Silent Hill 4: The Room Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 10/19/2022)

[Image from igdb.com]

Silent Hill 4: The Room

Developer: Konami/Team Silent

Publisher: Konami

Genre(s): Survival Horror

Platforms: PS2, Xbox, PC

Release Date: June 17, 2004

Silent Hill 4: The Room is the wildcard of the Silent Hill franchise, and considering the series is synonymous with being bizarre and disorienting, that’s quite the achievement. Silent Hill 4 is also the swansong of the original lineup of Silent Hill titles made by Team Silent before each team member defected elsewhere and international developers outsourced the series. In retrospect, Silent Hill 4 is a sentimental treasure that marked the last of something authentic in the series before it was subjected to a smattering of derivative releases that failed to capture Silent Hill's original, horrific magic. At the time, Silent Hill 4 garnered nothing but contention among Silent Hill fans, with one side arguing that Team Silent should’ve closed its doors after Silent Hill 3. Silent Hill 4 had the opposite dilemma that Silent Hill 3 faced: The latter relied on too much familiarity from the first game, while the former deviated from the familiar series tropes too drastically. Silent Hill 4 is so disjointed that it feels as if Team Silent were developing a new IP and someone at Konami’s offices told them to slap the Silent Hill brand label on it to garner more sales revenue, tweaking the final product with recognizable properties before its release. Fans like myself wanted something narratively unconventional like Silent Hill 2, but Silent Hill 4 tends to overstep the series' confines into avant-garde territory. As alien as Silent Hill 4 tends to be, at least it’s what makes the game interesting.

Shockingly, the most substantial deviation that Silent Hill 4 makes is almost omitting the town of Silent Hill entirely. Usually, I’d be thrilled to see a series retreat from its familiar stomping grounds, but Silent Hill is an entirely different beast compared to The Mushroom Kingdom and Hyrule. Besides being the series namesake, Silent Hill is the main character of the series and the only recurring one as well. Silent Hill 2 established the town as the recurrent protagonist, highlighting its supernatural powers as a haven for a limitless amount of harrowing possibilities. Silent Hill 3 seemingly averted from the town at first, but Heather eventually returned to the zenith point of its horrific emissions after taking a diminished helping of it with her through the streets of Portland, Maine. Both sequels take radically different directions, but the town still demands its place as the center of attention. Silent Hill 4’s inclusion of the town is fairly minimal, resorting to lore buildings to retain some sense of interconnectivity. Wiping the slate clean and only referencing the town of Silent Hill in a mainline Silent Hill game may seem blasphemous, but I’ll allow it. Conventions shouldn’t bog down an atypical series like Silent Hill. Two different Silent Hill protagonists have trekked through the same hospital on two separate occasions, so perhaps it’s time to tread new ground before the developers are forced to expand the area of Silent Hill to the mammoth proportions of a major metropolis like London or Tokyo. Doing so would compromise the quaint, remote scope of the town.

Instead, Silent Hill 4’s primary setting is Ashfield, a town as uninteresting as its generic, every-American town name would imply. The town is cloudy and dismal, but only on the scale of real-life cities like Seattle or Cleveland instead of acting as the murky base of a haunting, hellish atmosphere that Silent Hill exudes. At least, I can deduce this from the small fraction I can see of it. Ashfield is not a fractured concrete field for the player to navigate like the Silent Hill hub from the previous games. Rather, it’s merely the zip code of the protagonist's apartment. Henry Townshend, this game’s unfortunate bastard plucky hero, lives in a dinky, one-bedroom apartment in Ashfield’s downtown district: the “room” alluded to in the title. His existence is made even more meager because he cannot physically leave his apartment, with only a few nearby acquaintances expressing only slight curiosity about his whereabouts. Some mysterious force keeps poor Henry under house arrest, with enough locks and chains on his front door to cage in a gorilla with some effective soundproofing to boot. His only viable methods of seeing the outside world is through peering outside his windows like in Rear Window or voyuering through the peepholes in his front door and a weathered spot in his living room wall. Silent Hill 4’s premise attempts to replicate something known in the film world as a “bottle movie.” The term is defined as a film that mostly takes place in a single setting whose strengths rely on dialogue and mood in lieu of the inherent lack of action. Over time, the sole setting becomes as central as any of the people in it through its persistence of being the only foreground. Not only does the cramped “bottle movie” format help the game achieve that oppressive Silent Hill atmosphere, but the player becomes all too familiar with Henry’s apartment after repeated visits. The first-person perspective shift in the apartment also aids in evoking a sense of intimacy, a brilliant way to increase the player’s immersion in the setting. The residence may not be on the streets of Silent Hill, but the atmosphere has been effectively translated. It almost makes Silent Hill 3’s reversion back to the town seem like a cop-out.

Of course, executing something of a “bottle movie” in a video game would be downright boring, so Silent Hill 4 finds a way to give the player more legroom without sacrificing the intended feeling of claustrophobia. Henry’s only mobile outlet outside the confines of his roomy prison is a hole in his bathroom with a diameter wide enough to burrow through, a sure-fire sign that Henry will not be  will not be getting his security deposit back. It's like in Being John Malkovich. Instead of co-piloting the consciousness of an A-list Hollywood actor at the end of the tunnel, Henry finds himself in the pits of Silent Hill, or at least that’s what the player assumes. In each setting Henry arrives at after journeying through the hole’s tight crevices, there is only one other person around who isn’t an enemy. They’ll either follow Henry like a dog looking for an exit or pop up occasionally when least expected. However, none of these people survive as they are brutally murdered with methods so eclectic that Dr. Phibes would be impressed. Their deaths signal the end of the levels as Henry wakes up in a confused stupor thinking that it was all a dream. Suspiciously, the people that die in Henry’s “dreams” die in real life with serial numbers etched into their bodies to lead the Ashfield police department into a murder conspiratorial goose chase. While the cops try their best to wrap their heads around who could’ve committed these murders, only Henry can apprehend the Freddy Krueger figure.

A series like Silent Hill should subvert people’s expectations. Still, the unorthodox premise and setting of Silent Hill 4 seem incongruous enough to make even the most open-minded of Silent Hill fans apprehensive. Fortunately, Team Silent sprinkles in traces of familiarity to keep the fans from writing it out of the series canon. For one, Henry is such a fitting protagonist for the series, for better or worse. His total aloofness and scrawny, everyman disposition exemplify the archetypal protagonist of the series so well that it verges on parody. Heather’s emotive capacity resembling normal human reactions was too lifelike for Team Silent, so they regressed by making the next game’s protagonist a bachelor-era version of her dad. Like Harry before, Harry seems only slightly puzzled by what is happening around him. Being ensnared in his apartment and its harrowing implications, plus the expanding hole in his bathroom where audible weeping is often heard, only makes Henry tilt his head in confusion like a German Shepherd. Many argue that he lacks personable charisma and is the most useless protagonist across the four Team Silent-developed games, and they’d be correct. However, after four games, one can’t deny that Henry epitomizes the schmuck-like essence we’ve come to associate the protagonists of the series with to a capital T.

Silent Hill 4 connects itself with the previous games in the franchise mostly through lore. Walter Sullivan is a notorious serial killer whose brief mention in a Silent Hill 2 journal can be missed in a blink of an eye. In Silent Hill 4, Walter’s role has been elevated to the responsibility of connecting the game with its predecessors. The readable passage found in the journal states that Walter committed suicide in his prison cell by crudely stabbing himself in the neck with a spoon. Because of this, the Ashfield police force is grievously concerned that Walter’s death has been prematurely declared, and he’s on the loose again. Either that or a copycat killer has taken his place and is finishing what he started. One might think the Ashfield police are paranoid, but there is a clear indication that their deduction might not be that farfetched. A message inside Henry’s front apartment door says, “don’t go out,” signed by Walter in blood. The supernatural mystery element hasn’t been present in Silent Hill since the second game and is an aspect of Silent Hill 4 that elevates its intrigue.

A doofus protagonist and placing an obscure lore character in the limelight is essentially the extent of Silent Hill 4’s connectedness to the rest of the series. Everything else in Silent Hill 4 that is reminiscent of Silent Hill’s properties and foundation feels off-puttingly askew. In his apartment, Henry might gingerly traipse around in the first-person perspective. Once he crawls through the hole, the places in which he finds himself reorient everything back to the third-person perspective along with the rigid controls the series is known for. Silent Hill 4’s “dream” areas outside of Henry’s apartment would be the equivalent of the “dungeons” seen in the other games: buildings and other similar establishments with multiple floors that offer a course of consecutive objectives that will eventually lead to an end goal, inspired by Resident Evil and also The Legend of Zelda to a lesser extent. I’d be hard-pressed to refer to these areas in the same breath as the “dungeons” from the previous games because their designs resemble nothing of the richly layered dungeon areas we’ve been familiarized with. Silent Hill 4’s areas are as if the developers took the areas of the previous three games and put them in a microwave, warping their foundation and thus compromising their stark structure. Many of these levels are more free-flowing, with the vast majority of doors and passageways open to the player instead of most of them being permanently blocked off. In the previous games, the few accessible portions of the dungeons signal the player to keep note of its contents. When the player can enter and exit most rooms willy-nilly, it’s anyone’s guess where the key items could be and what to do with them. I particularly dislike the sections where Henry has to return to his apartment and perform a task to progress in a level because it’s incredibly unclear. It breaks the rationale of the dream-reality dichotomy the levels and the apartment should have. Can Henry seriously believe these are dreams when he can consciously return to them with something he retrieved from the real world or is he that fucking dense? The developers attempted to capture that abstract Silent Hill progression with new features and practices, but it’s far too unhinged in execution. At the same time, the decreased amount of layers to these levels dilutes the Silent Hill design too drastically. That, and the sequential order of levels with titles like “Subway World, Forest World, Water Prison World, etc.” makes them feel jarringly “video-gamey,” like children pretend-playing “Super Mario” around their hometown.

The atmosphere is a crucial element of any exemplary Silent Hill title. An authentic one should carry an aura of dread, despair, and a level of varying tension around every corner. Silent Hill 4 establishes a sense of unease with the apartment premise, and the dingy levels are certainly Silent Hill-esque. However, Silent Hill 4 does not deliver the same caliber of dirge and grotesquery compared to the previous games. I’d comment that the “otherworld” is another Silent Hill staple that has also been redacted, but I suppose the levels on the other side of the hole act as an alternate dimension in principle. Bloody viscera no longer drapes over the fleshy walls, and the architecture isn’t supported by sterile, jet-black industrial steel. Each level in Silent Hill 4 merely persists at a standard base of intensity that one would expect to become progressively more surreal and horrific, judging from the examples set by the previous games. The game has its standout moments, like the giant head found in the hospital, but it does not compare to the freakishly twisted “otherworld” that we are accustomed to. Silent Hill 4 even omits the flashlight because every level is accommodatingly lit. Considering this is a game from the same series that made people start drinking espresso at night because they were too scared to fall asleep, the visuals are kind of lame.

The developers still try to remind the player that while Silent Hill 4 makes plenty of offbeat decisions, it is still a bonafide survival horror experience. To emphasize this notion, Silent Hill 4 borrows the limited inventory space similar to that seen in the early Resident Evil titles. While limiting the player’s inventory space is intended to make the game feel tenser, I’ve stated before that this practice is only irritating and tedious whenever a game does this. Silent Hill 4 is no different. Items are placed more generously compared to the scarce encounter rate of Silent Hill 3. Still, the limited inventory system often makes finding items inconvenient. Every item, from the healing items, key items, weapons, ammunition, etc., takes up an individual spot in an inventory that totals 8-10 individual items without ever expanding. Not even the primitive system from the first Resident Evil game made the player hold each magazine of bullets in multiples of ten, so Silent Hill 4’s incorporation of it is more of a regression than a homage. The rationale of the limited inventory system on the part of the developers is most likely that Henry can easily return to his apartment by reentering the smattering of holes located around each level and reorganizing his arsenal via the chest storage unit. Due to the plentiful amount of items and keys strewn across each level, they will be forced to retreat into the whole for an inventory dump a nauseating amount of times, compromising the rift of surrealness between the levels and the apartment even further.

Fortunately, Henry will never need too many items on hand most of the time because the game is by far the easiest of the Silent Hill games developed by Team Silent. The game might be a bit roundabout and nebulous, but the player won’t have much to worry about while scrambling through the levels. The new health system is one main aspect Silent Hill 4 adjusts might attribute to its greater sense of ease. As I’m sure any Silent Hill fan would recall, the previous games displayed the protagonist’s health in the pause menu with colors that signified the approximate level of health the player had, ranging from a healthy green/blue to a ruinous red. Henry’s health is instead exhibited across the top left corner of the screen with a lengthy health bar with the same color pallets. Henry also must have been a varsity athlete in his youth (or he’s too dumb to properly register pain) because he’s the most resilient of the Silent Hill protagonists when it comes to taking damage. Any gnawing at his legs from the Sniffer canines or a mighty bitch slap from the abominable Repulsion-like Wall Men or the cloaked Twin Victims only reduces a sliver of Henry’s health. Henry hardly has to use either of his two firearms because the array of melee weapons will beat most enemies into submission with little difficulty, and he can charge up a swing with any of these weapons for a one-hit KO. It’s refreshing after dealing with the enemies in Silent Hill 3, who were as durable as demonic cockroaches. If all of the middling damage Henry endures starts to accumulate and turns his health bar less-than-blue, don’t bother freeing up an inventory slot by consuming a health drink (sorry, “nutrition drink.” Is Ashfield Silent Hill’s Shelbyville or something?) Simply backtracking a few yards down and returning to Henry’s apartment via one of the holes will restore all of Henry’s health, for the comfort of reality has healing powers, apparently. The red notebook on the side table in Henry’s living room is also the game’s only save point, but it can be accessed in any revisit from the hole. Everything feels too facile, but don’t get too suckered in as I did.

My declaration that Silent Hill 4 was the easiest Silent Hill title was intentionally misleading. While everything I listed above is true, it was merely a ruse to lull me into keeping my guard down. I’ve never been duped so drastically by a game’s difficulty curve before playing Silent Hill 4, for the second half of this game is the rudest of all rude awakenings I’ve experienced in any video game. As the game progresses, the killings in the murderer’s itinerary get literally too close to home for Henry. A man named Richard from the apartment complex is electrocuted. Shortly after that, the murderer pursues Eileen Galvin, the woman who lives next door, who Henry peeps on from time to time. However, the murderer does a shoddy job with Eileen and merely maims her. Eileen is taken to an obligatory hospital level to treat her grievous wounds, and Henry comes to rescue her and take her to a safe place. If the implications of the last sentence weren’t clear enough, let me spell it out more bluntly: the ENTIRE second half of Silent Hill 4 is an escort mission. Once I realized this, my heart sank into my stomach, and I felt like I was going to be violently ill.

An escort mission that spans an entire half of a game sounds painful enough, but there are so many other factors stacked onto an already terrible idea that make the second half of Silent Hill 4 borderline insufferable. As one could imagine, the inherent vexations of an escort mission are having to support someone who is more vulnerable and does not hold their weight in defense or offense. I suppose there have been worse escorts in gaming than Eileen because at least she can aid in combat with her character-specific weapons. Alas, everything else about her presence feels like Henry has an anchor chained to his ankle. Eileen is fairly weak due to being wounded and cannot run as quickly as Henry. She cannot climb up ladders because of her affliction, forcing the player to take more circuitous routes to accommodate her. She’ll nag at Henry to slow down constantly, but the last time I checked, her leg wasn’t the broken body part. Perhaps the fucking high-heeled shoes she insists on wearing make her handicapped, but I digress. Because Henry will constantly move at a more leisurely pace to oblige Eileen, the game becomes far tenser. The ghosts, the stand-out invincible game's enemies that can only be deterred and not fully vanquished, can no longer be evaded with ease as Eileen dragging her feet behind Henry gives them ample opportunity to kill Henry. In passages with any number of ghosts in the second half, the player will be screaming the title of a Dexy’s Midnight Runners song at the game until their voice is hoarse. Curiously enough, Eileen doesn’t possess an individual health bar. Instead, she had an “insanity meter” that the player cannot interpret. If Eileen is damaged significantly or left alone for too long, she’ll become “cursed, " making her look as bloodied as Carrie White. When she is cursed, she’ll start to damage Henry. After all the criticism RE4 gets for Ashley Graham, it’s a wonder why the same isn’t the case for Eileen in Silent Hill 4. Leon is simply doing his job, but who knows what motivates Henry to endure this grueling escapade. Spoiler alert, Henry: she's not going to fuck you.

To make matters worse, Henry’s apartment no longer heals him after returning from the hole, so stock up on healing items like you’re preparing for a nuclear holocaust. Signaling the second half of the game withdraws the apartment’s healing powers as the entire place is penetrated by vengeful spirits that put the entire place under a curse. Appliances will start acting erratically, like the cabin from Evil Dead II, and getting close will damage Henry more than any enemy could. The only way to combat these curses is by using the holy candle or a saint medallion found in the levels. Even after alleviating these curses, they will still appear periodically, so the curse will never be attenuated entirely. While this process is a chore, it is the most unnerving aspect of the game. All that molly-coddling the room did with healing Henry’s boo-boos was meant to illustrate the comfort people feel in their homes. If invaders defile that sense of security, it’s one of the most distressing terrors someone can experience. Suddenly, the spot that once served as a place of respite is comparatively more hostile than the levels through the hole, and the player feels as if nowhere is safe.

Besides being yet another second-half encumbrance, this marks a pivotal point in the narrative. Silent Hill 4’s The mystery of Henry’s detainment in his apartment and its connection with the game’s antagonist is revealed in disturbing detail. Walter, or his spirit, is indeed the culprit behind the new crop of murders and is finishing the job he started long ago. His methodology for his killings exposes much about his tragic, sordid past. Walter was abandoned by his mother and left to live in an orphanage in Silent Hill, the prison-like “Water Prison” level. Like most prisoners, Walter finds comfort in religion, but no one should seek out the kind of religion Silent Hill is serving. The cult’s teachings lead Walter to the “21 Sacraments,” a cleansing ritual involving the murders of 21 people. In doing this, Walter believes that he will be reunited with Henry’s apartment, who he believes is his birth mother (yeah, it’s weird). Upon returning to Henry’s apartment with Eileen, the game's final level is their apartment complex. It is now a visual representation of how Walter perceives the place as his birth spot, with placenta ooze covering the walls and the sounds of a woman in labor. It’s unsettling, to say the least. Henry is the last intended victim of the murders, so Walter has been preserving him in his apartment like a farmer who keeps livestock before the slaughter. Henry stops Walter as the game’s final (and only) boss, and the few good endings entail a happy ending for Eileen and Harry. However, it’s the worst ending that ironically is the most impactful. Despite defeating him, Walter still succeeds in infiltrating Henry’s apartment if Henry neglects both Eileen and the apartment. The child version of Walter that pops up occasionally lies comfortably on the couch, happy that he has finally reunited with his mom. I think this ending is the more satisfying because it focuses on the most interesting character of the game. We don’t start to condone Walter’s actions, but uncovering his past through the plot and the readable notes definitely makes him a sympathetic villain. His motives are also interesting and connect to the game’s central theme of security, which are intertwined with some compelling Freudian themes we haven’t touched on since Silent Hill 2.

Silent Hill 4: The Room is fucking bizarre, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. The game is an acquired taste for those who seek out the esoteric, and I thought I was one of those people when the retreaded ground of Silent Hill 3 left me slightly unsatiated. After playing it, I am left more bewildered than satisfied. I appreciate Team Silent’s pension for subversion and their attempt to reinvigorate the franchise with creative ideas, but it all falls apart in execution. Silent Hill 4’s gameplay is one big contradiction. Some aspects are far too leisurely while others like the prolonged escort mission are the most punishing the series has ever been. All the while, the level design feels both simplified and knotty. The narrative also doesn’t save the gameplay because the story is just as tangled. My summation of the story only focused on the positives because if I included all of the confusing plot holes that don’t make a lick of sense, this review would be twice its length. It’s all a giant mess. One could argue that I wouldn’t be as critical if the game were a new IP, but this game still feels like a Silent Hill experience. It’s just the first entry in the series that missed its mark with everything except for creative ingenuity. I’ve always argued vociferously that video games should be treated as art, but should the artistic elements of a video game excuse the tawdry gameplay and narrative aspects? Using Silent Hill 4 as an example, I’m not sure I have an answer to that question.

Silent Hill 3 Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/23/2022)

[Image from igdb.com]

Silent Hill 3

Developer: Konami/Team Silent

Publisher: Konami

Genre(s): Survival Horror

Platforms: PS2, PC

Release Date: May 23, 2003

Silent Hill 3 was the sequel everyone expected Silent Hill 2 to be. One might expect a sequel to any video game to transfer its characters, themes, and overarching story to its successor because those are the products of familiarity that coincide with a sequel. However, Silent Hill is a series marked by the unexpected and does not adhere to the practices of industry standards. The ingenious people at Team Silent crafted a sequel in which the only familiarity was the titular town, making the town the focal point of the franchise instead of the characters and plot arc presented in the first game. Team Silent’s strides in being unconventional birthed a sequel that was an artfully terrifying adventure into the catacombs of a disturbed, disquieted mind. Silent Hill had managed not to peak with “the scariest game of all time” by subverting every expectation one might have with the sequel and setting a higher caliber for the Silent Hill franchise for every sequel. Using the concept of having the town as the sole, recurring character across each Silent Hill game was a bold but brilliant idea that would retain the fresh frights the first game delivered. There are so many fucked up people in the world that could pass through the ominous resort town and have their uniquely perverse psychological demons conjured up to attack them, providing endless fodder for sequel material. However, someone at Konami must have gotten cold feet despite the acclaim that Silent Hill 2 had received and reminded Team Silent that they were running a business and art has no dealings within the walls of commerce. Either that or the idea of having the town as the sole recognizable property did not actually foster an abundance of creative potential, and they ran out of ideas. Silent Hill 3 is essentially Silent Hill 2 on the merit that it’s the loyal sequel to the first game that many expected the real Silent Hill 2 to be way back when. Silent Hill 3 is still a Team Silent-grade Silent Hill experience, but I’ve always found it to be a bit of a disappointment in comparison to the first two games.

The opening cinematic to Silent Hill 3 doesn’t give the player too much context for the beginning of the game. Alas, Silent Hill 3 begins abruptly as a teenage girl with unkempt blond hair is holding a knife in the misty darkness of night with a neon sign flashing “Lakeside Amusement Park” overhead. Immediately, hostile demonic creatures will appear from all corners and overwhelm the girl, who will run frantically across the park practically defenseless with zero context as to what she’s doing. The objective is to quickly meander to the tracks of a wooden roller coaster where the car will make a head-on collision with the girl, killing her on impact. The revelation behind this shocking introduction is the first of many recycled ideas from the first Silent Hill in that it was a bad dream that the protagonist awakes from while in a stupor in some barren cafe. The girl heads to a payphone outside in the most lively and inviting setting ever seen in a Silent Hill game and tells her dad she’ll be home before dark. On her way there, a detective encourages her to take a detour with him so she can learn more about the events surrounding her birth, so the way home is going to be a bit bumpy.

If it wasn’t made clear from the introduction, Silent Hill 3’s female protagonist is Heather Mason, the daughter of Harry Mason, the protagonist of the first game. “Wait, her name is Heather now?” every Silent Hill veteran will ask themselves in a state of befuddlement. It’s not explicitly explained by Harry, but he understandably wanted his reincarnated adopted daughter to have the least amount of connection to her origins in that godforsaken town as humanly possible. He probably also didn’t want the evil cult to find her just in case they get bold enough to attempt a do-over on birthing the antichrist thing, which certainly explains the name change and the dyed blonde hair. A father mandating a weekly hair-dyeing session on his teenage daughter is a strange thing to enforce, but it’s better to be safe than sorry if the consequences involve revisiting Silent Hill. Seventeen years have passed since the events of the first game, and now little Alessa/Cheryl/Heather is all grown up, meaning the good ending of the first game is now canon. Despite Harry’s best efforts to protect his daughter for almost two decades, his defenses have been infiltrated, and the cult has caught up with him. Now it’s Heather’s turn to uncover the ungodly horrors in her place of birth. At least we can all be relieved that Harry isn’t once again the main protagonist of this direct sequel, and this and other subsequent Silent Hill games won’t be the tired plot of Harry rescuing his daughter from Silent Hill like Mario rescues Princess Peach.

Where does Heather fit in the league of sorry bastards who must visit Silent Hill in their respective entries? Quite comfortably, actually. Heather’s execution as a playable protagonist shows that perhaps there was more to be tweaked to the Silent Hill formula in the vein of quality-of-life enhancements. The wonky, disjointed controls are idiosyncratic to every Silent Hill game and to every survival horror game to some extent. However, I’d be lying if I said I never actively grunted orders at the awkward movements of both Harry and James at moments when they needed to be quick on their feet like someone trying to potty train their dog. Heather is by far the smoothest character to control, yet the developers have somehow impressively managed to retain the essential stiffness of survival horror controls. In a certain section of Silent Hill 3 that copies the Pyramid Head hallway chase sequence from Silent Hill 2, I couldn’t help but be reminded of how many times I startled Harry when I bumped into a wall or the many times changing directions with James during that particular section felt like rotating a life-sized marble statue in a Resident Evil puzzle. With Heather, I practically exited this part unscathed. I suppose it makes sense for Heather to be more nimble than her middle-aged dad and a chronic depressive. Heather also marks the first Silent Hill protagonist with a convincing, emotive voice, thanks to her voice actress. In a series synonymous with flat, cheesy voicework, Heather consistently possesses the vocal inflections of a teenage girl while carrying a range of emotions when necessary. Yet, the rest of the voice cast of Silent Hill 3 gives the typical B-movie delivery.

Silent Hill 3 is a game that seems like it has a lot to prove, and I’m not entirely certain why. The previous game was the sequel meant to showcase how Silent Hill graduated from the grainy, blocky, primitive 3D era with wondrous graphical enhancements. To some extent, Silent Hill 2 was that killer app with an evolved technical prowess, but the art style and direction of that game distracted the player all too often. Silent Hill 3, on the other hand, flaunts its technical features like a model walking on the runway, refining even the new features presented in Silent Hill 2. The pre-rendered cutscenes introduced in Silent Hill 2 via the new capabilities of the PS2 hardware were impressive for their time, but they were implemented inconsistently. We learn from Silent Hill 3’s example that this awkward irregularity was likely because the developers bit off more than the PS2 could chew. Silent Hill 3 does away with the pre-rendered cutscenes entirely, and the regular cutscenes that are present are treated to some additional rectification, so the cutscenes look crisper. Gone are the muted, murky graphics plastered all over Silent Hill 2’s grim aesthetic as Silent Hill 3 revisits the jarring aesthetic of the first game with extra visual flair. The bloody, rusted nightmare that is the “otherworld” has never looked so viscerally grotesque, and now we get to witness a finer-tuned version of this surreal hellhole with the magic of 21st-century gaming hardware.

If the aesthetic of Silent Hill has somehow lost its frightening impact upon the third visit, the developers made sure to provide those jaded Silent Hill veterans with some new obstacles to hurdle over. Silent Hill 3 is far more difficult than the previous two games, most likely a conscious decision from the developers to keep the game invigorating for veteran players. Their efforts have tapped into the vital essence of survival horror, which is the scarcity of resources and the feeling of being helpless. Health items and ammunition wouldn’t rain down upon the player in the previous Silent Hill titles, but they would find a plentiful amount of health drinks, med-kits, and ampoules if they took the time to thoroughly search every nook and cranny in both the overworld and each dungeon. Frequently, I felt like I was hoarding items by the end of the first two games. In Silent Hill 3’s case, on the other hand, the player would be fortunate to stumble upon as many as four healing or ammunition items per area. The comparatively scant number of items here arguably conveys that sense of panic and desperation that comes with trying to survive. Still, the extent of it is rather miserly on the developers' parts. I think by taking the time to explore the area, the player should be rewarded for their diligent efforts like in the previous games.

The new enemies Silent Hill 3 introduces serve as the crux of the deficient item dilemma. These foul, abhorrent dregs straight from the bowels of everyone’s deepest nightmares are the strongest and most diverse cast of monsters from any of the Silent Hill titles. The higher graphical fidelity may compromise the indistinct haziness that adds an element of scary ambiguity to their designs, so Team Silent seemingly pulled out all the stops in the creative department. Dog-like monsters no longer drip blood around the hub due to their total lack of skin but have split heads with each side having rows of sharp teeth. Skinless pterodactyls aren't patrolling the skies, but enemies like the Closer and Insane Cancer seem tall enough to reach the clouds. I couldn’t tell you what the Pendulums resemble, but they swim through the air with at least three tarnished-looking scythes. Remember when the spitting enemies from Silent Hill 2 would zoom around on the floor like a possessed Roomba after hitting them a couple of times? The developers decided Silent Hill needed more of that with the new Slurper enemies, whose pack-like numbers and hard-to-reach stature make them the bane of my existence. All these monsters vary in shape and size, but they all have something in common. Every single enemy in this game is a damage sponge. The larger enemies are presumably bulky, but even the smaller enemies are as durable as carbon fiber. The game supplies the player with half the amount of ammunition just for all the monsters to take twice the amount of damage to subdue. Fortunately, the larger enemies are easy to bypass, but the dogs and Slurper enemies are more ravenous than all other Silent Hill enemies before them. Silent Hill 3 is the only game in the series in which I was stuck between a rock and a hard place regarding my calamitous state of health and my destitute inventory. A part of me wants to praise Team Silent for emulating the struggle to survive in harsh conditions more effectively, but was this extent really necessary? The developers gave the player some new inventory items to help them, like the beef jerky bait and the bulletproof vest, but the results of using the jerky were inconsistent, and the vest weighed Heather down significantly. Also, you’re kidding yourself if you think a stun gun will do anything to these unholy beasts.

The odd thing is that most of these monsters exist outside of the realm of the town that we associate with them. Heather’s objective for the first half of the game is to return home, and she certainly doesn’t live in Silent Hill. Otherwise, the cult wouldn’t have had issues with finding her for seventeen long years. Heather’s residence is apparently Portland, Maine, and her identity could be inconspicuous enough in this New England metropolis to elude the cult for so long. That is until private dick Douglas Cartland is assigned by cult member Claudia Wolf to trace her whereabouts. After he succeeds in finding her, Heather’s existence is exposed, and she is no longer safe. Once Heather meets Claudia, things start to go south really quickly as the gruesome apparitions start to invade the mall. Silent Hill 3 is the most linear of the series, walking through the streets of “Portland, Maine” while dodging ungodly terrors. When Heather makes her way to Silent Hill, traversing through the town is still a straightaway trek with a few notable sights. While I felt dismayed that the town of Silent Hill got shorthanded in this entry, I came to appreciate a Silent Hill game with a more linear progression. The heavy reuse of areas in the town is evident that the developers could not think of any new ground to cover in Silent Hill without bloating the town to the point where it has as many landmarks as New York City. The same hospital from Silent Hill 2 even serves as a returning dungeon with the same layout.

However, “Heather’s Odyssey” raises a few questions. The previous Silent Hill titles solidified that the otherworld and the monsters in it were being fabricated by the remnant dark machinations of occult activity, giving the town otherworldly powers. This core tenant of Silent Hill remains consistent across both Silent Hill 1 and 2 despite their different ways of executing it. How can the otherworld go mobile? Did Team Silent sacrifice all continuity to provide consistent creepiness for Heather to endure even if it doesn’t make sense? This question has been asked numerous times, and some have surmised an explanation. Heather’s existence in this cult is nothing but a vessel to give birth to their dark lord and savior, who will usher in the twisted new world order. Since she is the reincarnated version of Alessa and Cheryl, who have spawned the demon, she is also carrying the demon child, making her witness the otherworld wherever she goes. It’s a sound theory, but it raises even MORE questions. When was the conception, and how was this demon conceived? I assumed in the first game that the ritual Dahlia conducted was to both impregnate Cheryl and have her birth the demon there, and Harry was too late to prevent this from happening. Heather is the reincarnation of Harry’s first adopted child Cheryl. We see her as a baby after Cheryl is immolated during the process of the ritual, and since then, she doesn’t even have an inkling of who she really is or anything about Silent Hill until the events of this game. What impregnated her and when? Has she been housing the fetus since birth, and does it only grow when she’s around the town or the cult? Survival horror gameplay outside the town of Silent Hill just jumbles up the continuity of the series.

Harping on the awkward conveniences, Silent Hill 3 implements is a fine segway to discuss my primary grievance with Silent Hill 3. One of the most effective aspects relating to Silent Hill’s horror factor is its pacing. The subtle ambiance of the fog mixed in with the dim hallways in the abandoned town is supposed to put the player on edge. The otherworld is a means to elevate that disquieted feeling with ghastly imagery to make the player sweat, delving deeper into the nightmare. The boss of a dungeon is meant to be the climax and defeating it serves as the player’s relief, like they are waking up. The first Silent Hill executed this progression flawlessly as early as the first sequence, using the nightmare pacing model for the rest of the game to great effect. Silent Hill 3 attempts to do the same, but the sloppy execution of the dream sequence is indicative of how the rest of the game treats one of the franchise's most crucial elements. Heather is already summoned to the harrowing heights of the amusement park section with little subtly to speak of leading up to it. The otherworld acts less as the danker part of diving deeper into the rabbit hole of Silent Hill and rather like a light switch. The otherworld takes up most of the time spent in each mapped section in the game. The reason “Nowhere” from the first game was so effective is that the otherworld slowly engulfed the town as the game progressed, and “Nowhere” felt like a point of no return with no sign of relief in sight. Silent Hill 3 makes the mistake of raw dogging the player with the otherworld without any lubrication, and the player becomes all too familiar with it. The only instance where Silent Hill achieves the transition tactfully is in the hospital, where a bathtub flooding with blood signals the otherworld at a tasteful halfway point in the dungeon.

Effective moments like these are all over Silent Hill 3. While the game may not treat the player to a horrific dirge, little nuggets of sheer horror are dusted over certain parts to leave that lasting impression. Some highlights include the recurring presence of Stanley Coleman, a former patient of the Brookhaven Hospital. He has developed a case of puppy love for Heather and displays it by sending her creepy love notes and a headless doll as an offering. Needless to say, Heather is put off by his affections, but this doesn’t halt the tenacious Mr. Coleman. Once Heather warps to the otherworld of the hospital, a phone starts ringing in one locker, similar to the phone segment from the first game. An unknown caller, who we assume is Stanley sings the “happy birthday” song to Heather with an unsettling cadence, and the player is just as disoriented by the scene as Heather is. In the same hospital is the infamous “mirror scene” where a room with nothing but a sink progressively starts to sprout blood-red veins from every corner of the room until Heather’s visage in the mirror stands motionless, and Heather is murdered by the room. To add tension, the exit will be locked until the last five to ten-second window before Heather is consumed, leaving the player in a red-faced frenzy trying to escape. This moment tends to be the unanimously pivotal scene among those who have played this game, but there was one scene that affected me even more. Once Heather comes home from the most hectic scenic route imaginable, the player would expect to see good ol’ Harry without those PS1 pixels considering Harry is Heather’s father. Unfortunately, we see Harry in a state of bloody disrepair as he’s been murdered in his living room chair. Douglas didn’t only inadvertently make Heather unsafe with his detective work, but Harry as well. It seems the cult didn’t take kindly to Harry preventing the birth of their savior all those years ago, so they wiped him out as a vindictive act of revenge. Heather is understandably upset, and her father's death is the catalyst that brings her to Silent Hill to enact vengeance on Claudia. I, too, was infuriated upon seeing Harry’s demise, for playing as him for the duration of the first game allowed me to become attached to him. Harry might be a schmuck. Hell, he’s such a schmuck that his apartment is just as dingy and uninviting as the interior of any building located in Silent Hill. But, he was the bravest, most valiant schmuck in gaming, and I became far more invested in Silent Hill 3 after this moment.

Other than becoming a tale of retribution, what is the substance of Silent Hill 3’s story? What separates it from the previous two games on a conceptual level? On the surface, not too much. The sole unique attribute that Silent Hill 3 has that the first game doesn’t is Heather as a protagonist, but her character and story have to be stronger than her becoming Inigo Montoya. Could the otherworld in the context of Heather’s character be a fit of extreme hysteria, like a satanic version of The Yellow Wallpaper? Initially, I had this mildly sexist joke in mind to make fun of how Silent Hill 3 signified a drought of creativity at the Team Silent office, but I started to consider this allegory seriously. Singling out Heather as the franchise’s female protagonist and dissecting her role based on her gender would normally process a shallow analysis, but there is surprisingly enough evidence to support the claim that Silent Hill 3 is a stark feminist work.

I criticized Silent Hill 3 for being too relentless with the otherworld, and I’m still of the opinion that it overstays its welcome. However, looking at the game through Heather’s character, there might be a deliberate reason why Heather’s Silent Hill experience is more relentless than the two other protagonists. Is there any other type of person as scared, volatile, and frangible as a teenage girl? Young women around this age tend to be in serious danger at all corners, whether they put themselves in it. The men surrounding them start to see them with a carnivorous lust, hunting them down like a lion does a zebra. All the while, they never ceased the level of condescension they expressed when the teenage girl was prepubescent. Under a certain lens, the male creeps in a teenage girl’s life are like the enemies in Silent Hill. Monsters such as the Insane Cancer and the Scrapers have more voracious energy and masculine forms than any of the enemies in the previous games. The Closer vaguely resembles a warped caricature of the most primal essence of a teenage girl, as if the otherworld is mocking Heather’s femininity. The Split Worm boss is essentially a basilisk-sized penis, a not-so-subtle rendition of a fear of sex and its consequences. Harry and James’s adventures through Silent Hill were daunting enough, but Heather struggles even more because the town is trying to prove her capabilities because she's a woman.

Any Silent Hill fan, new or old, can see clearly that the cult is a sickening organization, but Silent Hill 3 delves deeper into the dogmatic depravity that fuels it. One can recall from the first game that the God born from Alessa would “cleanse” the world by engulfing it in fire, disintegrating the corrupt influence of humanity, and leaving the world in a state of still oblivion that they refer to as a “paradise.” Claudia, the successor to Dahlia, pontificates emphatically about the cult’s ideal world of purity to Heather. The latter is naturally unconvinced that extinguishing mankind in a fiery inferno is a sensible way to ameliorate the world’s problems. As fucked up as the cult is, it’s not farfetched to mirror it to some organized religions in real life. Maybe the cult is a twisted reflection of the hypocritical zealotry often expressed by officials and fanatics that comprise many world religions. Perhaps the repugnant imagery that makes up Silent Hill is an ugly reflection of the influence of religion behind its seemingly pristine mirage. Vincent Smith, a preacher for the cult, is charismatic on the surface but smugly speaks of nothing but iconoclastic rhetoric that makes him seem psychotic. Claudia preaches benevolence but browbeats any skeptics with threats of eternal damnation. Personally, I’d rather go to hell than Silent Hill, and this cult’s actions based on their religious practices are the reason why.

Relating to the feminist connections, what is one of the biggest societal institutions dedicated to suppressing women's rights? The answer is organized religion. Specifically, in Heather’s case, the right to choose to birth a child. Somehow, Heather is pregnant with the cult’s savior and experiences chronic aches and pains so painful that she writhes on the ground in agony. She is constantly reminded by Claudia that birthing God is her destiny, for she is Alessa who did the same all those years ago. Alessa’s memories start to infiltrate Heather’s psyche to further solidify the connection between the two once she reaches the chapel. This dungeon’s map is even drawn in crayon, similar to what Alessa would do as a child, an ironic contrast between the child-like innocence of the drawing and the nauseatingly unscrupulous land it’s mapping out. However, Heather is not Alessa and does not have to go through with giving birth to something she desperately does not want alive for a cause that she finds utterly horrific. Heather expresses her autonomy as both her own person and as a woman in the best scene in the game. Her act of saying “fuck you” to Claudia and her cult is by aborting the fetus by drinking a liquid found in a locket she’s had for the entire game. She coughs up the fetus, much to Claudia’s chagrin, but Claudia is too pious to give up. Claudia consumes the fetus as its innate powers morph her into the final boss, God, an abomination whose depiction would offend any religious group. After vanquishing the evil, Heather returns to the amusement park to reconvene with a wounded Douglas. She’s in high spirits with a newfound confidence that she is free to live her own life now.

If Team Silent were forced to revisit the story arc of the first game for whatever reason for Silent Hill 3, then I suppose I can be glad that this was the finished product. It seems that I underestimated the ingenuity of Konami’s team of eccentric weirdos, as they still never lost their magic touch while working under constrained parameters. While the story of the first Silent Hill could’ve been under wraps, placing the reborn Cheryl from the first game in the protagonist role managed to breed new life into the already established mythos and consider it from a different perspective. The distinctive properties from the first game have never looked so sublime. However, this is why I feel Silent Hill 3 is still lackluster despite its quality. Silent Hill 3 feels as if it tries far too hard to become the better version of the first game by using so many of the same elements and amplifying them. Still, the developers got so caught up in making Silent Hill 2.0 on the newest console that they forgot the importance of subtlety in a Silent Hill game. That, and being all too familiar with the first game, inherently squandered the full potential of a Silent Hill sequel that we already knew was possible from Silent Hill 2’s shining example. Perhaps I would’ve been less harsh on Silent Hill 3 if it had been released before Silent Hill 2. With all that being said, Silent Hill 3 still exemplifies most of the best qualities the series is known for and playing it will keep you awake at night for at least a week. Ultimately, if you’re comparatively subpar to the two most outstanding pieces of something in your respective genre, you’re still pretty good with all things considered.

Silent Hill 2 Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 5/9/2022)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Silent Hill 2

Developer: Konami/Team Silent

Publisher: Konami

Genre(s): Survival Horror

Platforms: PS2, Xbox

Release Date: September 24, 2001

One of the core aspects that makes psychological horror arguably the best subgenre is its tendency to delve into one’s emotions. The genre can offer chilling scares relating to surrealism to distort one’s perceptions. It can also provide burning, unrelieved tension in the vein of pacing and atmosphere to get under someone’s skin and cause a feeling of discomfort. However, I believe the emotional angle is an underrated factor in the genre’s effectiveness. Emotions are an overwhelming part of being human, and frequently those overwhelming emotions can escalate and climax in both positive and negative ways. On the negative spectrum, one’s feelings of grief, sorrow, guilt, and shame can slowly rise to a boiling point and culminate in a reaction of pure terror. One might attempt to repress those negative feelings, but the psyche in the mind's interior can only endure so much weighted negativity before it starts bursting through the seams of one’s being. Perhaps the most terrifying part is that this immense culmination of negativity and the anxiety felt by proxy is only felt by that one person. It’s an invisible war in that only one person can feel the impact of the exploding shells and the ensuing bits of mental shrapnel. Only others can empathize with one’s psychological struggles to a certain extent, mostly if they’ve experienced what the other person is currently undergoing before. However, simply because a hectic mental ordeal is unpleasant doesn’t mean it can’t be beneficial. Digging deep into the central source of one’s mental dissonance, while it may prove to be staggeringly painful, can relieve the tension of mental repression and prove to have a positive impact on one’s overall demeanor and well-being once the escapade is complete. Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin mushrooms are often prescribed to patients with a considerable concentration of cognitive instability, and the potent experience usually results in a significant psychological change. A video game that understands all of this to a great extent is Silent Hill 2, the sequel to the 1999 Konami survival horror masterpiece.

Silent Hill 2 had some goliath-sized shoes to fill upon its initial release. How does one go about exceeding a horror game that is considered the scariest title in the medium? Silent Hill caused more anxiety-induced insomnia in 1999 than the Y2K scare. A sequel to any video game is inherently supposed to build upon the foundation of the previous games and compose an objectively superior product. As I discussed with the first Silent Hill, the game was effective enough where all of the rudimentary elements of its presentation and gameplay made the game disjointed and more effective. That, and the narrative of the first Silent Hill did not warrant any further exposition. The story of Silent Hill wrapped up succinctly (whether or not the player received the true ending or one of the bad ones), and there weren’t any unanswered questions pertaining to the town, its residents, or any unfortunate visitors. The developers, however, were a crafty bunch that wisely chose to formulate Silent Hill 2 as an indirect sequel, giving the game more leeway to construct its own identity. It proved to be a success as Silent Hill 2 is consistently lauded as the quintessential Silent Hill experience. It worked so well that Silent Hill 2’s zealous fanbase associates the game with unusual adjectives relating to its high level of quality, namely describing the game as “beautiful.” Beauty is a subjective matter, but it’s perplexing that someone could describe something twisted, grotesque, and macabre like Silent Hill as being beautiful. After pondering this notion while considering Silent Hill 2’s understanding of emotional horror, the fans might be onto something.

The most integral deviation Silent Hill 2 takes from the first game is removing itself from the narrative of the first game. As stated before, the first Silent Hill did not leave itself open to explore the story even further. We learned enough about the dastardly cult plaguing the town, and Harry’s harrowing journey was finished regardless of if he succeeded in what he set out to accomplish. One of the biggest mistakes a sequel to any media can make is attempting to expand on a story that has already been completed, exposing the industry’s initiative to bank on shallow familiarity rather than taking a risk with a new idea. Team Silent, however, was a group of people assembled specifically because their collective acumen could only produce something off-kilter, making every collective decision inherently risky from an artistic standpoint. The direction Team Silent took to deviate from the first game’s narrative was to include the town of Silent Hill as the only recurring character and not only to upkeep the franchise's namesake. The player may have been treated to a crash course lesson on the disturbing history of how this quaint little resort town was adulterated into a force of pure, maddening evil and the people who caused this. Still, Team Silent thought to expand upon the town’s supernatural capabilities. The “otherworld” seen in the first game was a horrific projection of Alessa’s cognition, so what happens if Alessa’s presence is longer relevant because she and all of the relevant characters from the first game have been omitted from the game?

Silent Hill 2 answers that question with a whole new slew of people who are just as fucked in the head as Alessa. Enter James Sunderland: a young, tall, blonde man who dons a green army jacket. Like Harry, he’s Team Silent’s depiction of an average American schmuck who is unprepared to approach the unholy terrors he is about to encounter in Silent Hill. Unlike Harry, the catalyst to his “adventure”, for a lack of a better term, is not by happenstance. James receives a letter from his wife Mary claiming that she is located at Silent Hill and eagerly awaits his arrival at their “special place,” implying that the couple was privy to the town’s festive era before it became the dreadful hellscape that we know it as. The odd aspect of this letter is that Mary has been dead for quite some time, a problematic factor of this scenario that complicates things. Nevertheless, James makes his way to Silent Hill with the hope that he will reunite with his estranged/deceased wife and rekindle their love.

Another element that separates Silent Hill 2 from the first game is the difference in tone. The first Silent Hill bombarded the player with ghastly imagery and tense pacing, but its sequel is comparatively more dismal and dreary. The opening sequence sees James looking at a reflection of his dour visage in the mirror of an off-road bathroom, which is as grimy as one would expect from a bathroom located in Silent Hill. He exits the restroom to where he parked his car to contemplate what he’s doing here over the serene, misty lakefront. After being lost in thought, James’s first inclination to Mary’s whereabouts is to search through Rosewater Park. Before he can search the park, he must trek through the dilapidated apartment complex off the beaten path, beginning the first “dungeon” of the game. As James is galavanting throughout the town, the player might notice that Silent Hill feels more barren than usual. Except for encountering Angela in the graveyard and the first enemy in the dark alley, the long walk/run to the apartment is fairly uneventful. James breezes through the town despite the typical blinding fog and makes his way to the apartments without too much turmoil. Once he arrives at the complex, all that greets him in the foyer is the dark vestibules, and a save option. The main reason one might keep their guard up is because of the first game’s pension for using nightmarish surrealism to plunge the player into a frenzy until it becomes too overwhelming to bear. This opening sequence that reintroduces the player to the town's layout is comparatively tranquil, only because they expect things to go south as they move forward. It gives the player the impression that Silent Hill 2 is taking a different approach to setting the tone for the series. The desolate, ghost town atmosphere set by the first game is amplified to make the player feel the crushing loneliness. One of the most explicit examples is later in the game, where James is rowing a boat on the lake waters with nothing but the semi-rhythmic sound of the paddles and the dense fog to set the scene. Besides a faint light in the distance, the long boat ride feels almost aimless, so the player can bask in absolute solitude. Moments like these and many others greatly aid the overall somber, melancholy tone the game exudes.

Silent Hill 2 is another sequel from the original Playstation library that made the jump to the Playstation console’s own sequel, the PS2. As one would anticipate from a new console generation, Silent Hill 2 had the clear advantage of being on a superior piece of hardware. Silent Hill is, however, not a series that is synonymous with presentational or technical prowess compared to the next-generation sequel of fellow artful, well-received Konami franchise Metal Gear Solid on the PS2. I’ve already explained how Silent Hill is more effective because it looks like shit. While these factors are not an integral aspect of Silent Hill 2’s quality, the developers add some improvements to the first game with the frills of next-generation gaming. For one, the characters are much less blocky than the ones seen in the first game, and their mouths move consistently to a surprisingly realistic degree. The AV cutscenes seldom seen in the first game are now implemented more frequently, and while they may look awkward, they are just another case of something jarring-looking enhancing the creepy experience. The voice acting is still wooden and inexpressive, but this works in Silent Hill 2’s favor as it fits the disoriented characters. The most apparent graphical change that Silent Hill 2 makes is the look of the fog. The entire point of having the fog in the first game was due to the technical limitations of the PS1, and its effectiveness in making the game more ominous was merely a lucky coincidence. One could assume that since the PS2 fixes these technical limitations that the fog would no longer be needed, but removing the fog would be a travesty. Thick fog has been such an essential staple of the Silent Hill franchise to the point where one could argue that it’s the only returning character other than the town itself. The graphical and technical improvements to the game have simply given the fog the same treatment as the characters. Instead of the white, wintry fog found in the first game, the fog in Silent Hill 2 is a smokey, gray force of nature that violently blows in James’s face and most likely irritates his eyes. It’s almost as if there is an immortal fire burning somewhere beneath the town, engulfing the entire area, similar to the town in Pennsylvania that Silent Hill is loosely based on. As for the lighting, Silent Hill 2 doesn’t offer the same consistent pitch-black darkness as the first game did. Rather, there are narrow streams of light that permeate through the jet-black void to balance the moody and frightful aura. The more intricate lighting scheme presented here most likely wouldn’t have been possible on the PS1, so the advancements brought about by technical progress have aided the franchise.

Silent Hill 2’s gameplay is an aspect that hasn't changed even slightly from the first game. Tank controls may have gone out of fashion after the first 3D era, but they have remained a key principle of control in the survivor horror genre. Moving with the nimbleness of an android is ostensibly what accurately emulates the natural motion of American schmucks like Harry and James to these Japanese developers. I don’t know whether or not to be offended by this notion as a fellow American schmuck. Still, I completely understand and support the continuation of tank controls for the franchise. One of the vital components of an effective horror game is feeling trapped and less capable, and the rigidity of tank controls perfectly captures this. James controls the same as Harry did, with the only minor exceptions of running more gingerly and not reacting to accidentally careening into a wall. James also fights the exact same as Harry with an almost identical arsenal. The holy trinity of Silent Hill firearms are all here and are obtained in the same order at the same pacing as the first game. Besides brandishing a steel pipe, the other prime melee weapons take different forms. James receives a knife from Angela upon coming across her in the apartment complex but feels as if using this bloodied kitchen utensil gift would be distasteful or something. Instead, he wields a plank of wood with a nail as his weak, base melee weapon to combat enemies in desperate measures. The juggernaut melee weapon that looks difficult to employ for the noodle-armed schmuck protagonist isn’t a hammer but a sharp cleaver so gigantic that Cloud Strife would blush. At this point in the game, the player will know exactly who this knife belongs to and gasp that James can use it, but we’ll get to that. Disposing of enemies still requires the same method of dealing enough damage to where they fall and double tapping their wounds while they vigorously writhe on the ground to put them out of their misery. Health and ammo seem much more plentiful in Silent Hill 2, but the player will still have to search every nook and cranny and squint to discern the microscopic items. Under a certain perspective, Silent Hill 2’s gameplay might be objectively flawed and need improvement, but it wouldn’t be as hair-raising without all of its quirks.

Given that Silent Hill 2 is also primarily set in the series namesake and this abandoned resort town hasn’t undergone any construction or gentrification, is there any undiscovered land in Silent Hill for James to explore? Upon looking at the new town map, the land hasn’t changed at all. Notable locations from the first game are still on the map, but now they are out of James’s reach. Apparently, Silent Hill 2 takes place in an entirely different section of town, most likely on the other side of the closed-off roads that inhibited Harry from traveling in the first game and vice versa with James. This southern district of Silent Hill holds many unique sites in the overworld, such as Pete’s Bowl-O-Rama and Heaven’s Night, a strip club where neon signs still illuminate the inside after years of inactivity. More importantly than the new settings of the overworld are the new “dungeon” areas that make up the substance of the survival horror game design. These new areas include a series of connected apartment buildings, an underground prison, and a grand hotel overlooking the lake. A hospital is again the second “dungeon” area of a Silent Hill game, which may indicate a kind of franchise fatigue that may be used to argue against using the town again as a setting. However, this is an entirely different hospital located in another part of town. Silent Hill apparently has (or had) an outstanding number of casualties that warranted building two hospitals in town (gee, I wonder why).

While these structures might be new to the player, their inner design is exactly like the “dungeons” in the first game. Traversing through them involves the same survival horror progression where some doors are permanently fused shut while some are locked, and the player needs to find keys to open them. Some keys are locked behind puzzles, while some need to be collected among the scattered items. The puzzles in these circuitously-designed establishments still follow the same cryptic chicanery as in the first game. The difficulty of the riddle-based puzzles can now be determined by a setting that is now separate from the combat difficulty, but that does not change some object-oriented puzzles. In the first apartment, James will come across a 12-pack of unopened juice. Consuming a hefty amount of vitamin C most likely won’t bolster his defense against the various monsters in the apartment, so the player concludes that it must be used for a puzzle. Juice doesn’t (or shouldn’t) corrode body parts like the chemical found in the school, so what is it for? It turns out that the player must drop the entire pack down a laundry chute to unclog the debris and uncover a coin. How is the player supposed to conclude unless they worked in the laundry room and administered beverages and other items through the chute? While this still follows a kind of obtuse puzzle logic, there is one “puzzle” in particular that irks me. In the underground prison, James will enter a room that not only locks on him upon entry but ousts the battery in his flashlight. Rejuvenating the flashlight with a fresh battery will uncover a swarm of bugs that will gnaw at James’s legs as his health slowly diminishes. A door locked by a keypad is the only means of an exit, but the button code will be a random combination of the two or three slightly incandescent buttons on the pad. The player, of course, does not know the code, so they will most likely hear the error noise many times until they get it right by chance. The player will waste many health items lest the bugs chew until they hit a vital artery and cause James’s untimely death. The game can be as oblique as it wants to be, but this is entirely unfair. All of these puzzles simply solidify that nothing in Silent Hill is apparent.

“Nowhere” from the first Silent Hill received my prestigious honor for being a highlight component in the game that made my brow sweat and my organs tense up with utter discomfort, so do any of Silent Hill 2’s dungeons match up to this quality of sheer terror? They are still consistently dim and claustrophobic, with scary moments dispersed in between progress, but the “overworld” is underutilized here in terms of gameplay. The only dungeon that is relatively flipped is the hospital, but only for the last section of an almost completed dungeon. I didn’t think so before replaying this game because of Silent Hill 2’s dissimilar tone that also seeps into the dungeons, but there is one contender. The labyrinth found beneath the prison exudes the same discomforting, otherworldly surrealism that “nowhere” did, and it might be even more effective. “Nowhere” was a mapless extension of the most harrowing parts of previous “otherworld” sections, but the labyrinth’s aesthetic and design are harder to decipher. Its empty walls aren’t as deteriorated as the other dungeons and have a disconcerting peach color. Traversing underneath the empty, wooden foundation of the labyrinth looks like James is wading through the gastric juices inside the intestinal walls of a giant, unfathomably horrific creature with a dark engine room at its center. There is a map to assist the player, but its lack of illustrated boundaries will only help the player to a certain extent. This is the first and only dungeon in Silent Hill 2 that bewildered me with an avant-garde design that made me feel uncomfortably lost and confused like “nowhere” did.

All of the consistencies jumbled with the changes make for a solid Silent Hill experience once again, but what makes Silent Hill 2 so special? Why does this entry move so many people where the first one didn't? The meat of the game that separates the first and second Silent Hill games is the themes and story that are saturated in obtuse symbolism that will likely swing over a majority of players’ heads. They’ll have to ponder over what they’ve just experienced, a telltale sign of a substantial piece of art. Silent Hill 2’s story is less of a traditional story of a hero overcoming forces of evil and more of a character study. Contextualizing the horrors presented in Silent Hill 2 will slowly unravel James’s layers and reveal that this unassuming man has a sick, perverted center with a psychological profile so corrupt that Sigmund Freud would ejaculate at the thought of analyzing it.

To effectively untangle the mind of James Sunderland, Silent Hill 2 adds more inspiration from other artistic mediums. The same aesthetic and design inspirations that sculpted the first game are still present, but Silent Hill 2’s themes are carved from two specific literary sources. The first and most obvious inspiration is the classic Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment. In short, the plot of Crime and Punishment involves an impoverished man murdering a wealthy but avaricious pawnbroker to usurp her money. He tries to justify his actions but is ultimately subdued by the immense, grievous feelings he experiences after committing the crime. Silent Hill, with its supernatural powers, plays the role of judge and executioner in the cases of all the people in the game. Angela has found her way to the town because she murdered her father. A heinous crime indeed, but the justification for this act is because her father chronically abused her both physically and sexually. The negative feelings she has for her father conjure up a boss called Abstract Daddy, a moving hump of rotten flesh supported by a bedframe with a gaping orifice underneath. Besides the inner context, the name alone makes it one of the creepiest boss battles in the series, and the room James fights him in with its symmetrically penetrating holes makes it even more disgusting. Eddie is a gluttonous young man James meets in the apartment while vomiting in a toilet that rivals the worst toilet in Scotland. He claims to be innocent of the crime of killing a dog and a child, but his quick mental deterioration unsheathes his true lack of remorse for his crimes. Eddie has a long history of being bullied for his weight, and the pent-up feelings of humiliation is the reason why he took those lives. What about James? What did he do to warrant a visit to Silent Hill? Once James uncovers a video and watches it in a familiar room in the hotel, we learn that Mary didn’t die from succumbing to her illness. Sure, she was terminally sick, but the videotape reveals that she died of asphyxiation at the hand of James smothering her with a pillow. This is a shocking revelation to both the player and James, but the question of justifying James’s crimes still lingers with the overall themes. Ultimately, Angela is engulfed by flames, and James has to subdue the crazy Eddie. The game seems to imply that no crime should go unpunished in a way only Team Silent could think of.

Another clear influence is Solaris, another Russian novel written by Stanislaw Lem. Some scenes may also be inspired by the notable film adaptation of the novel directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, but the premise directly stems from the novel. In Solaris, a psychologist named Kris Kelvin visits a station presiding over the surface of the sentient planet Solaris to investigate the unusual phenomena of why all of the crew members have gone mad and or killed themselves. Once he arrives, an apparition of his dead wife that he longs for comes alive, which overwhelms him with feelings of longing, and succumbs to the same madness as the rest of the crew. Solaris is not an influence often referenced in the makeup of Silent Hill 2, but it is nevertheless obvious. The other victims of the town’s maddening powers seem to speak to James eloquently, but there is little connection between their perspectives and his. While James isn’t as alone as the game might exude through its atmosphere, this lack of conciseness between every human character adds to the sense of alienation under the same methods as the ones portrayed between the characters of Solaris. Maria is obviously the same apparition as the protagonist's wife in Solaris, but the further connection is how her visage torments James. The wife in Solaris becomes too human and attempts to kill herself out of existential dread. After ingesting liquid oxygen, she still retains her life after a short upset. The underlying point of abusing the figment of Kelvin’s wife is not to extinguish her character but to further torment Kelvin’s sensibilities. The same can be said when Maria is brutally murdered by a certain monster in town, which greatly upsets James. However, she is still seen intact after these events. Constant scenarios like this prove to torment James for the crime of murdering his wife. Crime and Punishment may bring the ethos to Silent Hill 2’s themes, but Solaris brings the execution of them.

Illustrating these themes is essential in dissecting the game’s symbolism, but they’ve been documented before by others who have taken the time to divulge the game's substance. I’d like to think that I’m not a lazy critic and will not waste your time elucidating the game’s themes that have already been discussed to death. After pondering over the Silent Hill 2 experience, I’ve come up with my own unique interpretation that connects all of these themes. I’ve concluded that Silent Hill 2’s story is a roundabout journey through the process of grief. The five steps associated with grief are not conveyed in their concise order, but there are still many elements that represent them.

Denial is a pretty easy step to decode if the player is paying even the slightest bit of attention to James. He knows that his wife has been dead for years, yet he does not think that someone is pulling his leg upon receiving the letter allegedly written by her. The letter is a beacon of hope that gives James hope that she is still alive and yearning for his presence, clouding his sense of judgment and rationale. Laura, another visage conjured up by James, represents a sense of James’s innocence in the form of a little girl. Laura claims to know Mary, and factors like her age make James do a series of mental gymnastics to affirm his theories. It’s almost cute that James is holding onto hope to see his dead wife again until we learn how she died, of course. Laura is also bratty and confrontational like one would expect from a little girl, and she has a certain sense of hostility towards James, like his innocent side is upset at what James has become. In the hospital, Laura leads James astray and locks him in a dark room with two dangling cage monsters known as Flesh Lips, another boss with an extremely repulsive name and design. It’s almost as if James’s innocent side is trying to punish James for what he did, which becomes more deadly as James indulges his delusion.

Mr. Sunderland’s anger is a certain type of rage and frustration in the sexual variant. Let’s just say that during Mary’s hospice, there wasn’t a lot of bumping uglies in the Sunderland master bedroom. This dormant sex life was a huge factor in his decision to accelerate her dying process. As a result, the uglies that James bumps into in Silent Hill resemble his sexual frustration. The hospital in the first game had enemies that resembled both doctors and nurses, but notice how there are only nurses in Silent Hill 2’s hospital? Notice how the same nurses and manakin enemies are vaguely sexy (as sexy as a Silent Hill enemy could be anyway)? A lack of rational human anatomy on the manikins with only a series of four legs connected on a torso and the unbuttoned blouses on the nurses signifies that our dear James Sunderland is nothing but a rampant, woman-objectifying misogynist. There is an extremely clear character that further represents James’s true nature, and he’s one of the utmost requisite characters in discussing Silent Hill 2. I’ve been careful to allude to Pyramid Head to prevent discussing him in an airy fashion because the character has transcended his placement since the game’s release. Pyramid Head has become the de facto mascot of the series, implemented in other Silent Hill media by those who do not understand Pyramid Head’s role in the game, sullying his initial stature. I can’t say the boom of Pyramid Head-centric popularity is a surprise. He’s incredibly effective as Silent Hill 2’s boogeyman, hunting down James like a glowing, geometric terminator. However, the true substance behind Pyramid Head is as a cog for the whole machine rather than the centerpiece. Pyramid Head is James’s toxic, uber-masculine side, complete with pure, animalistic lust. Did you think the colossal knife he swings around was merely an intimidating weapon and not a glaringly obvious phallic symbol? James’s first encounter with Pyramid Head in the apartments shows a distressing scene involving Pyramid Head raping a manikin enemy and making pleasure noises reminiscent of a climaxing grizzly bear. He’s doing the same to another one in the stairwell before facing him for the first time. Pyramid Head is the personification of the sexual id that every man possesses, and that’s why he’s so scary.

Bargaining comes in the form of Maria, the mirage meant to resemble Mary. More appropriately, she’s the idealized fantasy of how James perceives Mary, which makes her look like she works at Heaven’s Night. Upon encountering her at the park, James is delighted to see Maria as she resembles his wife. He attempts to relish in Maria’s presence, but he can’t shake the nagging feeling that comes with her uncanny nature. Maria should be ideal for James, but that certain element of fabrication makes James disillusioned with her. Maria being in the presence of James as she follows him through the town gives off the impression that James has settled with Maria to appease his unrealistic wish fulfillment, and it just isn’t the same.

Silent Hill 2 emanates the feeling of depression out of every crevice of its being, but there is more to express this than in the game’s overall atmosphere. James is certainly a depressed character, but to what extent? Considering nothing is tying him to staying in Silent Hill, I’d wager that Mary’s letter provided the first burst of serotonin James has felt since Mary's passing. Harry was stranded in Silent Hill due to his car being in shambles after the accident, and he had to brave the unspeakable elements of the town to save his daughter. On the other hand, James can drive off at any time without losing anything of value but chooses not to. His life figuratively died when Mary did and has been flatlining with nothing else to live for since then. A more overt form of symbolism regarding James’s depression is the few times that the “otherworld” rears its head. The otherworldly dimension is no longer marked by Alessa’s occult fusion of blood and industrial rust but by James’s solemn disposition. Whenever he is reminded of Mary’s death, it starts to rain indoors as it starts to erode the interior of the building, signifying James’s personal decay. The rain in the hotel starts to flood the basement as James mucks through the knee-high water, detailing the severity of James’s emotional state.

As for the most challenging final part of the grieving process, acceptance comes to James in the form of three different endings. Upon witnessing what he’s done to Mary in the video, James comes to a moment of clarity that helps him face Pyramid Head without caving in at the sight of Pyramid Head impaling her with another method of sexual symbolism. He then climbs to the roof of the hotel to confront the visage of Mary and renounce her supplementary status as the woman he loved, which results in the apparition fighting back in the form of what is essentially the Flesh Lips fight with extra steps and a more spacious battlefield. Coming to his senses is only half of the equation. Specific instances of how the player treated the game will unlock a certain result for James’s final decision. If the player healed often like James’s will to live was revitalized, it will trigger the “Leave” ending in which James’s conscience is cleansed, and he can live his life anew. If the player treated James’s life with detachment, the “In water” ending will result in James committing suicide by driving his car into the lake with Mary’s body in the trunk so he and Mary can rest peacefully together in the same vicinity. If the player was especially considerate to Maria while she followed them around, James will start a relationship with Maria in the “Maria” ending, which I think is a cop-out that lets him fester in a fool’s paradise rather than a feat of inner strength. “In Water” might fit the Crime and Punishment ethos, but “Leave” is a better example of acceptance and how it pertains to finalizing grief. Overall, it doesn’t matter what I think because the game is nonpartisan to any of these outcomes. None of these are “bad” endings, but simply a logical outcome the game comes to depending on the player’s choices.

Silent Hill 2 perfectly exemplifies my definition of a perfect sequel. Like a skilled plastic surgeon, Team Silent meticulously spliced the rudimentary blemishes present in the first game with superior technology while staying loyal to the foundation that made the first game effective to a fault. The result is fairly indiscernible in many ways, but the differences are apparent enough to hold the game on its merits. It’s not an oxymoron but a pinpoint level of quality that many other developers fail to deliver. The real question that determines Silent Hill 2’s place in the game that came before it is this: Is Silent Hill 2 scarier than its landmark predecessor? Considering how different the two are, that question entirely depends on one’s definition of fear. I think the first Silent Hill is more effectively jarring and relentless, but Silent Hill 2 makes the player want to wash away the disturbing events of the game with a hot shower. There is something more intimate about James’s journey through the gauntlet of unmitigated torment known as Silent Hill. The horrors presented to Harry were the product of someone else's despair, but all that James experiences is his own mind assaulting him with his own repressed thoughts and feelings. Using clever metaphors under the direction of a survivor horror game, Silent Hill 2 conveys the mental and emotional blitzkrieg of struggling with grief or acute mental illness. It’s an arduous journey most people will take at some point in their lives, but overcoming it is a gratifying sensation that rewards those willing to undergo the cleansing process with a new, glimmering light once absent in their lives. This purifying resolution is utterly profound, and Silent Hill 2’s depiction of this through its sublime, awe-inspiring presentation is a thing of pure, unmistakable beauty.

Silent Hill Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 10/28/2021)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Silent Hill

Developer: Konami (Team Silent)

Publisher: Konami

Genre(s): Survival Horror

Platforms: PS1

Release Date: January 31, 1999

I feel as if Capcom and Konami have this unspoken rivalry with each other. Both are arguably gaming’s most prominent third-party developers that have been active since the early days of console gaming. Both of their notable slew of franchises are some of the most popular and critically lauded in gaming history, supporting the range of systems both companies have been featured on. There are distinctive parallels between their franchises that might hint at some friendly competition. Where Capcom has Ghost n’ Goblins, Konami has Castlevania. Where Capcom has Breath of Fire, Konami has Suikoden. In the late ’90s, however, Capcom was sitting pretty on the throne of the survival horror genre with their breakout hit Resident Evil. Capcom sat on their royal seat with their legs crossed, held up in their mighty fortress with the smuggest of grins on their faces. From the top of their perch, they taunted Konami saying that Solid Snake was a hamster and Richter Belmont smelled of elderberries. Okay, that isn’t exactly what happened, but the success of Resident Evil inspired Konami to conjure up their own survival horror game to compete with Capcom. A lightbulb appeared over the director of Konami's head as he gathered a pack of misfits from the Konami offices, a talented but contentious bunch with a taste for the esoteric and the macabre. They were the cool kids' table that even Hideo Kojima wasn't allowed to sit with. This team of developers at Konami was known as “Team Silent”, a codename relating to the team’s final product: Silent Hill. With Silent Hill, Konami did more than just offer an experience that competed with Resident Evil. Silent Hill was heralded with the status of the scariest game of all time. Playing Resident Evil might have caused some people to get startled whenever they heard a bump at night, but playing Silent Hill kept people from sleeping, rocking back and forth in the fetal position with the lights on. Several generations later, with many sequels under its belt, the first Silent Hill somehow maintains its landmark status as the king of interactive terror.

Whenever I discuss a game from the early 3D generation, I feel inclined to talk about how well it’s aged. I don’t feel like contesting the preserved qualities from other past generations, but it always makes a point to mention this for this particular generation. Perhaps this is because this generation has always seemed antiquated to me. After all, I grew up with the generation that succeeded it, which greatly refined primitive 3D graphics. There wasn’t a grace period where games from this era looked cutting edge as they’ve always looked awkward and rudimentary to me. Silent Hill is no exception, as the game has aged like cheese. The graphics are unrefined and pixelated, the character models are stiffer than cardboard, and the voice acting is some of the most endearingly bad voice work from an era synonymous with terrible voice acting. I cracked on Hideo Kojima, but Team Silent could’ve used some of the presentational prowess he used in Metal Gear Solid. However, Silent Hill is a rare case in which these dated aspects are not a glaring detriment marred by the progress of the medium of gaming. Somehow, these aspects preserve the effectiveness of the fear factor Silent Hill is renowned for, making it just as effective as it once was decades ago.

As with Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill’s graphics and voicework are not necessarily synonymous with its overall presentation. Metal Gear Solid did a wonderful job depicting an artful espionage story despite the limitations of the PS1. Over time, the stronger qualities of the game still retain their effectiveness. Silent Hill is intended to be a spine-chilling, psychological horror story meant to explore the dark recesses of the human psyche. Silent Hill does not achieve this through the presentation but through masterful pacing that feels like a nightmarish progression. This is achieved as early as the infamous opening scene of the game. Harry Mason, the poor sap in for a wild ride, to say the least, wrecks his car in the middle of the night, trying to swerve away from what appears to be an adolescent girl in the middle of the road. Once he recuperates from the accident, his seven-year-old daughter Cheryl goes missing. He follows what appears to be his daughter as she disappears.

The blinding fog is a suitable base to set up the ominous setting, but this scene gets much worse. Harry follows Cheryl into a narrow alleyway, where he spots the bloody remains of an unidentifiable creature. This odd, ghastly encounter gets progressively weirder and more hair-raising as Harry continues to trek down the alleyway. Suddenly, the alleyway gets calamitously dark, and Harry finds himself in a blood-splattered maze formed from rusty, metallic fences. At the center of this maze is a decaying corpse that looks like it was crucified on the barbed wire of the fence. Little creatures with knives appear to kill Harry, and he has no means of defending himself from them. The gate he entered won’t budge, so he also has no means of escape. Once the creatures kill him, Harry wakes up in a cafe feeling incredulous about whether or not the experience he just had was merely a dream. The players just experienced the most harrowing beginning of any game up to this point. The progression of this sequence is exactly what a nightmare feels like. It starts with a base level of discomfort as the scene gets more perilous to a climactic point of sheer terror. The player feels as shocked and disoriented as Harry when he wakes up in a cold sweat. This unparalleled opening sequence isn’t even the pinnacle of the horror of Silent Hill. Believe it or not, it gets much scarier after this.

Objectively, Silent Hill’s age conspicuously shows through every facet of its presentation. It’s endemic to the primitive blemishes of the PS1 era without much of it aging gracefully two decades later. This is the case for most PS1 games, so this doesn’t come as a surprise. However, what does come as a surprise is that not only do the dated aspects not deter the experience, but they aid it. A key element to a lot of effective horrors is ambiguity. Resident Evil’s enemies were all recognizable creatures that reflected people's fears in real life, either in an exaggerated size or scale. As hair-raising as facing a giant, man-eating snake or the living dead in eerily lit corridors, the fear factor on the player only extends to their discrepancies with these creatures. Silent Hill is much more psychological and knows that the key to horror lies in the fear of the unknown. Team Silent’s creativity flourishes in the nightmarish creature designs seen throughout the game. Every first encounter with these creatures will most likely warrant the player screaming, “what the fuck is that?!” with wide-eyed bewilderment. All of the creatures in Silent Hill are tormented-looking figments of this town, with some even having uncanny recognizability. Many creatures also have a percentage range of skin on their bodies, a disturbing aspect of their designs. Some of the monsters look like unfortunate burn victims, and others, like the dogs and the flying creatures in the overworld, have no skin. The skinless creatures in the overworld resemble dogs and what appears to be something of a pterodactyl, covering all ground in the town, so the player never feels safe. The enemies inside the various barren buildings in Silent Hill are even creepier. Most of them resemble humanoid beings like the small creatures in the school or the nurses/doctors in the hospital, but they are anything but human. These enemies are abominations from the creatively dark minds of the Team Silent offices. These enemies are hostile toward the player, but they aren’t vicious and bloodthirsty. Their demeanor seems tormented and as if they lack mental faculties. They act as if they wish to be put out of their misery. When the player hits them in defense, they make an anguished cry and writhe on the floor once they are beaten down. The player is relieved that the threat is down, but they are still uneasy about what they just encountered. The bosses resemble bugs, but even the most knowledgeable entomologist couldn’t decipher what species they are. The dated graphics aid the uneasiness because it’s difficult to discern what any of the enemies are. This was most likely intentional because their designs are so ghastly. If the graphics were clearer, the effectiveness of the enemy encounters would falter as a result. It’s unnerving that players can’t decipher what’s coming at them, especially after decades of graphical progress.

The effectiveness of the dated graphics also extends to the foregrounds as well. Even if someone hasn’t played Silent Hill, they are still aware of the dense, blinding fog that has become synonymous with the series. The fog is meant to accentuate the creepy atmosphere with a wintry mix accompanying it for a better effect. It’s not only used to create a mood with an aesthetic. When Harry is moving around in the town, the player might notice that the fog is so thick that they cannot see more than ten feet in front of them. This is because the developers could only program so much in the overworld with the graphical limitations that they implemented the fog to compensate. The developers only rendered what they felt was necessary for the player to see directly in front of them, resulting in the player constantly having a restricted range of sight when traversing the town. One can assume that if the developers weren’t so constricted, the player would be able to have somewhat of a lucent view of the town of Silent Hill. Traversing through the overworld of the town is leagues more hectic with the fog, obviously because not being able to discern what dangers surround the town gives the player more anxiety. It’s also much more likely to get lost due to being unable to see around. Without these technical limitations, Silent Hill may not have even had the pea soup fog the series upholds.

Inside buildings and structures, Silent Hill compensates for the technical limitations with complete darkness. This is not the candle-lit, luminescent eeriness that lights the night in Resident Evil. Silent Hill is where even the moon is too afraid to shine, which greatly affects the strained atmosphere of any nighttime setting in the game. Once Harry wakes up in the cafe, he finds a flashlight on the counter. The player won’t find the flashlight useful sprinting across town but will never want to turn it off once they scurry through one of the town’s abandoned buildings. It even surprised me that the player can turn off the flashlight, considering there is never any respite from the complete darkness in these buildings. Even more surprising is that the game is spookier once the player turns off the flashlight in these areas. The developers render more of the foreground for the player than in the overworld, but the player only sees what is directly in front of the minute lighting provided by the flashlight. Anything the player would see with the flashlight on is the stuff of nightmares, alarming them while they are forced to see them progress onward. Turning the flashlight off is somewhat relaxing comparatively, despite the complete darkness. Horror games are not intended to be set in broad daylight, but most horror games before Silent Hill at least established a spooky mood with some gothic lighting. Calling Silent Hill spooky would be a laughable understatement. The darkness here is a void of despair, demanding that the player navigates through lengthy swathes of the game with minimal lighting. Because the fog was implemented due to limitations, I can only assume that the darkness here was also due to this.

The dated controls also factor into the effectiveness of Silent Hill’s horror just as much as the dated graphics. Rigid movement controls in early 3D games were so common that they were dubbed “tank controls” by gamers, and these were especially common in early horror games like Resident Evil. Though they felt uncomfortable and unnatural compared to real movement, they enhance the horror factor of these games because they make the player feel more vulnerable. However, moving like this as the super-soldiers of Resident Evil didn’t make sense because all the characters seemed capable of physical prowess. Harry, on the other hand, is a mere writer and a poor schmuck who is a victim of circumstance. He’s an average joe with a non-physically intensive career path (I would know), so the tank controls appropriately fit him. His run is only slightly quicker than his walking speed, he flinches when he bumps into a wall, and he swings his weapons like he’s never even picked up a baseball bat once in his life. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine were assigned to deal with the horrors of Resident Evil because they could deal with the challenges. Harry Mason, on the other hand, is put in a situation far beyond his element, which is a testament to true survival horror.

The only dated aspect of Silent Hill that is a detriment to the overall experience is the voice acting. Bad PS1-era voice acting can be endearing, like in the case of the first Resident Evil, because the game exudes a campy tone anyways. The same cannot be said for the dark, spine-chilling experience that is Silent Hill. Harry Mason is intended to be a joe-schmoe, everyman character, so his voice is intended to be plain. Considering the situation and what he’s up against, one would think he’d be a tad more emphatic. Instead, his lines are delivered as blandly as humanly possible no matter the situation. Harry experiences the most blood-churning, visceral horrors in gaming history, and all he can utter are inquisitive musings like “what is that?” Meanwhile, the player is even afraid to process what they just experienced. Perhaps the lack of vocal energy is supposed to emphasize Harry’s every-man status, but I find fault with this. As a fellow everyman myself, my skin would be blanched at the horrors of Silent Hill. I guffawed a couple of times Harry opened his mouth to ask himself what was going on, an unintentional source of levity, I’m sure. Other characters like police officer Cybill and Dr. Kaufmann express their lines with the same monotone, deadpan delivery. I could argue that this dissociation between the characters and the player is due to a hint of surrealism, but I just don’t buy it. The bad voice acting is similar to many other games from this era.

As a survival horror game, Silent Hill borrows many of the fundamentals from Resident Evil. The common tank controls have already been established, but Silent Hill also borrows the same sense of survival strategy from Resident Evil. The main thing to consider in any survival horror game is scarce resources. While Silent Hill doesn’t implement the same cramped inventory system as Resident Evil, ammo is even more deficient, and there are no juggernaut weapons like the revolver and grenade launchers. Harry’s arsenal includes standard firearms, such as a pistol, shotgun, and hunting rifle. The last weapon isn’t even available to the player until more than halfway into the game. Harry also has a selection of melee weapons, such as a lead pipe and a large red hammer. The melee weapons are used to conserve ammo but vary in effectiveness against enemies. The player’s health is also indicated with the exact three color schemes as Resident Evil. Health items, on the other hand, are simplified as there is no botanical mixing involved. Health drinks restore a small portion of health, medkits a medium portion, and ampoules restore a large portion of health. The health items are also as scarce as ammo is. The player will stumble upon all these items organically, but I felt the need to explore the overworld and find items to prepare for the challenges ahead. This is something I never felt necessary for Resident Evil. A unique aspect that wasn’t in Resident Evil was the addition of a radio. The game mitigates the total darkness in various sections by giving Harry a radio that signals that monsters are nearby. The device ensures that although the player might not see the danger, at least it cautions them that it’s close. The sound the radio makes is just as harrowing as the marginal light from the flashlight as its ring pierces the eardrums of every Silent Hill veteran. The player also has the option of turning the radio off like the flashlight, and I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would turn that off either.

Silent Hill isn’t just Resident Evil with a psychological tinge. Silent Hill was obviously built from the survival horror template that Resident Evil established, but Silent Hill is its own beast. Team Silent is obviously a group of people with a smattering of eclectic influences, all of which are incorporated artfully into this game. Some notable influences are obviously horror films, but specifically horror films that dabble in surrealism. The design of the “otherworld” resembles the hellish illusions from Adrian Lyne’s film Jacob’s Ladder. The premise of a quaint town with a dark, surrealistic underbelly is reminiscent of Twin Peaks. The game also takes aesthetic inspiration from the works of Junji Ito and Francis Bacon. Arcane elements from various religions are also implemented into the game, mostly as references and parts of the puzzles. To flaunt their artistic knowledge even further, the streets of Silent Hill are named after famous science fiction authors, the three keys found in the overworld are named after characters from The Wizard of Oz, and the three teachers at the elementary school are named after members of Sonic Youth (a reference that made me giddy when I first saw it like the complete dork I am). These demented Japanese hipsters wanted to express their influences to make something of a highbrow horror experience. Konami tasked them to compete with Resident Evil and didn’t underestimate the collective literate acumen of these people to take this survival horror template and run away with it.

In terms of gameplay, Silent Hill might also take inspiration from games outside of the survival horror sphere like The Legend of Zelda and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Silent Hill’s Zelda influence seems apparent in the way the town is designed and the progression that takes place throughout the game. I’ve been referring to the town of Silent Hill as the game's overworld because it’s very similar to something like Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time. It’s a hub with interconnected paths with a few minor stops in between. Nothing in the hub is too consequential to the progress of the game, but rather a space between all of the landmark areas and a means to travel between them. It’s a relative space to revel in the potential of early three-dimensional design. The only difference between Hyrule Field and Silent Hill is that instead of a spacious field with a small number of enemies and many obvious routes, Silent Hill is a hectic, dingy hellhole where enemies run rampant and where there are zero obvious routes. Many of the paths in Silent Hill that seem obvious are blocked off and impenetrable. The factor of Silent Hill’s world and progression that reminds me even more of Zelda is that the landmarks Harry visits trying to find his daughter remind me of the dungeons from the Zelda series. I’ve even caught myself referring to the school and the hospital as “Silent Hill dungeons” because their Zelda influence is obvious to me. Once Harry enters these places from a path in the overworld, navigating them becomes a large precedent in progressing the game’s story. Each building comes with a separate map different from the one in the overworld that exclusively gives the player a layout of the entire building. A good number of the doors in each building will be either locked without any hope of opening or opened with a key from another room. This gives the player the incentive to explore as many rooms as possible while keeping a mental note of what is in every significant room. Progressions through the buildings are done by finding keys to the locked doors and solving puzzles. Any Zelda fan will recognize these aspects because they are the makeup of every Zelda dungeon. One difference is that the puzzles Silent Hill presents can be a tad perplexing. The puzzles usually offer hints in the corner of the room, but the clues are presented in the least straightforward ways possible. There is no reason to overthink these puzzles as they are simpler than they seem, but I still feel that Team Silent made the puzzles a little esoteric to further flaunt their credentials.

The Symphony of the Night influence might be more of a stretch, but it still seems applicable here. For those who are unaware, the second half of Symphony of the Night has the player exploring the same castle, this time with the map literally flipped on its head with new challenges. In Silent Hill, the same is done through the “otherworld”, a horrifying, uncanny nether realm that represents the darkest regions of the human psyche. Navigating through the dark, abandoned Midwich Elementary was scary enough, but it’s Candyland compared to the otherworld. Harry enters the otherworld for the first time through a clock tower in the courtyard of the elementary school. It suddenly starts to rain, and an arcane symbol appears in the middle of the courtyard to signal that something has changed. In the hospital, every room seems impenetrable until Harry enters the elevator. At first glance, there are only three floors, but more glances will add a fourth floor, another entrance to the other world. This moment is so subtle, but it’s one of the scariest moments in the game. The otherworld has a few harrowing idiosyncrasies no matter what area it’s mirroring. It’s a jet-black, industrial hellscape painted with rust and blood. Hanging, massacred corpses of unknown origin drape over the otherworld like ornate decorations. The only foundation keeping Harry between his life and plummeting to dark oblivion are metallic cages and rusty, industrial steel. The otherworld is a surrealistic nightmare made to make the player uncomfortable and fuck with their heads.

Unexplainable phenomena like Cheryl calling Harry on a disconnected phone and a disturbing sequence showing Cheryl’s visage on a series of televisions is an onslaught on the player’s senses. Once the player enters the otherworld for the first time, they’ll get a dreadful sense of deja-vu as they realize this is the makeup of the nightmare sequence in the beginning. Silent Hill’s masterful pacing and progression into the rabbit hole of a nightmare has occurred once again, but this time Harry can’t just jolt himself awake. The player has to work with the nightmare, navigating through it, uncovering the exit, and earning respite from it, and that’s a distressing affair. One particular dungeon at the end of the game called “Nowhere” is a dungeon that takes place entirely in the otherworld. It has the same ghoulish features as anywhere else in the other world, but it’s the longest otherworld section in the game with nowhere to turn back and no map to aid the player. The absolute darkness, surreal design, and the industrial clings and clangs and dentist drills of the soundscape were enough for me to utter “...make...it...stop...” whispered under my breath with sheer discomfort. Never has any section in any video game made me this unnerved and uncomfortable. “Nowhere” itself is an achievement in horror gaming.

It also helps that Silent Hill’s plot is one of the most horrifying premises in horror media. Quite frankly, I’m surprised that the premise of this game didn’t meet any controversy and censorship upon its release. As Harry searches for Cheryl, he starts to uncover the dark history of this town, and it’s quite graphic, to say the least. He meets a frazzled older woman named Dahlia Gillespie, who gives him an artifact known as the Flauros to protect him from the monstrosities that plague the town. He then meets Dr. Kaufmann, a doctor specializing in exorcisms, and Lisa, a nurse who strangely lives in the otherworld section of the hospital. Harry then starts chasing a girl who looks like his daughter Cheryl but is actually an adolescent girl named Alessa, Dahlia’s daughter. She is a dead ringer for Cheryl, and that’s because Cheryl is the reincarnation of Alessa. Alessa’s body was immolated in a ritual conducted by the evil cult based in Silent Hill that Dahlia is a member of. The ritual was intended for young Alessa to give birth to Samael, an arcane demon that the cult worships that will bring forth an age of darkness upon the world. Complications occurred, causing the ritual to fail, and part of Alessa became Cheryl, Harry’s adopted daughter. However, Alessa’s spirit remained in the town and manifested in the otherworld. All of the terrifying things in the otherworld are symbols that mirror Alessa’s anguished cognition, such as the mean kids in school and her distaste for bugs. Even the nurse Lisa is a ghostly apparition manifested as a memory of the nurse who cared for Alessa in the hospital. This plot takes elements from The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and manages to be as shocking as both. That is one messed up little girl.



Silent Hill’s story has multiple endings like other horror games before it. Once Harry completes the “nowhere” dungeon, Dahlia and Alessa are found in the center of a spacious, dark room, ready to execute the ritual again and birth Samael. Depending on a few circumstances that have to be met, Cybil and Dr. Kaufmann are here as well. The “bad ending” has Harry defeat an incubator, and Cheryl is dead for good, leaving Harry crestfallen. The “good ending” involves Harry fighting the rebirthed Samael, a bug-like version of the dark angel Baphomet. He’s also an incredibly cheap boss with a lightning bolt attack that I’m convinced is undodgeable. I tanked this boss with my health items, but it was still an aggravating fight. The game even gives the player some leeway, and Samael dies if the player enters the fight with no ammo. Once Samael is defeated, either way, Alessa has reincarnated again, and Harry leaves with Cybil to raise another version of a rebirthed Alessa. Given the sequels of this game in retrospect, the good ending is the canon ending, but I found that the bad ending was a more appropriate gut punch to such a visceral experience.

Konami knew they had something special with Silent Hill. They let the creative juices of their most eccentric employees roam free, conjuring up something that made Capcom scurry away from their horror throne, squealing like a little girl and hiking up its skirt while it was running away. Silent Hill isn’t just a horror game; it’s an experience that has left an impression on every gamer. It’s an experience that highlighted our collective fears of the dark and presented new terrors to give a fresh meaning to them with creativity and artful surrealism. It’s an experience that tickles at our almond-shaped amygdalas and gives us a horrific sensation that people in 1999 didn’t know was possible. Like many early 3D titles on the PS1, it’s showing its age like the liver spots on an old man’s head, but somehow the meat of the experience transcends the looming inevitability of passing time. Only a true masterpiece can accomplish this, and I can confidently give the first Silent Hill that prestigious title.