[Game Review] Silent Hill

Note: This review contains spoilers.


Three years after Resident Evil blew up the gaming world with a new genre title ("survival horror"), Silent Hill was released to immediate critical acclaim.  Neither of these were the first horror games in existence - Resident Evil was initially meant as a remake of Sweet Home for the NES, one of the earliest horror games - but both set forth the tropes and style that all subsequent games would follow.  Both took tank controls and odd camera angels from the PC classic Alone in the Dark, and Silent Hill feels far more that game's child than Resident Evil, despite the latter having a similar setting.  Resident Evil was horror for the schlocky, action horror fans, full of monsters, scientific experiments, and a puzzle mansion that whipped players between fighting through zombies and pairing keys and mechanisms to locks and moveable objects.  The game's plot, as well, was hockey and fun rather than scary or chilling.  Silent Hill took itself seriously.  It used cults and demons as its backbone, aping another hockey horror trope, but layered psychological horror and thick atmosphere on top of it meant to envelope the player in dread, rather than confront players with difficult choices of ammo preservation or other more action oriented emotions.  Resident Evil was about confrontation of horror, about fighting back or making your way through so you could continue exploring.  Silent Hill wanted to make you hesitate before you went through that next door.  Resident Evil would lay the groundwork for resource management, puzzle environments, and inventory management that many subsequent horror games would follow.  Unfortunately for Silent Hill, it's biggest contributions were not what made the game stand out.

It was Silent Hill's aesthetic that would be its legacy among imitators, but it would be its emotional approach (and the storytelling of its follow up) that would become its critical legacy.  Rusted metal walls, foggy streets, and J-horror inspired monsters would be imitated ad nauseam by games after this one (even in the Alone in the Dark remake, which distinctly feels like it is aping Silent Hill).  And to be fair, Silent Hill's aesthetic is something to marvel at.  As survival horror was something new to the gaming public, J-horror monsters like ghost children with knives, or twitching ghost nurses felt unique when compared to contemporary Resident Evil's zombie, B-movie vibe.  Likewise, the alternate Silent Hill, where walls and streets turn into rusted metal, dilapidated padded walls, and weather worn grates, was something claustrophobic and oppressive.  The genre up to this point had been full of haunted houses and odd puzzle mansions, making the industrial textures once again something unique in a burgeoning genre.  While the industrial aesthetic is most certainly the most aped aspect of this game (it even feels as though movies from the 2000s take from the aesthetic of this game), by far the game's most famous and most iconic aspect is the Silent Hill fog.

Smartly, the fog came about as a way of covering up chunk loading, which was notoriously bad around the PSX era of games.  Roaming around the town, you are surrounded by walls of impenetrable fog, making exploration a nerve racking experience.  To circumvent the annoyance of monsters leaping out at you before you can react, the game gives you a radio that gives off static whenever a creature is nearby.  As if walking around with minimal line of sight wasn't enough, now you have the tension of squealing radio static while things hunt you between the rows of houses and small town businesses.  Tension and anticipation are the core emotions to most of the external locations throughout, something exacerbated when you transition to alternate Silent Hill later in the game.  Alternate Silent Hill is much darker, taking place at night, with fog, and with the light grays of the normal Silent Hill replaced with the rusted, dark metal aesthetic of alternate Silent Hill.  As spooky as it is, it can be incredibly frustrating to get around with minimal frames of reference within your short field of view, much more so than the fog drenched day.  That said, the lighting and graphical presentation is top notch, almost too much for the aging PSX to handle.  In latter parts of the game, where there are more creatures and the environments get darker, frame dropping becomes far more common.  This kind of technical issue is something that comes somewhat with playing ambitious older games, so I can't take too many points off given it was within the realm of expectation for a graphically progressive game of the time.

Combat and controls have also aged, but much like Silent Hill 2, they work for the type of game presented here.  Silent Hill has tank controls, a control scheme I am a defender for because, in horror games where vulnerability and interesting camera work go a long way in making the horror effective, they work perfectly.  If the odd camera angles are a bother, the camera can be swung around with R2 if you want to see what is in front of you, and I mean swung, because the camera is a physical object in this game that has panning movement, and can cause some quirky, disorienting effects that I would consider a positive, but would not hold grudges to those that find it nauseating.

As emotionally effective as the aesthetic, tense combat, and disorienting camera work is, the game feels thematically thin.  The plot follows Harry Mason as he takes his adoptive daughter to Silent Hill for a vacation, but finds himself waking up from a car wreck within the town.  His daughter Cheryl runs into the foggy streets out of sight, and Harry must traverse the town looking for her.  What Harry finds is that the town is home to a bizarre but largely ignored cult.  The cult has quite a history in Silent Hill, but most people refer to their leader as "that nut", dismissive and somewhat uninterested.  Meanwhile, the town's recent history has been plagued by a hallucinogenic drug whose traffic the local police have been unable to throttle.  It's vaguely discussed, so whether this hallucinogen has been causing issues seems to be beside the point.  What is clear is that the hallucinogen is used by the cult, and it feels as though the game's plot is implying this as the explanation for what is going on in the town, but if that red herring was intentional, it was poorly done because I wasn't aware that could be the explanation until I was already late enough in the game to know it wasn't.  In the current time as Harry, the town is virtually empty outside of a tormented nurse named Lisa that you befriend, a shady man named Kaufman, a neighboring town's Police officer named Cybil, and the cult leader Dahlia.  Everyone else has mysteriously disappeared, and it is implied throughout to be due to Alyssa, the daughter of Dahlia, who was forced into a ritual birth seven years prior in order to birth the cult's God.  Alyssa denied (psychologically? spiritually? again, things are left unclear) the ritual and thus was immolated.  Because of her destiny to birth the cult's God, Alyssa is immortal and didn't die of immolation, but her denial of the ritual while it happened bisected her soul, making the ritual birth half her soul in a baby twin of sorts, which became Cheryl.  Side quests imply that Kaufman is behind the drug trafficking in the town, and has intentionally hooked Lisa after she is having trouble sleeping (how a horrifying hallucinogen is used for quelling PTSD or is addictive is beside me, but it's best not to overthink it).  Lisa is seeking this drug because she is one of the hospital staff hired to keep the cult leader's daughter, who suffers constant pain and whose psychic energy is implied to be what turned the town into its current nightmare state.  The plot, then, is that Dahlia has cursed Cheryl to return to Silent Hill in order to recombine with Alyssa and finish the ritual.

The cult aspect of any Silent Hill game is always its least interesting aspect, and here it is the most forefront of the game's themes of any of the Team Silent games in the series.  The level structure smartly follows some thematic reasoning, starting with the elementary school where Alyssa was tormented as a child, the hospital where she is being kept, and several locations such as the church, sewers, and amusement park where the cult fulfills its operations in secret.  Not nearly as smart as Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, but showing some thought behind level significance that followups would continue.  There are impressions of themes throughout, about drug trafficking in a small town, industrial aesthetic perhaps implying the industrialization of quaint small towns for better economic viability, etc. but all of them are rather forced.  The cult is a bad guy, your daughter is a mcguffin, and any meaning between these two points are vague at best.  It isn't such a large criticism since the mature tone of the game is something remarkable even in modern times as most "mature" games are either sex filled or gore filled.  Here, the tone is much more interested in tension and panic, of what isn't seen rather than simply disturbing content (although images of torture abound in sections of the game).  A vague impression of themes is better than being beaten over the head with themes, it is just that the game pales in comparison to the interesting and unique themes of its sequels, an unfair criticism that, again, I won't be taking points off for.  For the time, Silent Hill is a remarkable achievement, something mature and different and far more emotionally resonant than most of its contemporaries, and even than a lot of modern games.  It's a game that works mostly as an emotional experience, one that is technically impressive and has some challenging puzzle elements (particularly towards the end).  Intellectually, it feels like a tease that doesn't quite land on its own without the sequels giving it some context.  But a tease is alright when most of the experience comes together as a whole, and for the history buffs out there looking into gaming's dense lineage over the years, Silent Hill towers in the PSX's penthouse of iconic games.



9.5