solved a ridiculous puzzle on accident). Thankfully this is the only one that is super obtuse but it does kind of make all the other puzzles after this one feel lesser just because knowing how hard this was supposed to be gave me expectations for the rest of the puzzles in the game which, while I'm glad they weren't as weirdly obtuse as this, felt all pretty straight forward and easy even removing the comparison to this puzzle.
Overall, Silent Hill is a must play in the horror genre in my opinion. This game effectively writes the book on horror tone and atmosphere while having fun (though admittedly dated) gameplay and a pretty strong story. Seriously if you haven't played this game yet please do, there's a reason the Silent Hill name has stayed in people's minds despite it being seventeen years since the last game in the series most people would consider good released.
9.5/10
In Silent Hill you play as Harry Mason as he struggles to try and find his daughter, Cheryl, somewhere in this mysterious and unsettling town in New England where he crashed his car. Harry slowly unravels this town's many secrets as he battles many horrific creatures and struggles to stay in the real world as he keeps getting pulled into a nightmare realm version of the town that was created by a cult that had tried to create their own god and started pulling the town into a demonic realm in the process. The story is engaging and pretty solid, I liked the characters and never felt like the story was going in any directions I didn't like, and I definitely felt like some of the story bits really added to the overall horror of the game with how unsettling a lot of the details of the story are, such as the fact that they kept a little girl alive in a dying state for years since she was going to be the incubator for the new god the cult was trying to create. Though an element that I think really added to the horror of the game, in a good way, were the controls.
The controls of this game are pretty clunky and and can take a good amount of time to get used too, but I think them being clunky and kind of awkward really works for the type of game that Silent Hill is. Harry Mason isn't some tactical military man with years of combat training, he's just some dude trying to find his daughter. So him feeling kind of stiff to control and hard to maneuver at times makes sense for him to a degree. At the same time, from a gameplay perspective it does also help the game feel scarier I feel. Not being able to control your character as smoothly or as gracefully as in other genres of games, like an action game for example, help adds to the feeling of struggle and horror as you try to traverse this horrific town. Games that use their controls as a way to help accentuate the style and tone of gameplay they're going for is interesting to me and this game definitely does it in a way that makes it feel still pretty playable while also making you feel part of the experience almost. Since I mentioned style and tone, I think next I need to talk about this game's atmosphere.
Silent Hill is a marvel in how it creates and manages to consistently keep up its atmosphere throughout the entire game. From the moment you first get control of Harry and get thrown into the fog covered world the game just creates this constant sense of unease. You don't know whats out there and you're alone and unarmed in this unknown place. Then once they start introducing more and more of the horror elements to the game it manages to keep feeling intense and and keep the pressure on you as it manages to create this feeling of something being around every corner. Its incredible really and is up there as one of the best horror games for me just for this ability to keep atmosphere alone.
What I find really impressive is that a huge part of this game's aesthetic and atmosphere, the suffocating fog that rests over the majority of the town, is only there because of hardware limitations. It's incredibly clear that this game being on the playstation one really hindered it as they couldn't render the town in a satisfactory manner with the way they wanted the town to function as an overworld; which is very apparent during nightmare world sections of the game where there is no fog and only a darkness that isn't pulled in enough to keep the player from seeing just how much pop-in and loading in there is for the town as you travel through it. So they added the never ending sea of fog that blankets the town during the day in order to let them use their idea while also hiding some of the messier technical aspects, and I'm just impressed with how this bandaid over a technical problem managed to make the game feel more at home as a horror game. The fog in Silent Hill hiding the nightmare creatures that lurk around, ready to kill you at a moment's notice if you get to close just feels right and really adds to the tense spooky atmosphere the town carriers and I'm honestly pretty glad they had to use the fog since I can't imagine how this game would function without the fog there to act as a constant sense of fear of the unknown for the player.
I do think part of the atmosphere working so well is tied to the game being as short as it is. I finished the game in a little under four hours and I am more than content with that length. I know the big for a lot of games today are to be as big and time consuming as possible, but horror games just cannot function that way. Eventually you'll stop getting scared or lose all the tension the game once had because you'll be used to it by that point. It was my biggset problem with Alien: Isolation back when I played that because it was a twenty hour horror game that stopped being scary around hour ten because you've seen all the scares the game could possibly throw at you at that point. Silent Hill feels like its just the right length to stay unnerving and tense while also not ending before the player has had enough which I feel really helps the game keep up its tense and spooky atmosphere that has been so well crafted over the course of the game. All that being said, there is one thing the game does that breaks this atmosphere and general horror vibe a bit.
One of my only two criticisms of this game is how it handles the combat; not in the gameplay itself but in the weapons you get as well as the amount of ammo you get for the guns. What I mean by this is that the game just kind of throws ammo at you to insane degrees. By the end of the first nightmare section I had almost two hundred pistol bullets and a decent chunk of shotgun ammo saved up, and this trend continued throughout the rest of the game up until I got a weapon about halfway into the game, the emergency hammer, that basically just invalidated every enemy outside of flying ones and bosses. Combat managed to maintain some tension through throwing more enemies at you at once and forcing you to struggle against a lot of them coming from all sides, but that quickly deteriorated as you could just swing he hammer a couple times and be done with the encounter once you took care of the first one in that encounter. It's not the biggest issue in the world, but it did take me out of a few combat encounters and bosses since I never really had to worry about or struggle with weighing whether it was worth it to waste some ammo since I always knew a truckload more was around the corner.
Now for the second thing I have a number of criticisms for in this game, its the puzzles. The way this game handles puzzles is really bizarre in that it almost has a reverse difficulty curve with the first real puzzle, the piano in the school, being the hardest and the ones later on all being relatively easy in comparison. The piano puzzle is effectively a puzzle without a clue due to how the clue is written and how much mental gymnastics you would need to take to solve it on your own with what you're given (unless you're me who was just absentmindedly pressing different keys on the piano while trying to figure out what to do and got it on accident. Which doesn't make the puzzle good but it does make it kind of funny that I solved a ridiculous puzzle on accident). Thankfully this is the only one that is super obtuse but it does kind of make all the other puzzles after this one feel lesser just because knowing how hard this was supposed to be gave me expectations for the rest of the puzzles in the game which, while I'm glad they weren't as weirdly obtuse as this, felt all pretty straight forward and easy even removing the comparison to this puzzle.
Overall, Silent Hill is a must play in the horror genre in my opinion. This game effectively writes the book on horror tone and atmosphere while having fun (though admittedly dated) gameplay and a pretty strong story. Seriously if you haven't played this game yet please do, there's a reason the Silent Hill name has stayed in people's minds despite it being seventeen years since the last game in the series most people would consider good released.
9.5/10
Reviewed on Sep 26, 2021