Anyway, way back in 1999 Konami gave us Silent Hill, the first in the legendary and ongoing series. Harry Mason wakes up in his crashed jeep, sans daughter Cheryl, on the edge of the resort town of Silent Hill. Thus begins his journey into the enigmatic and ‘scary’ town that gives this game its name, on a quest to rescue his daughter.
To be honest, the game surprised me. Of course I’d heard it was good, but then you hear a lot of things about old games and not all them end up true. Silent Hill has aged well, despite its graphical and voice acting imperfections, and especially despite its tooth grindingly awful combat. That’s because the game isn’t actually about its gameplay (thank god). I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily telling a story, either, at least not merely about some characters. People scoff at SH a lot, and often straight up piss on it for not being scary. And it’s not. As I played, the sense I got was rather of overwhelming sorrow. More than horror, I found sadness to be the game’s most pervasive theme. From the pre start menu cut-scene to the game’s ambiguous conclusion, Silent Hill laid a blanket of dark inevitability and wove a tale of people who were caught up in a heartless plot through no fault of their own.
The story in Silent Hill, like a lot of horror games, seems like it passed the improbable sign about a hundred miles ago. Since before the town became a vacation spot, an occult group has been firmly entrenched in Silent Hill society and it seems likely they’re not worshipping the friendly bunny god, either. I won’t go into spoilers, but it’s pointed out pretty early that this has a lot to do why the town is near empty of people and there are bizarre creatures running around. If you keep your eyes open and dig around the levels, you can piece a great deal of the story together, but it certainly isn’t spelled out for you. If you complete certain optional quests the game will hand you some more of the pieces, but these puzzles range in ease and obscurity, some are quite difficult without the aid of a walkthrough or FAQ. How many of these tasks you successfully complete determines your ending.
Full disclosure, since I only got a week with this game I saw only the Good ending, and not the Good+ due to a mistake I made early on. Still, I’m satisfied with saying that if you manage the Good, or Good + ending, you’ll have a fairly good idea of what happened to this town and Harry Mason’s daughter, but only if you think about things. It’s really a credit to the game that it forces you to fill in some the blanks yourself no matter how well you do.
The other characters beside Harry are few and far between, but they’re well characterized for their time and surprisingly endearing, despite their awkward dialogue and voice acting. They normally function to poke you along on your quest, telling you where to go and where Harry’s daughter might be before racing off on their own business again, yet somehow they keep reappearing because, of course, everything in Silent Hill is connected.Mostly, you are alone.
As you travel around the town your portable radio alerts you to enemy presences by ringing, and though these wandering enemies are not difficult to kill it’s almost always wiser to run. To accomplish this, you have to turn off your light and plunge headlong into the unknown at full pelt, or try to slowly navigate around the nurse shaped blur in the corner of your screen without alerting her to your presence.
and health packs are at first optimistically abundant, but they run dry pretty damn fast. Searching for supplies quickly becomes a gamble in and of itself. You need bullets for the bosses, with one exception, which can make things difficult to juggle. Especially as boss monsters don’t appear at regular or (at least to me) intuitive intervals. This necessitates the equally engaging and painful task of inventory management, which is one of the best parts of traditional survival horror, and a part I sorely miss.
Visually, Silent Hill is about as impressive as the inside of a card board box. Textures are frequently reused and new areas rarely look new at all. The Audio design is the real standout here. The music creeps up on you, and while the monsters and environments aren’t scary, you’ll often find yourself hunched over your controller with twitchy eyes anyway. When you first enter an area there might be a fuzzy little tune in the background, but by the time you’re at the end of a level your heart is racing in time to a beat and you’re swearing if that bass drum in the background doesn’t cut out soon a controller is going in the tv screen.
That’s a damn good thing, because the only tension that comes out of the combat system (baring obsessing about how much health you have left and whether you have enough shot gun bullets stored up) is pure frustration. Battle is slow and unresponsive, it can be borderline impossible to tell what you’re aiming at or IF you even are aiming at something. I did enjoy the satisfaction of kicking an enemy to make it stayed dead, but that was a pain in the ass as soon as you were dealing with two or three opponents at once. The dodge buttons were slow to kick in and couldn’t be relied upon, and the pause between shooting and being able to run away was often the difference between life or death, and that almost never ended in the positive option.
Yet, despite numerous flaws, Silent Hill sunk its hooks into me. I found myself relentlessly intrigued. The town took me by the hand and drew me into its parlor, and before I knew it I was all tangled up in its web. All told, my run took around a comfortable ten hours, not too short, not too long. The story came full circle, and despite a rather open ended conclusion I felt closure and an extreme desire to just hug Harry. Silent Hill deserves its spot on the classics shelf, and I strongly recommend it to any horror fans who haven’t visited yet. It takes a little patience, but it’s worth the ride to see where all this begun.
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