Silent Hill Review (PS1)

  I grew up on movies like Pet Cemetery, the Friday the 13^th series, and I never liked Freddy much because I thought he was a goofy pussy. When kids my age were playing with G.I. Joes or race cars I had a collection of Aliens action figures and was trying to find the right combination of food coloring and corn syrup to make fake blood. That is to say: I was never a horror averse person or one to shy away from the spookies. When the survival horror games were huge in the '90s with mass market titles like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, I never found them particularly “scary”. They were video game representations or interpretations of mediocre to bad horror movie cliches, usually relying on jump scares and other cheap tricks to unsettle the kids. Silent Hill scared the shit out of me. It's dark, dirty, grimy, and is generally unpleasant enough to stick with you after you turn the game off. Revisiting it now, the purity of it's horrors has withstood the test of time far greater than any ordinary game should.

  You play as Harry Mason, a fairly ordinary guy who awakens from a car crash to find himself trapped in a perpetually foggy, snowy/ashy, and more or less deserted town called Silent Hill. Your daughter was in the passenger's seat, now she's gone. Following shadows, footsteps, and blood trails you wind up in a decrepit, rusted alley where you discover a rotted corpse wrapped up in barbed wire and hospital gurneys soaked in blood. A distant siren wails and it suddenly turns to night, so you light a match and are attacked by amorphous gray figures the size of children.  They are wielding knives. You can try to make your way back through the twisting alley, but the door is chained shut. You're trapped, and more of the nightmares keep appearing, holding your legs and slashing at you. You eventually drop dead.

  Then you awake inside a diner. There's a police woman there, one of a handful of humanish characters locked in the town. She explains about the collapsed roads out of town, the monsters running amok, and the general bad situation you're in. Your only real motivation is finding your daughter, so you take the pistol she offers, arm yourself with a radio that broadcasts white noise when there is danger around, and a flashlight and set off. Or try to... because a fleshy winged creature with a dog's head bursts through the diner window and attacks you. Here you come to realize that Harry is not a fighter.  Shooting at creatures is sloppy and ammo is a fairly limited resource, and swinging away with a knife or a pipe is a gamble. You're going to spend a lot of time juking like a football player because fighting is a last resort when cornered (or when your healing items far outweigh your ammo count). It would be easy to write off the combat as “bad”, and just as easy to justify bad combat as “adding to the tension”. Silent Hill feels deliberate. The environments are all fully rendered 3-D spaces where you're free to zig, zag, and move the camera behind you as needed in the open, and the tight interiors have enemy placement that allows for choices. Almost all encounters are tense, but they never feel cheap.

  The town of Silent Hill itself is impressively large, open, and full of secrets. You can't enter most of the buildings, but exploring off the beaten path can yield some extra health items, ammo, or something more enticing or cryptic (that may require other cryptic items to use...). Trying to navigate an entire town shrouded in thick fog and sometimes oppressive rusty darkness could be an unintentional nightmare of a different, gameplay variety, but James is smart enough to make notes on his map to keep your main path crystal clear. All the dead ends get squiggled and the places of interest get circled. Checking the map regularly is a quickly learned and necessary habit. If you didn't find the area map... the nightmare is real.

  You find clues indicating your daughter's whereabouts scattered around so you follow them with little choice on account of the locked doors and sinkholes. You'll visit now-standard landmarks like a school and hospital, solving puzzles to get items that allow you to progress once you've sufficiently explored each location. Each location can morph into a “dark” version of itself, where previously just disturbing or strange ambiance twists into pure nightmare fuel. Rusty pipes and grimy floors turn to hanging, boxed bodies and gory chains. Children's drawings of monsters manifest into actual nameless beings you have to fight. There's an ever-present, ominous screeching, clawing sound that really worms it's way into your gut. Just when you learn to block it out it gets louder or changes pitch, then when you think it will drive you insane... it stops. For the moment.

  The constant delve into deeper, darker depths of the town's history involving cults, a still-burning coal fire, and hidden secrets lends the feeling of falling down an endless, unstoppable spiral. You may be repeating the basic steps over: open map, check doors, repeat... but the atmosphere and story is like a train constantly gathering speed. The details are nebulous or questionable, and that works to it's advantage. James is questioning his sanity, you're questioning who is a reliable narrator or what is “real”, and everything is fucked. It's great.

  Silent Hill is a textbook case of working within limitations to make something amazing. The graphics aren't technically any less shitty than any other PS1 game, but they work marvelously to deliver deliberately shitty, unexplainable creatures and a town with a narrative and claustrophobic gameplay reason for not being able to see ten feet in front of you. Grimy graphics are great, but add the grating sound design and surprisingly good/off voice acting with some disturbing notes laying around and fuck... For my money this is still one of the most effective horror games out there. I've probably played through at least a dozen times over many years, and it still manages to get to me each time. It's a masterpiece of terror.