I'm not sure why they call this town "Silent" Hill anyway, every time I leave my apartment I'm deafened by the cacophony of 50,000 dental drills buzzing in unison. Schools are nice, though.
I'm not exactly sure where to start with Silent Hill. I feel that the most obvious jumping off point is to draw comparisons to Resident Evil or Alone the Dark, the forebearers of the survival horror genre, but that feels a little unfair. Silent Hill doesn't really concern itself much with the "survival" aspect. Sure there's limited resources and combat feels clunky, and there's an argument to be made about whether that's by design or due to limitations, but the real meat of Silent Hill is its puzzles, which are a lot more challenging than anything found in Resident Evil. I actually had to step back and think on a few of them before applying what I thought to be the solution, and even though the means to solve them are communicated well enough, there's still a certain vagueness that you never really feel like your hand is being held.
Of course sometimes you'll just need to take a pipe to a monster's head, and that definitely doesn't feel great, but it mostly just suffers from the same limitations as other survival horror games of the era, and it's hard to fault it in that regard when it really was just adhering to the norm. Most of your weapons will be melee based too, and if you've ever played one of these games, that feels especially terrible.
Silent Hill puts more stock in the "horror" elements of the genre, and creates a truly upsetting atmosphere with its sound design, grim story, and unsettling off-kilter cast of characters. Of course it does this brilliantly, even leveraging some of those aforementioned limitations to its advantage. The fog helps hide poor draw distancing, but it also masks your line of sight so severely that you're in constant dread over what might be lurking five feet in front of you. Landmarks and other points of curiosity always seem to pop up suddenly, demanding exploration. As you creep through a recently revealed alleyway you might begin to hear the sound of chewing in the distance, and you know that whatever is waiting just beyond the fog will likely bite your face off, you just don't know if it's 20 feet away or already in front of you. The many discordant sounds of Silent Hill are meant to play tricks on you and evoke a sense of unease at all the right moments, but they're also designed to both lure and deter you from certain locations.
The dark halls and tunnels Harry must trek through are grimy and decayed. Even if they weren't filled with incomprehensibly grotesque monsters, they seem downright dangerous to explore, as if one wrong move is going to result in a tetanus shot. The limited graphical capabilities of the Playstation (and early 3D gaming in general) didn't do very many favors for games seeking a more photorealistic aesthetic, and some developers worked around this by relying on pre-rendered backgrounds to squeeze in more detail than what the system was capable of. Silent Hill gets by just fine without such measures. It holds up well to modern scrutiny and remains one of the better looking games on the system.
Every part of Silent Hill comes together to make a game that is unlike anything else on the system, or even within its generation. It's a moody, atmospheric game that is more horrific and unsettling in its quieter moments than Resident Evil as its most violent. It says a lot that a Playstation 1 game is capable of frightening me when a lot of modern games fall far short of the mark.
I'm not exactly sure where to start with Silent Hill. I feel that the most obvious jumping off point is to draw comparisons to Resident Evil or Alone the Dark, the forebearers of the survival horror genre, but that feels a little unfair. Silent Hill doesn't really concern itself much with the "survival" aspect. Sure there's limited resources and combat feels clunky, and there's an argument to be made about whether that's by design or due to limitations, but the real meat of Silent Hill is its puzzles, which are a lot more challenging than anything found in Resident Evil. I actually had to step back and think on a few of them before applying what I thought to be the solution, and even though the means to solve them are communicated well enough, there's still a certain vagueness that you never really feel like your hand is being held.
Of course sometimes you'll just need to take a pipe to a monster's head, and that definitely doesn't feel great, but it mostly just suffers from the same limitations as other survival horror games of the era, and it's hard to fault it in that regard when it really was just adhering to the norm. Most of your weapons will be melee based too, and if you've ever played one of these games, that feels especially terrible.
Silent Hill puts more stock in the "horror" elements of the genre, and creates a truly upsetting atmosphere with its sound design, grim story, and unsettling off-kilter cast of characters. Of course it does this brilliantly, even leveraging some of those aforementioned limitations to its advantage. The fog helps hide poor draw distancing, but it also masks your line of sight so severely that you're in constant dread over what might be lurking five feet in front of you. Landmarks and other points of curiosity always seem to pop up suddenly, demanding exploration. As you creep through a recently revealed alleyway you might begin to hear the sound of chewing in the distance, and you know that whatever is waiting just beyond the fog will likely bite your face off, you just don't know if it's 20 feet away or already in front of you. The many discordant sounds of Silent Hill are meant to play tricks on you and evoke a sense of unease at all the right moments, but they're also designed to both lure and deter you from certain locations.
The dark halls and tunnels Harry must trek through are grimy and decayed. Even if they weren't filled with incomprehensibly grotesque monsters, they seem downright dangerous to explore, as if one wrong move is going to result in a tetanus shot. The limited graphical capabilities of the Playstation (and early 3D gaming in general) didn't do very many favors for games seeking a more photorealistic aesthetic, and some developers worked around this by relying on pre-rendered backgrounds to squeeze in more detail than what the system was capable of. Silent Hill gets by just fine without such measures. It holds up well to modern scrutiny and remains one of the better looking games on the system.
Every part of Silent Hill comes together to make a game that is unlike anything else on the system, or even within its generation. It's a moody, atmospheric game that is more horrific and unsettling in its quieter moments than Resident Evil as its most violent. It says a lot that a Playstation 1 game is capable of frightening me when a lot of modern games fall far short of the mark.