The Haunted Hoard: Silent Hill (PS1)

While Resident Evil might be the most recognizable name in video game horror, Silent Hill is perhaps the most well regarded, the early titles in the series often coming up in discussions of the best horror games of all time. With such a well-respected franchise, it can be a little hard to divorce the reputation from the substance, but while the original Silent Hill certainly has some early PlayStation game woes when it comes to aspects like its graphics and tank controls, there are still identifiable traits that helped it start off a series with such a strong legacy.

 

Silent Hill begins with a strange, almost cinematic trailer for its own content, but when things do kick off, the player finds themselves playing as Harry Mason in the city of Silent Hill as he’s searching for his missing daughter. This small American town is immediately off-putting thanks to its eerie silence and relative abandonment, Harry only ever meeting a few other human characters along the way, and while the delivery of the voice acting can be lacking at times, it’s more stiff than cheesy, the game’s horror not leaning on it too hard save with a few characters like the mysterious religious woman Dahlia who does handle her voicework a bit better. The town itself is where most of the horror comes from instead, and in an ingenuous way of working a limitation into an effective game design element, Silent Hill is blanketed in a constant obscuring fog that both accommodates the game’s draw distance problem and makes the town seem eerier, the player only able to see so far in front of Harry at any time.

 

Rather than impeding your progress much, the fog’s main purpose is to help the town feel more empty and mysterious, the player unable to even see massive landmarks like a lighthouse or carnival until they’re incredibly close to them. Things feel condensed at all times even when you’re running down the middle of the abandoned streets, the world around you only coming into view when you are close enough. A very generous map system prevents you from ever getting lost, and Silent Hill might actually be a lesser game without it since the fog would indeed be hard to navigate without being able to check where you are with a single button press. The map in general is incredibly helpful, updating to show you any doors or rooms you’ve been into while keeping unexplored areas unmarked, and Harry will add his next major location to visit most of the time, getting there sometimes requiring some figuring out but never leaving the player bumbling about the fog without some idea of where they should be heading.

The fog hides more than just your destinations though. Something dark has infected the town of Silent Hill, with the few remaining people there having to contend with twisted creatures and the corrupted forms of its animals and people. The low visibility in the city makes navigating through it tense as the area ahead of you might suddenly reveal one of the hairless, rotten hounds that will leap out to try and harm you. The flap of wings will alert you to the fleshy bat creatures who patrol the streets for prey, and as you begin exploring interior areas like the school and hospital, you’ll only find more corrupted creatures out to kill you. While not every creature is particularly fearsome, there is a certain pathetic angle to a few of them that makes them even more creepy to encounter. Small shadowy infants will amble towards Harry before chucking themselves forward with a shrill chirp, childlike knife-wielding humanoids seem pitiful until they fall onto Harry and jab their blades in to hold him in place, and the doctors and nurses desperate to use their implements on you hardly seem able to hold themselves up in a standing position. There are some simple foes as well like little bugs scuttling around the ground or more dangerous ones like the monsters lurking in the sewer ceilings to surprise you, but your encounters with them always carry some degree of danger because you are always somewhat outmatched.

 

Silent Hill achieves a surprising balance of power to vulnerability. The game has no qualms with giving you ample ammo for your handgun, with strong options coming along in the form of shotguns and rifles as well as a variety of melee weapons if you fancy your chances in close range. Save for boss enemies, there are few foes that can’t be put down with a bit of persistent fire, but stopping to shoot your foes and especially trying to bludgeon them to death might not always be a viable option. Whether the enemy is a fast foe desperate to reach you or a slow shambler whose jerky movements slow down their approach, if they get in close, they can deal a good chunk of damage, and even once Harry has forced them off, they’re now in range to strike again quite easily unless you book it. Harry must come to a complete stop before the player can open fire, and while your shots are fairly accurate after doing so save in groups where hitting the right target isn’t guaranteed, you’re still now a sitting duck. If your shots don’t stun the enemy or outright kill them, they can still move forward, and while you can suffer a few blows before dying, the healing items seem distributed quite conservatively, meaning that you won’t want to burn through your medical kits and healing drinks by taking down the enemies you could have just fled from. Fixed cameras in certain locations and the fog out in the city means enemies might even be able to get in close before you ever see them, but there’s a wonderful tool so you’re rarely hit by a complete ambush. A radio you collect early on will begin to emit static when something dangerous is near, the sound only fading completely once you’re clear of them or you’ve killed all the enemies nearby. Rather than spoiling any surprise enemy appearances, hearing your radio start to crackle adds tension to many moments, especially when you’re in a room that appears to be empty or one where you just barely can’t see the whole area, the mystery of what’s lying ahead making the approach more tense than just a generic air of mystery.

Silent Hill scares mostly with its suspense, monster designs, and the threat to your life that makes every confrontation a bit more meaningful than a simple enemy run in. The PlayStation’s graphics can be a blessing and a curse though. Oftentimes during the game, an area you’re visiting such as the hospital will shift into a dark, other world counterpart where it’s adorned with horrific imagery and plays host to more dangerous and twisted creatures. However, a lot of these other world locations take on the form of ugly brown textures that do bring to mind rust or dried blood, but the muddiness loses its appeal on repeat visits to this dark counterpart to Silent Hill. There are still rooms that can do quite a lot with a little though, such as a long walk down an ominous hallway ramping up the tension as you have no clue what might be on the other side of the door you’re heading towards. The locations also play host to many puzzles that impede your progress, a few devious in their design such as one near the end involving Zodiac signs that can throw you off the trail to its solution with those shapes, but many involve using the right items in the right ways or in the right area. Many are surprisingly intuitive, the player sometimes even finding the right object before they are aware the puzzle exists to solve and things clicking quite easily once the components have come together. There are never too many objects floating around at one time to ensure that you can eventually find your way forward or at least know what puzzle you should be working on, and a few might even make you feel clever afterwards, such as the ones involving color-coded poems and playing broken piano keys in the right order.

 

The bosses of Silent Hill often are not too much to write home about, some like the lizard with a split head matching the mix of pathetic and horrifying the regular enemies hit while a few giant bugs pad out other moments, but their fights are pivotal in that they encourage caution with your ammo, these big baddies requiring the use of your rarer shotgun shells and better timed shots to overcome, making those smaller foes bigger threats for that need to balance your bullet output. If there is one area to outright say Silent Hill’s decisions didn’t benefit other areas of its design though, it might be its requirements for the different game endings. A first time player is unlikely to do what’s required to get even a decently satisfying ending, mainly because the game doesn’t really lead you towards the optional side quests too well. While Silent Hill is a varied city with plenty of intriguing areas to explore even outside the main story’s path, there’s a very brief moment where you’re thrown into a new section of it and might just hit a point of no return before you realized you were supposed to enter the exact right buildings to kick off the side quests for the better endings. Silent Hill does feel more about that tense, terrifying journey though than the conclusion, unraveling the mystery of the town, what happened to Harry’s daughter, and exploring locations with their unusual histories helping to ensure that even if you get the worst ending, you still got most of the important aspects wrapped up satisfactorily on top of an overall effective and engaging horror experience.

THE VERDICT: Smeared muddy textures, fog that only lets you see a few feet ahead, and blocky character designs could kill the experience in many games, but Silent Hill uses these all to surprising effect to amplify its atmospheric horror. The unusual designs of the creatures are amplified to a sickening level due to it being difficult to distinguish their features, the environments feel off-putting and unclean due to their ugly appearance, and the fog lends a strange mystery to the town and whatever strange horrors might be lurking just out of sight. By giving the player the means to defend themselves well enough while making each creature still dangerous and not always worth fighting, Silent Hill genuinely makes the player afraid of its world and able to feel vulnerable even when wielding well-fed firearms. Clever puzzles and a thick air of tension helps Silent Hill overcome some of its weaker traits like the ending requirements, bad acting, and occasionally clumsy controls, the game able to inspire some authentic fear thanks to an excellent balance between player power and weakness.

 

And so, I give Silent Hill for PlayStation…

A GREAT rating. Silent Hill is rough around the edges in a few parts, but sometimes those rough edges are exactly what makes the game so terrifying. The inability to make out certain details of the environment gives the world a sort of hazy, nightmare quality at times, the grotesque monster designs hiding in the dark and fog to look more sinister than the models truly are. The need to keep moving to survive or risk your life and ammo by stopping to fight means there are few moments where you feel truly strong but none where you feel absolutely helpless, that area between making any new monster type or boss a tense mystery until you’ve seen what it can do and what you can do to stop it. It’s a shame bosses often lean on big bugs when the other monsters are such wonderful corruptions of humans and other creatures that aren’t just large arthropods, and the story does get robbed of some tension by bad line delivery, flat faces outside the CG scenes, and the need to go your own way without much hint as to what earns you the best finales to the game, but the mechanical strength of the horror elements and the establishment of such an enigmatic atmosphere around Silent Hill and its many dangers means that it still brings the horror even if it can’t nail the dramatic moments.

 

Silent Hill is definitely deserving of the respect it has earned, managing to achieve horror without leaving the player toothless. You can handle the world of Silent Hill, but not so well that it ever becomes a power fantasy, the game able to create a sense of dread it pays off in many small ways instead of leaning on the barely present abrupt scares. While it’s time of release did lead to some of its flaws such as being from an era where video game voice acting was pretty much guaranteed to be bad, it might also be one of the clearest triumphs of turning limitations into effective game elements, so many drawbacks turning into upsides as the game milks their reimagining for impressive horror potential.