So the other day I texted my rock-loving friend with a link to "Promise", from the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack, and I went "Dude I kinda wanna know your take on this 'cause this franchise is full of bangers". And his reply was like "I totally dig this shit but I can't picture it in Silent Hill. Isn't that franchise like an atmospheric kind of thing that hipsters usually like?".
I get the feeling that there's a phenomenon happening with a lot of media where a particular work permeates into a community or even pop culture but very few people have actually experienced it first-hand, so an idea of what the work is supposed to be gains an entity of its own and suddenly people get surprised that Metal Gear Solid is a James Bond parody. I think this totally happened with Silent Hill, which often exists not as itself but as "Thesmart psychological alternative to survival horror in a world where Resident Evil was the reference".
I played Silent Hill for the first time around two years ago (that would be 2022), swapping the controller every 20 minutes with a friend nerd enough to have bought an original PSX copy of the game without me inflicting any kind of terrible torture upon him. And I would like to encourage people to dive into this game, experiencing it first-hand… because what we found was nothing as what we imagined. The truth is, even if its supreme art direction is what comes to mind when reading Silent HIll, there's no end to how dumb this game can get!
I say this in the least condescending way possible. Sometimes people seem to have forgotten that in this franchise you resolve puzzles in abandoned schools by plugging rubber balls into holes or throwing cans into ventilation ducts. Not to mention finding stupid hints at how to defeat a giant lizard in the conveniently only readable book of the whole building. At its core, the game doesn't draw away as far as I thought from other genre games of its time. Nonetheless, it's totally fearless when it comes to mixing arrythmic noises with rock ballads, or creating cutscenes around the weirdest dialogue and pauses you'll ever see in a mainstream videogame just because someone on the team liked David Lynch.
Silent Hill is so punk and imperfect and arbitrary and reckless and I LOVE IT! Maybe so much because the Internet had built such a restrictive idea of what this game was in my mind, and actually playing it felt like discovering some kind of huge secret that an evil corporation had been hiding in plain sight for decades. Face these classics with an open mind, because they are usually a lot more fun than what some of its most gatekeeping fanbase suggests.
I get the feeling that there's a phenomenon happening with a lot of media where a particular work permeates into a community or even pop culture but very few people have actually experienced it first-hand, so an idea of what the work is supposed to be gains an entity of its own and suddenly people get surprised that Metal Gear Solid is a James Bond parody. I think this totally happened with Silent Hill, which often exists not as itself but as "The
I played Silent Hill for the first time around two years ago (that would be 2022), swapping the controller every 20 minutes with a friend nerd enough to have bought an original PSX copy of the game without me inflicting any kind of terrible torture upon him. And I would like to encourage people to dive into this game, experiencing it first-hand… because what we found was nothing as what we imagined. The truth is, even if its supreme art direction is what comes to mind when reading Silent HIll, there's no end to how dumb this game can get!
I say this in the least condescending way possible. Sometimes people seem to have forgotten that in this franchise you resolve puzzles in abandoned schools by plugging rubber balls into holes or throwing cans into ventilation ducts. Not to mention finding stupid hints at how to defeat a giant lizard in the conveniently only readable book of the whole building. At its core, the game doesn't draw away as far as I thought from other genre games of its time. Nonetheless, it's totally fearless when it comes to mixing arrythmic noises with rock ballads, or creating cutscenes around the weirdest dialogue and pauses you'll ever see in a mainstream videogame just because someone on the team liked David Lynch.
Silent Hill is so punk and imperfect and arbitrary and reckless and I LOVE IT! Maybe so much because the Internet had built such a restrictive idea of what this game was in my mind, and actually playing it felt like discovering some kind of huge secret that an evil corporation had been hiding in plain sight for decades. Face these classics with an open mind, because they are usually a lot more fun than what some of its most gatekeeping fanbase suggests.