Silent Hill

The Good

I'm a PC owner, and a PC player. Unlike some people out there, I stick to my PC and I was NEVER interested in getting a console, don't have the money nor the will to do it. Plus, as any human being who is more than 15 years old as of June 2003, I didn't develop these 15-inch twice-articulated thumbs people seem to have nowadays, thus I choose my good old keyboard over any console controller any day of the week. Hell, I grew up by a Sinclair's ZX Spectrum +, which makes it even worse as even the mouse was kinda weird for me at a time.
I liked Survival/Horror games when they first came out -AND IT WAS NOT IN 1996 WITH THAT RESIDENT EVIL CRAP, IT WAS LIKE 3 YEARS BEFORE AND THE GAME WAS CALLED ALONE IN THE DARK!!!-, yet the more I growed as a PC-player, the more I got used to the keyboard/mouse combo (too much FPSs and adventure games).
This would eventually make full-keyboard controlled games (namely, Survival/Horror games) pretty hard for me to get used to. The inabilty to have features such as "free look" kills me. The mouse is a must for me today. Not being able to use it to look around makes me feel kind of claustrophobic. Or like I'm controlling some badly handicaped character.

So, this was pretty much my videogaming life, until one day I stumbled upon Silent Hill 2. God how I LOVED that game. Well I won't extend about it here -you can go ahead and read my REVIEW if you want to know how much I liked it- but I will say this: I liked the story so much, that I was compelled to play the first game no matter what.
I found out SH was only a PSX game which didn't make it to any other platform, so guess what? I GOT A PSX JUST TO PLAY SILENT HILL.
To the moment, it is the only PSX game I own, and it will most likely remain like that for the time being.

So, all this rant is meant to explain the fact that I might be too hard on some technical aspects, since I come from a DirectX 8.1 class PC, and don't know the exact limitations of PSX. Furthermore, I'll be comparing Silent Hill to its sequel, which will of course sound quite anachronic.
OK, on to the review.

I got to go easy on THE GRAPHICS, since as I said I don't know how close to the PSX limits these are.
The graphics resemble to DirectX 6 class games, wich means pretty little polygons per character, crappy lighting effects, and very low resolution textures.
Nevertheless, from a designer point of view I think they look great. The first monsters you come to find look kinda silly, but I believe they are inteded to, as you will probably understand near the end, when you get in Alessa's childhood bedroom. Plus, they looking silly makes up for a strong contrast with the "alternate" version of them you will find in Dark Silent Hill (more on this later).

The town is depicted to every little detail, making it look very realistic. The different scenarios are stuffed with small freaky details, which will add a lot to the atmosphere. In the videogaming community there is somewhat an arguement about the mist that covers the town, whether is there to help the game rendering or just to add to the atmosphere: well whatever the truth is, it works great for the atmosphere. So, end of discussion.
Also the camera not only swaps between different static angles as in classic Horror/Survival games, but every angle has real time motion on its own. Sometimes the camera will make weird pannings that work out as a really dramatic effect.
There is one option by which we can position the camera behind the character's back (similar to a FPS game) which helps clear any problem the "weird angles" may create. In this regard, Silent Hill 2 really sucks, as the camera sometimes will hide the enemies, and more often than not will take forever to re-position in a convenient place. So, in this regard, I got to say the first Silent Hill is WAY better than the sequel, in spite of the technological superiority of the later.

THE SOUND is simply amazing. It is hard to say if it is the music or the sound effects, since they are both pretty much the same, it is not exactly music, but at times it has too much "rythm" to be just noise. This "soundscape" has often been compared to the work of Angelo Badalamenti for the likes of the TV series Twin Peaks or the movie Lost Highway, and I think is the best description someone could possibly make.
One thing you can be sure about: the soundscape is eerie, and enhaces the atmosphere of the game greatly.
Furthermore, every now and then, there will be "random" noises that go off all of a sudden and will make you jump off your seat.
No other game came closer to Silent Hill in this area, and the ones which made an attemp, pretty much failed (like Alone in the Dark IV and even Silent Hill 2).

But the technical aspects alone won't make any justice to the game. IS THE STORY of the Silent Hill saga the main thing that set these games apart from any other title of the genre. There might be eternal discussions about which one has the best graphics, the best control interface, or even the best sound, but the story in Silent Hill is WAY superior to ANY other survival/horror game.
The best thing about it is that the greatness lies not only in the storyline itself —which is STUFFED with twists, secrets, and all kind of nasty surprises— but it goes much further, turning the whole gaming into a unique immersive experience that is pretty difficult to put in words.

Harry Mason is driving his car towards Silent Hill, a quiet tourist resort. By his side Cheryl, his 7 year old daughter, sleeps. A female cop passes by the car on a motorbike and they exchange looks. Further ahead, Harry sees the bike crashed on the side of the road, the cop missing. As he raises his eyes, he gets to see a girl standing in the middle of the road; Harry quickly maneuvres to avoid hitting her, and the car crashes. When Harry awakes, he finds Cheryl's missing. As he steps out of the wrecked car, he finds out the town is indeed silent. As if it was empty. There's a dense mist that won't let him see more than 20 ft ahead. Softly but consistent, a light snow falls. Without even thinking about how strange that is, being summertime, Harry runs after a silouhette that looks just like his daughter, ending up in a long alleyway. As he moves on, it seems like night falls quickly. Behind one corner, Harry finds a wheelchair. Behind another corner, Harry finds a hospital bed with a body, covered by a blood-stained sheet. One more corner ahead, Harry find what seems to be a crucified human body, the skin peeled out. Harry turns over, and three small children holding knives stumble towards him, stabbing him to death.
Harry wakes up in a dinner. Cheryl's not there, but the female cop is. Outside, it's still snowing.

From this moment on, the game grips you by the troath and won't let go until you find out what is happening in this town, where is Cheryl and why does she seem to run away from her father every time they meet.
Harry is not your typical videogame super-hero a la Resident Evil, who happens to find a rocket launcher lying around and just starts blasting off the evil zombies and ghouls ( that, BTW, also have rocket launchers ??? ).
Harry is a family man, a regular guy who lost his wife and now refuses to lose his daughter to a nightmare of a town. The man is determined and brave, but doesn't even know how to hold a gun. He is trapped, clueless, in a story that goes beyond his possible understanding.

Silent Hill is not the quiet tourist resort Harry thought. Eerie and deserted —except for the nightmarish creatures and a couple of persons who are as struck as Harry, if not as twisted as the beasts—, Silent Hill has yet another face to make things even worse.
The town with the mist and the creatures lurking in it makes up for a pretty opressive atmosphere that will have your nerves going on; but at some points Misty Silent Hill will "shift" into Dark Silent Hill. Here, you get to re-visit some of the places you have already been to, but everything is changed: rain pours instead of the snow, there is a gripping darkness instead of the mist, and all the walls and decorations turn into rusty blood-stained metal, with hanging chains, cuffs, hooks, human-body sized cages, and other elements that make you think about medieval torture chambers. As you move on throughout the game, every time you get back into Dark Silent Hill it seems to get even worse, until even the monsters get "reversed" and more twisted than they were, and the streets are replaced by rusty grating over bottomless pits.
After spending some minutes in Dark Silent Hill you will actually be GLAD every time you get to go back to the —also eerie and twisted!— Misty Silent Hill, and that is an incredible achievement from the producers of the game, it's the most smart mindjob I've been put to by a videogame.

Also, and this is something a lot of people actually HATED, don't expect the ending to be an easy to digest, tell-all, conclusive ending. By the time you beat the game, you might be left with more questions than when you started, feeling the need to play it all over again, in order to get things straight.
Furthermore, there are four possible endings, depending on some choices you get to make in a couple of moments of the game.
In that regard, the game offers a great deal of REPLAYABILITY. Not only because of the four different endings, but every time you restart you will find a load of bonus weapons and hidden features, according to how you played the game the last time.
There is even a fifth secret ending, some kind of easter egg meant as a sick joke from the programmers.

The Bad

OK, now the sad part. I totally HATE the CONTROL INTERFACE. This is the damnation of the Survival/Horror genre, and apparently there's not much to do about it, some people even like it, which surely goes beyond me, but as I already said, a game in which I can't "free look" around makes me sick with claustrophobia. If a monster happens to throw itself at your feet, you are pretty much screwed, and need to back up quickly as Harry can't look down or crouch.
As other titles of the genre, Silent Hill gives us a lame excuse for a "strafe" move which is two steps from totally useless, and that is the best control feature we have in action sequences. Because of this, I found myself running away from as much fighting situations as possible, and the boss fights were pretty much an excercise in the shoot-heal-shoot-heal-shoot-heal technique, as trying to avoid attacks would make me get more damage than just standing still.

The GRAPHICS need some work around, specially the human characters. They don't look good. As I said, I don't know how much better the PSX can get, but I do believe a Tomb-Raider-level is achievable, and TR's characters look much better than SH's. Dr Kaufmann is horribly drawn. So is Harry, the main character.

As good as I think the fact that the hero is more of an anti-hero without any of those cliches so common in videogames is; sometimes they take it way over the line. Take for example the way Harry runs. He looks plain silly, one would think his feet weigh a couple tons or something. Even worse is the way he holds some of the weapons. OH MY GOD! When I saw Harry holding the pipe, I just rushed to holster it and never took it out again! He looks so STUPID I was afraid the monsters would just laugh at me! Same goes for the way he holds any of the melee weapons.

As good as the moving camera is, there is something wrong with it. I don't know exactly what is it, just most times when the camera moves, the textures seem to flicker very badly. Looks like the whole scene is made out of cardboard, and moving it is about to break it all. I'm pretty positive this didn't happen in Tomb Raider.

The VOICE ACTING sucks. So much so, it manages to throw some otherwise very intense moments off board just like that. This is terrible, since even one of the game endings gets pretty screwed up by this. Specially the guy playing Harry (the main character, almost nothing) should be better off doing the dishes at some small town dinner or something. The guy sounds so calmed and washed out he can't possibly have a soul.
Furthermore, there is a small half-second pause between spoken sentences that doesn't make any sense. I suppose it is the game loading the next line, but it often pauses right in the middle of some fast-paced dialogue or in the middle of some maniac rant from an inspired character, and looks like the actor forgot his line, and is checking down the script.

The Bottom Line

The best horror game ever. Period.
I'm a PC player, but I got a Playstation only to play Silent Hill.

The game has the best atmosphere I experimented in any videogame, and it actually surpasses a lot of movies. It's got even better atmosphere than its own technically-almost-perfect sequel.
If we think about how limited the game is in the technical aspect, one must stand up and applaude Konami for a great job. Silent Hill is a masterpiece.
The game will send the creeps all over you all the time. You won't believe you are just playing a game, and even less you will believe that a so technically outdated game can have that effect on you. The soundscape keeps the atmosphere going on. The twists in the plot confuse you more and more by the minute. Every now and then something will suddenly come up, making you jump off your seat like a good old-school horror movie. Every now and then, reality will be transfixed into something wicked, where nothing is what it seems. At one point you will face a huge creature resembling a lizard. You need it to open its mouth, so you shoot it in order to get it mad. Then it starts making noises and you get ready because this is it. Then you freeze when, instead of opening a mouth like you would expect, the lizard's head splits in half, opening its huge jaws side to side.

Please take note that Horror/Survival is a pretty confusing genre, and there are different opinions on WHAT exactly Horror/Survival means.
If you think Horror/Survival is best defined by Capcom games (Resident Evil, Dino Crisis) then you might find Silent Hill too slow and confusing.
On the other hand, if you think Capcom leans too much towards the "action" side of the street, and those games are not as scary as you would like (plus I think their storylines sucks), then join us in the Silent Hill side. Personally, I think THIS is how you make a horror game.

The Good
It's clear that Silent Hill is not a simple game. I'd say that this is one of the most scariest games in a long time. Game design is disturbing and the sound's unique, featuring a scary story deep enough to create spin offs, sequels and a lot of things (like comics, novels and many more).

Let's proceed step by step. Silent Hill was released as a Survival Horror Game, an alternative for Capcom's Resident Evil. Soon, the players realized that comparing this game with Resident Evil is a big mistake. We don't fight zombies and we're not facing a classic horror story. Silent Hill was conceived as an original game, and that's what it is. This game is the perfect one for those who love psychological horror, the kind of horror from movies like Jacob's ladder, more focused in the atmosphere than in concrete terrible frights. Something more ethereal.

Story is deeper than anyone could tell. Besides the main creepy story the game has many details and secondary stories (Lisa Garland's is my favourite one, a melancholic story in a world of darkness and terrible creatures that will give you a strange feeling, so sad). Everything's connected to Alessa's minds and fears, each creature has a reason to be there and to be like it is, all extracted from Alessa's pain and suffering: The fear of the dogs, the bullying suffered in the school or the creatures from the fairy tales that she used to read. Everything's about Alessa's world, the world that overcame the town of Silent Hill when Alessa suffered her terrible fate.

The main story is as deep as good and the player must take the time to explore all the town and to understand every part of the story, which is not a simple task. You don't have to go everywhere in the town to complete the game, but if you want to know what's happening you should. Even if you take a look at every location in the game many questions aren't answered, so, you'll read a lot of different interpretations of the same thing if you search for more information.

Talking about gameplay, the game works as Resident Evil and that's why it's a Survival Horror Game (that's why people compare it with Resident Evil, but the game has nothing to do with it). We carry different weapons that we aim to the creatures and shoot as well as many puzzles to progress with Harry's searching for his daughter. Of course the puzzles that we'll find are related with Alessa's mind, for example, there's one featuring characters from Alice in Wonderland, one of the tales that Alessa read. It looks like it's out of place, but when you understand the story you won't feel it. To sum up, different puzzles related with the main story and not just mysteries in a mansion without a concrete sense, you know.

When we start the game we'll pick a flashlight and a radio. The radio is necessary because it will make a strange noise when we're near a creature. About the flashlight, you'll need it to go on in the darkest areas of the game (which are a lot), the problem is that its light will attract the monsters around you. We'll find many maps in our quest, and Harry will take notes there about anything, like closed doors, broken doors, places that he had visited or puzzles. You need your flashlight to look at the map, so, as if we were there, if you want to avoid monsters you'll have to search for a room that has none of them, and then take a look at the map and see where you want to go, turn off your flashlight, get out of the room and go there (of course walking, unless you want to be noticed because of your footsteps while you're running). Of course you can kill every creature that you find, but ammo is limited.

Controls are simple too, the classic configuration for a Survival Horror Game, a button to aim and another to shoot, the button to examine and the one for running. You'll have also a status screen to heal you if you need it. There are two buttons, the L1 and R1 that are useless. If you press your running button and one of those they became more useful but it's an annoying way to move, or maybe that's just that we're not used to that.

The camera is different from Resident Evil, we don't have static cameras in the rooms, the camera will follow us in our adventure and what's more, it's part of that scary feeling and atmosphere in the game. Sometimes the camera won't show you what's further. This is a good example about using a camera properly if you want to make a scary game like this.

Graphics aren't special at all, but they're good. Light effects are the best thing about graphics,but the game's not the best out there because of its graphics. The design and the deep story are above all the other aspects of the game. There's something curious about graphics, they're not perfect but that helps with the atmosphere of the game, I mean, if you can't see clearly what you're shooting at it becomes more scary, you're shooting to something and you don't even know what it is.

The music and the FX deserve an entire review. Akira Yamaoka's work in all the games of the series is a before-and-after in videogames. There are some Silent Hill games which aren't as good as they should, but the music was always good, no matter the game. The first Silent Hill has an industrial style all over the game, the music of Yamaoka suits with the rusted world of Alessa where you can smell the oxide at any time. Yamaoka composed a noisy soundtrack for the game, with metallic sounds and strange noises that makes the atmosphere even more claustrophobic. Besides that compositions, Yamaoka included some melancholic tracks for concrete parts of the game, and when you listen to them in the middle of this world, when everything's just noise, they really work as I never thought in a Survival Horror game. Songs like "She", "Tears of..." or the main Silent Hill theme are masterpieces.

You can play the game many times because it has many different endings as well as unlockable weapons, like the Katana, the chainsaw or the Hyper Blaster. Our decisions during the game will influence the story in some ways, specially in the end.

To finish with, there's something that I really like about the game. You don't need to complete the game fast to get a good score at the end. The score depends on the items that you've taken, the good/poor aim that you had, the enemies killed and other things. Silent Hill is a game to be enjoyed little by little because of its depth. Put all your senses on the game and you'll love it.

The Bad
The game has no important bad things to remark but there are some things that aren't perfect. There are some movements that are useless as I said, and the fact that you need to finish the game many times to unlock all the weapons available.

The camera as I said is another scary element that helps with the atmosphere of the game because it won't show us what's there many times. That's perfect for the atmosphere, but not for the gameplay because many times we will walk in the direction of the camera and we cannot see what's further, so, it's possible (in fact it happens a lot) that a creature appears and attacks Harry when you didn't notice it because the camera didn't show you. There's a button to center the view, but it doesn't work as we want sometimes.

Wait, did I say that the game has no remarkable bad things? I forgot about something. The voices are disastrous. The voice acting is boring, soporific and all the bad adjectives that you could imagine. It's not like they're talking when they do, it's like they're reading the script without any feeling and with a large pause between each sentence. Wake up Harry! Your daughter's on big troubles, I think that you should be more interested in what you say. I really love this game and I don't like talking about the bad things on it, so, I'd say that the voice acting is like that just because they're been consumed by the town itself and the darkness on it, and it helps the atmosphere of the game, but the fact is that the voice acting is intolerable.

Another bad thing that depends on how the player plays the game is that you may not want to explore the whole town, only focus in the main story and finish the game as soon as possible. If you do that you won't experience a shocking game and you'll feel like this is just a normal game and nothing unique, specially if you get the bad ending which is a bit frustrating (it's the bad ending, what were you waiting for?).

The Bottom Line
One of the scariest experiences in videogames history with a perfect design and story harmonized by an unforgettable music. There's nothing to reproach in the game (besides voice acting), maybe only the fact that it set very high standards and now it's difficult to make a game as good as this. The game defies the imagination, even Alessa's.

The Good
I loved the spooky sound effects, and creepy lighting and darkness effects. I also loved the story of this game, very involving and deep really sucks a person into the plot of the game. I also liked the different and unique characters, very life like and had a certain life to them. I was on the edge of my seat through the entire game, and I just couldn't bring myself to shut it off.

The Bad
I didn't like the voice acting, it seemed rather wooden and emotionless at times. Then again there were times when it was rather well done as well. But some of the main plot elements, which in my opinion required a great deal of skill in acting. Just didn't have the skill that it required in my opinion. I think that the producers of this game, could have worked much harder on the quality of the voice acting in this title.

The Bottom Line
Very frightening, I found myself leaving the lights on at night, while i played this game in my room. I found myself hearing strange noises in my house every night my first time through this game. It's a feast of fear and puzzle solving that I think everyone will appreciate. Now there maybe some that do not like games that have a great story and presentation. But even with those particular people, I think that even they can appreciate the beautiful lighting effects, and story presentation in this title.