Brown trousers time. (Silent Hill (PS))

Member Name: SqueakyG

Product:	Silent Hill (PS)
Date:	11/05/01 (186 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Scary and disturbing, great story with a movie-like quality

Disadvantages: Graphics looking old, puzzles can be frustrating and shooting enemies is not spectacular

"The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh."

This cryptic and macabre line is the first thing you see when you load up Konami's Silent Hill (straight after, "There are violent and disturbing images in this game"), and thus begins the most frightening videogame experience I've ever had. Silent Hill was released in 1998 for the PlayStation and received critical acclaim but unfortunately not a great reputation with gamers. Some people saw it as a tired old Resident Evil clone, unfavourably comparing the lack of explosive firepower with Capcom's famous survival horror franchise. Some people thought it was too hard and some thought it too easy. And some people just didn't get to hear about it at all.

For those who gave it a chance, Silent Hill was one of the most intensely disturbing and frightening videogames ever made. It is very much a clone of the Resident Evil "survival horror" genre (which itself was taken from Alone In The Dark); but whereas Resident Evil was an action-based story with trained police fighting zombies and monsters, Silent Hill is a much spookier tale of a normal man trapped in a town where things have gone very very wrong.


The Story
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The game begins with a fantastic FMV introduction. Harry Mason is driving along a road at night with his seven year old daughter Cheryl beside him. They are travelling to the quiet holiday resort of Silent Hill, where Harry and his wife used to visit before she died. A female police officer on a motorcycle drives past and overtakes them. Around the next bend Harry sees her crashed bike on the side of the road, and fails to see a girl who has stepped out in front of the car. He swerves to avoid her and the car tumbles off the road. {fade}

Harry wakes up in the crashed car the next morning. Cheryl is gone and Silent Hill has been enveloped by a thick fog. He spots Cheryl walking into an alley and runs
after her. As he continues down the alley, Harry notices daylight has turned to darkness, and things become... well... WEIRD. An old-fashioned air raid siren wails in the distance. The gory remains of a dog are splashed all over the path. An empty overturned wheelchair squeaks with one spinning wheel. Small demon creatures slash at Harry's legs and he loses consciousness. {fade}

Harry wakes up startled from the nightmare, now sat in a diner with the female police officer standing over him. How much of it was a dream? Silent Hill is still covered in fog and Cheryl is still gone. The policewoman, Cybil, gives Harry a gun for protection. He also takes a radio that isn't picking up any stations, but the static can alert him to anything dangerous in the area. As Harry sets out to search for his daughter, he discovers a nightmare world of Satanism, demons, and a town fading in and out of Hell.


Control
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If you've played any of the Resident Evil games the control and gameplay will be very familiar. You control Harry from a third-person perspective, with some fixed camera angles and some moving shots. It takes some getting used to because UP always means walking forwards, whether Harry is walking into the screen or towards you. After banging into walls for a while, you get used to it. Resident Evil suffered from times when you couldn't see the dangers in front of you because of the fixed-perspective shots. Fortunately Silent Hill is more dynamic. The environment is made of moving polygons meaning everything is mobile. This leads to some great moving camera angles that make the game look very cinematic.

A criticism of the game is the lack of firepower. Harry goes through the first section of the game with nothing but a handgun and a copper pipe for self-defence. Weapons don't get much more spectacular later on. This isn't a game about explosive weaponry, folks. It's much slower than that. Your
inventory is easy to navigate, and Harry's energy level is shown as a changing colour from green to red. The controller also vibrates like a heartbeat when energy is low.

The static of the radio alerts you to enemies close by, and at first this seems like a wonderful eerie touch. After a while however, the sound of the radio really starts to grate. Enemies start out as vicious dogs, small "teddy bear" demons and flying pterodactyl monsters. Once they are defeated it helps to stamp on their head to make sure they don't get up again.

Puzzles are quite hard and obscure, but they aren't totally illogical. There are always hints, often left behind by the townsfolk and written in blood. The first puzzle in the game is finding three hidden keys so you can find a way out of the streets you are trapped in. Once in the school, there is a pretty fiendish puzzle involving a piano.

So how difficult is Silent Hill? Monsters are pretty easy to beat as long as you shoot wisely and conserve your ammo, but the puzzles can be pretty fiendish. Sometimes the unbearably frightening atmosphere makes the game harder than it should be, simply because you're too scared to play!


The Fear
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Oh yes, Silent Hill is scary. It aims for supernatural horror and succeeds powerfully. The foggy streets convey an oppressive and lonely atmosphere, with street signs named after horror and sci-fi writers. Once Harry makes it to the Midwich Elementary School the horror REALLY begins. The school is dark so Harry must use a flash-light. This means you can only see what your torch lights up, and everything else is in the shadows. There are some demons in here, but even creepier are the harmless ghost babies who walk through the walls. After solving a few puzzles in the school, the atmosphere radically changes. You are now in exactly the same school, but it has changed to a "darkside" version. Everything now has d
irty boiler-room textures. The walls are rusty mesh and there are chains hanging from the ceiling. Chilling scenes get triggered, like when Harry sees some toy telephones on a desk, and one of them starts to ring. Cheryl screams for help down the phone line and hangs up. Very unsettling :-)

The second major environment is the hospital. Again, the same thing happens. Harry goes through the "normal" hospital, but then it changes to the Hell version. Doctors and nurses with moving humps on their backs lumber after you, trying to kill you.

The story develops into a very chilling tale. I don't want to spoil it for you, and to be honest, I needed to read an online guide to make sense of it. The game has four different endings: good, good +, bad and bad +, depending on certain actions you take during play. If you're a dedicated player you might also discover the easter egg comedy ending concerning UFOs :-)


Graphics and sound
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Silent Hill's graphics were great for their time. The moving camera beats Resident Evil's fixed shots, and the dynamic lighting of the torch in dark environments was exceptional. The fog and darkness served the purpose of being eerie and claustrophobic, but anybody who understands games knows it was also to hide the PlayStation's weak draw distances. However, this was a good thing. It allowed Silent Hill to feel like a real town, where you can't see far into the distance but you can feel the streets around you. Unfortunately, time hasn't been kind to the game. The graphics look very old now. The resolution is too low and the textures are blocky and pixellated.

Sound effects are minimal in the game, but they do their job. The radio static gets repetitive and annoying after a while. Sometimes you get used to the silence and then a sound makes you jump. Background music is atmospheric and unsettling, as a kind of industrial sound without a tune.
There are a few impressive pieces of music for the FMV scenes. This music is so good that the soundtrack was released on CD, though it may be hard to find.

In the tradition of survival horror games, the voice acting is atrocious. Some of the voices are okay, although they sound bored and emotionless, as if the actors haven't spent a single moment thinking about their character. There are long silences between each line of dialogue while the CD drive finds the next line on the disc. This sometimes ruins the atmosphere.


Silent Hill is available for the PSOne on the £20 platinum label. If you have a PS2 you should be able to play the game with faster loading times and slightly enhanced graphics. This game provides more horror than a Stephen King novel or a scary movie, so if you like being scared you should definitley give it a try. The gameplay may be unsatisfying in places and you could get stuck on the puzzles, but it will frighten the life out of you. And remember: only play this game in the dark if you have several changes of underwear!

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