Silent Hill

Despite knowing some of the very surface level aesthetics, I went into this without really knowing what to expect. I loved it.

  I played this as a PSOne Classic on my PS3

Kind of like my second-hand exposure to Resident Evil over the years, there were certain things about Silent Hill that I guess I just absorbed through a kind of cultural osmosis. "A foggy town that manifests your fears or guilts (or something?) as evil nurses or a pyramid dude," was the gist, but, at least with this first game, everything else was completely new to me.

There's a bit of exposition in the back half that I thought felt a bit rote (stuff about a cult and some Proper Nouns being thrown at you) but for the most part this is just an inexplicable situation a few people have been thrust into. Like a lot of good horror, the lack of any clear justification or true sense of logic only adds to the experience.

And it is good horror. While I deeply enjoyed the two Resident Evils I played, there's a B-movie quality and a level of camp deeply embedded into their identity that's difficult to overlook. Everything in Silent Hill is played incredibly straight, and while Harry's voice often sounds a bit wooden, the performances are all incredibly solid. When people talk about this as being a "psychological horror" they're not exaggerating, it really does try to go for some slower, less surface-level scares (in addition to the odd jumpscare, of course). Yes, you do still fight a TON of things (and you'll probably go through more ammo than either Resident Evil game) but I was surprised by just how often I'd come across something that made me genuinely uncomfortable.

This staircase is longer than it should be.

Even the visuals, which you might think would seem dated and hard to overlook, were incredibly effective. The fog is something that's often talked about, but only after playing it do I see just how significant an impact it has. What presumably started as a way to limit the render distance (and thus get this 3D game to run on a PS1) leads to a setting where nighttime is filled with a blackness you can't see through and you can't see more than a few feet in front of you even in the middle of the day, so there's a pretty constant feeling of anticipation and dread because you never exactly know what might be just a few steps in front of you.

Nope.

I don't want to sound like I'm dissing Resident Evil because I did love those first two games I played, but I guess I was just surprised by how different this game felt. Mechanically it's pretty similar and it was almost certainly inspired (at least in part) by those games, but I suppose I was surprised that a PSOne game could get me so genuinely unnerved. Any time I hear people rave about older video games there's a part of me that assumes at least a bit of it has to be nostalgia.

 

(As a bit of an aside, there's a part of me that doubts Final Fantasy VII or Ocarina of Time, two games I haven't played, are truly some of the "greatest games of all time" because, well, a lot's happened in the last 25 years)

Silent Hill is, well, actually as good (and scary) as I was led to believe, so playing through it was a delight.