Summary

Silent Hill is a survival horror game released in 1999 for the PS1. It was developed by Team Silent and published by Konami. In it, you play as Harry Mason searching for your daughter in the eponymous town of Silent Hill. Perhaps you've heard of it, maybe in a dream. But of course lo and behold we gotta deal with cults and monsters and all manner of scares once we get there.

I've long wanted to do some Silent Hill, at the very least the first two. I've never played or watched them before surprisingly, given the games and genres I'm interested in. It reminds me a bit of Twin Peaks. Where their influence is immense and everywhere and I like a lot of spinoff stuff that was directly inspired by said thing. I had just never seen the original. Obviously Silent Hill 2 is the big daddy of all psychological survival horror. Also that psychological aspect is well proper in my wheelhouse. But I wanted to start with the first one even if the psychological stuff isn't as much of a focus. Not like either is particularly long or anything and also the first one is perfectly well-regarded from what I've seen. We will eventually progress to the second game as well, I am sure. Not sure if I'll end up covering anything beyond those two, but we shall see.

Review

Quite fun seeing the source of a number of references I recognized. Lots of stuff from Signalis.

I enjoyed the game overall. There are a couple of clear issues that I did have with it, which I'll get into. But it had good bones and I'm interested in seeing the sequel. My hope is that they get rid of the annoying bits and focus on the good points.

The biggest issue that I have is the combat. It ain't fun and there's way too much of it. The game almost never gives you room to just sit with the creepy atmosphere. Nearly every room in the game they shove annoying enemies at you. You've gotta do the weird song and dance with them, that doesn't really feel good and also just feels like it's detracting from the experience. In my opinion, you could safely remove like 3 of the weapons and 80% of the enemies and the experience would only have improved. Give Harry a steel pipe, a handgun with very limited ammo, and then maybe a shotgun once we get way further into the game, like near tail-end of resort area. Get rid of the cruft and focus on what's actually successful here. The streets of Silent Hill feel great. They're proper spooky. I don't feel scared when my radio tells me an enemy is nearby because there is always an enemy nearby. There was an enemy 5 feet ago and there's going to be an enemy 5 feet after this one. Imagine how good it would be if you're wandering lost for several minutes in the mist with little incidence. Then you start hearing the radio. Something's nearby. You get closer to it, then suddenly it starts moving away from you. Or circling around you. Great potential that's ruined by too much incidence.

One thing I didn't talk about in my closing thoughts in the actual final episode, but I'd actually like to give credit to the game for some good puzzles. I did look up a number of solutions in the interest of time. But once I knew the answer, they were very rarely eldritch. An easy trap for games of this era to fall into. Most of the puzzles were actually pretty reasonable and didn't require crazy intuitive leaps.

I don't like how the endings work. I looked up why I got the bad ending and how one would get better endings. It was entirely a you have to just know to do X in Y place otherwise you're doomed to bad end. particularly the getting the weirdo liquid in the hospital with the bottle. That seems really easily missable to me. The Kaufmann stuff I will accept as being easier to do on a first playthrough. Though in my defense, there's no indication for where you're crossing a point of no return. I did get the feeling that I had missed something in the resort area, but I really wasn't certain. So that little sidequest didn't get done. A bit frustrating.

It seems clear to me with the ending screen that sums up what you did and the letting you save and start the game again that they expect you to play multiple times. Some games do this and I really have to disagree with the practice. There are some visual novels that do this and I acquiesce to it because you're able to skip large portions of it. But games that are proper games that expect you to play it multiple times to get the true magical special platinum edition are just dumb. And we as gamers should push back against that. I'm not playing your game multiple times. I simply do not have the time, it's not happening. So unless it's a case where the ending is determined by something you're doing in the last 15 minutes or so, the ending I get's the ending I get. Be it good or bad. So having the ending you're very likely to get on a first playthrough be bad seems like a poor choice to me.

I did very much enjoy the Twin Peaks of everything. The insane way everyone acts and the small town energy. Hoping that continues in the future.

On to Silent Hill 2 (2001).

Links

Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXbBIoFOxaQvvu8nnkCwUkx5FiCCrz7oC