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"And that's the news from Silent Hill, where all the skies are foggy, half the doors are locked, and all the children want to stab you."

Ever since the great video game collapse of the early 1980's, when video game companies realized that simply ramping up a game's difficulty until the player's hands were leaking pus was no longer enough to sustain a gamer's interest, game makers have tried to integrate classic storytelling into game playing. Problem is, storytelling usually has defined points of rising action and falling action, while in (good) games rising and falling action are determined by the player's actions. This can cause...issues. An example is Spider-Man vs. the Kingpin, where the player, having disarmed a bomb rigged by the Kingpin to destroy New York, crawls through some air ducts, and encounters...the Kingpin. You see, rather than cowardly moving, say, outside the blast radius, the Kingpin's devious plan was to...well, it's not clear what he was planning. Maybe he just wanted to make really, really sure the bomb would go off, or give his tech support team a nasty call if it didn't. Darned thermonuclear bombs, never going off when you need them.

The point is, the game's designers wanted the endgame to be a big showdown (as per the title), and dumping things like "logic" and "sanity" to get it was deemed perfectly acceptable. But with Silent Hill, Konami came up with a brilliant solution - if your game doesn't have logic or sanity, you can do whatever the heck you want!

The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh. And um...yeah.

Silent Hill is a descendant of Resident Evil, and of older puzzle-action hybrids such as The Immortal, where gory mayhem is broken up by brainteasers that must be solved in order to progress. You play Harry Mason, a writer who wakes up in Silent Hill after a car crash, discover that his daughter's gone missing, and...well, I'll get to the rest later. Suffice to say that you're in a small town that's deserted except for some monsters that want to kill you, and you start out armed with a kitchen knife and a gun with about 15 bullets.

The R2 button controls whether you're "armed" (in which case the X button allows you to attack with your weapon) or "unarmed" (here, the X button examines your immediate surroundings for anything useful). The fact that it takes two buttons to attack is a nice touch - even if Harry didn't have terrifically bad aim, indiscriminately shooting anything that moves won't get you far in this game, as Harry starts as easy prey for the game's endlessly spawning monsters. Each of the PlayStation's buttons has at most two functions, and it's fairly easy to learn useful button combinations as play along. (To turn around 180 degrees, then arm your weapon while walking forward quickly and focusing the camera on what's ahead of you: L1+R1, then up+X+square+L2.)

Graphically, the game's a mixed bag. Your view will be occluded by thick fog in the game's exterior sections; you either accept it or don't. Personally, I didn't have a problem with it. The small-town America settings are well-done for a polygon-based PlayStation game. And then there's beasties such as the tractor-trailer-sized lizard who, should you get caught in its vertical mouth that opens like a set of pliers, will happily chew your head and torso like a wad of bubble gum.

The bad news is that several areas have fixed camera perspectives, where centering the camera with the L2 button has no effect. Some will say that the game's designers did this for an "arty" effect. I'd like to comment that I'd be in a better position to appreciate their artistry if it didn't so frequently result in my being REPEATEDLY STABBED IN THE CROTCH BY FREAKISH CHILD-BEASTS. There's nothing more infuriating than walking into a room, hearing the groans of some godforsaken horror shambling toward you, and yet not being able to see the damn thing, forcing you to either blindly fire off some shots, or wait for said horror to finally show onscreen. Your spatial sense ends up being routinely, pointlessly violated when entering and exiting rooms, causing you to refer to the map far more often than necessary.

But here's what makes the game: the sound. It's not that they sound particularly well done (the pitchshifting effect used on Harry's footsteps when running is lame), it's that the designers know how to use sound to raise your hackles and generally screw with your head. One item in your inventory is a radio that will (usually!) wail with increasing loudness the closer you are to a hellbeast. Since you frequently won't be able to see more than fifty feet away from you (whether from the fog, the dead of night, or the camera placement), the radio acts as a Geiger counter for detecting Things That Will Kill You. Nearly all the game's best moments involve the radio, whether it gets progressively louder as you walk down a foggy alley, or it fades in and out as some far-off flying lizard hones in on you, or when it's shrieking the second you walk into a room, or (my favorite) when you first enter an area where the radio doesn't function and think "Hey, something I've never seen before is crawling toward me - that's OK, the radio would be going off if it was a threat oh please no please stop clawing me AHHHHHHHHH!" (One gripe is that the radio doesn't go off when monsters are behind a closed door. There's no technical reason for this, as a "monster in here/no monster in here" flag would seem to be all that's needed.) There's also the standard horror-movie usage of just-when-you-least-expect-it sounds - sobbing, things jumping out of lockers, and so on. On the other hand, the "music" is not just crappy (looped noise, a single horror-movie chord on an organ played over and over again) but obtrusive; sometimes it's hard to tell whether the radio is squawking or the soundtrack.

And now, Silent Hill's story. It has something to do with Harry's missing daughter, something to do with drugs, something to do with a cult, and everything to do with justifying a whole lot of weirdness.

The fear of bad cutscenes tends to create fear of insane video game plots.

Right from the game's first cutscene, you'll notice the writing and VO talent are bad. Obnoxiously bad. Mystery Science Theater 3000 bad. Lines like "Radio? Huh. What's going on with that radio?" make me wonder how the line readings could have possibly been done without the VO artist, the engineers, and the producers being stoned out of their gourds. It doesn't help that most of the game's cutscenes consist of information-free Z-movie exposition like this:

Harry: Some crazy lady in a church gave me a Rubik's Pyramid and told me "darkness was devouring the town." Do you know what "darkness devouring the town" means?

Blond Cop Chick in Pleather Pants: "Darkness devouring the town"? No, I don't know what "darkness devouring the town" means. Do you know what "darkness devouring the town" means?

Harry: No, I don't know what "darkness devouring the town" means. By the way, have you seen my daughter around here?

BCCIPP: No, I haven't seen your daughter around here. Have you seen your daughter around here?

Et cetera.

And through these cutscenes we get the story: After a car crash, Harry wakes up in the ghost town of Silent Hill, with his daughter missing. Harry treks through the town to find her, and uncovers complications. Namely:

-The previously mentioned hellspawned beasts,

-Large chunks of the town's roads have been obliterated, forcing him to go on find-that-key quests to proceed, and

-At certain points, Harry will be transported to an eeeeeevil urine-colored parallel dimension where broken wheelchairs and shackled corpses are considered festive decor.

So what's causing all this? Well, at first it looks like drugs are behind it, then it's some Samael fellow, then it's an eeeeeeeevil cult, then it's mind-controlling parasites, then it's a plot to sacrifice souls to bring back yadda yadda frickin' yadda. I don't mind a few good plot twists, but Silent Hill's plot seems to have been rewritten from scratch for every hour of playing time.

But that's OK. Since the game has something to do with the barrier between reality and insanity, or something, anything illogic in the game can be easily explained away.

Why is there a door that can only be opened when four blocks are placed in a certain arrangement...and yet those blocks are scattered throughout the building in relatively unguarded areas?

Doesn't matter! It's all insane!

Why is there another door that has a combination lock...where instructions for unlocking the door are hanging on the wall in the same room, albeit in cryptic form?

Doesn't matter! It's all insane!

What exactly triggers the good world/eeeevil world transitions?

Doesn't matter! It's all...you get the idea.

Ultimately, Silent Hill is a shotgun wedding of good, entertaining game ideas with gross incompetence, and only the "it's all a dream - or IS IT?" ambiance of the proceedings makes it tolerable. Better to skip this game and go directly to Silent Hill 2, which not only ignores the events of this game, it also vastly improves on it in every conceivable way, and plays the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to this game's Scooby-Doo Solves Yet Another Ghost Story. Silent Hill starts with a deep-sounding quote: "The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh." I'll end by noting that no matter how many times you finish the game, no matter how many FAQs and plot summaries you read, no matter how much deconstruction you do with the game's plot, characters, theme, or iconography; you will never, ever, ever find out what the hell that means.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/28/05

"Experience a true survival HORROR-TERROR-RUN FOR YOUR LIFE classic from 1999"

"The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh." Being that this game has been out for over ten years, it's hard to understand the impact that it had on many people that had a chance to play it when it first came out. I was one of those people, so I still remember. If I had the chance to review it back in 1999, I would have given this game a 10 out of 10 and said that EVERYONE deserves to experience this masterpiece of fear. But being that it is so dated, I am going to attempt and place it somewhere in context with today's games.

Graphics 2/10 (9/10 in 1999)

Many of today's gamers are never going to understand why anyone could be afraid of anything in this game based solely on the graphics. The graphics compared to today's standards are atrocious. You can't make out things because they are so poorly defined, lines that should be straight curve and move, the colors blend and mix, the lighting barely feels like it covers a few inches in front of you, and even the cut scene's graphics are laughable compared to most game's normal graphics. The camera angles you see from would never make it in a game today. This is why when they redid this game in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, they couldn't go for a straight remake of this game.

But what is here, especially if you can put yourself in the position to be open minded, is magic. The camera angles limit you most of the time so you can't see around a corner, even when you KNOW something is there based on the radio static. The darkness and lighting feels like it's constricting you (ON PURPOSE), enough so that when you start to hear the noise from your radio and you can't tell where its coming from you feel the need to start running. Even when you are roaming the town of Silent Hill in the daylight, the fog traps you and can make you feel you might run into the edge of a cliff at any moment. Most of the game is spent in tight corridors and rooms you can only see at an angle that restricts your view. All this does is add to the atmosphere of terror. As much as I would like to see a TRUE remake of this game, it would be difficult to create something with modern graphics without losing the suffocating solitary feel you get from the graphics of the original.

Story 9/10

In the era of the original Playstation, some of the greatest gaming stories ever told were created. This is one of them. I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything when I say you die in the first five minutes of this game. Or did you? The story is confusing and hard to understand but talking about any of it would ruin the experience. Half of the game you aren't sure what is real and what isn't or whether everything is a dream. There are multiple endings and some of them only add to the confusion. Every character introduced has their own connection to the story but don't expect the game to hold your hand and explain it to you like they do in modern games, there is no big tie up at the end that explains everything. You can figure it out by finding articles and clippings along the way, exploring and finding additional quests to the story, and spending time sorting it out in your head on your own time. Expect that the first time you play through this, you will be just as confused when you beat the game as you were the first time you entered the "Other" Silent Hill.

Sound 10/10

There's not enough that can be said about the genius of Akira Yamaoka. It is amazing to me how consistent he has been as a composer and it starts right here in one of his most "crazy" (for lack of profanity) soundtracks. Right from the intro you get the song that fits along with the entire theme of the game titled "Silent Hill". The mix of creepy static with real instruments and industrial/house drum loops and strange effects is a mix that creates something special that really couldn't fit anywhere else so amazingly well. I would go as far to say that this game is 60% soundtrack and the rest just has to keep up with the feeling it creates. And the when the air-raid siren starts it still gives me that same chill it did the first time I heard it. If you are a newer gamer who has never played any of the classics, this game will show you what video games use to have: a soundtrack that actually helped to define the game and add to the experience.

I won't talk about the voice acting because the game is obviously limited by the hardware and techniques of the time... but it's terrible by today's standards.

Gameplay 5/10 (8/10 in 1999)

The gameplay in this game, like the graphics, is hard to address. The controls are terrible. You cannot control the camera. Your character feels like it takes forever to react, like the momentum of starting a run or stopping is just too much for him. Swinging the weapons and firing the guns means you need to give yourself enough time to be a few moves ahead of your enemies. But don't be fooled by these faults.

Modern Silent Hill games (everything after The Room) have lost part of what made them special when they started trying to appeal to a broader crowd. When they updated the controls, the games lost the sense of frantic adrenaline you felt when you saw something running at you and you knew you weren't going to be able to raise your weapon and hit it in time. This game is especially bad out of all of them... there's no other feeling like the one when you are exiting a classroom into the hallways of Midwich Elementary school and you can hear multiple tiny demon children coming after you from every side knowing your are screwed. Enemies respawn in this game and if you aren't careful with your ammo and medical supplies, you will start to feel the pressure more and more of the enemies around you. The Silent Hill series builds an atmosphere that makes you feel safe in spots and unsafe in others, so much so that you will often find yourself running between the spots that seem safe. Every now and then those spots that seem safe... aren't. And don't even get me started about the streets of the "Other" Silent Hill at night... it is something to be experienced (on hard mode by the way) and not talked about. Let's just say you will be running and considering doing it without your light even if it means you don't know where you are going.

Outside of running for your life and combat, this game is primarily made of exploration and puzzles. The puzzles in this game are not as difficult as some of the puzzles in the sequels, but they are appropriately entertaining and dark.

Summary 5/10 (9/10 in 1999)

The feeling that this game created when it first came out was completely original. Silent Hill was a thing that gave people nightmares. It starts right from the intro before you ever push start all the way through to whatever crazy ending you receive based on your actions throughout the game. The movie was terrible and disappointing in comparison and Shattered Memories, however you feel about it, does not capture any of the feeling of the original game. In my opinion, the ONLY Silent Hill better than this Silent Hill is Silent Hill 2. You can download it for about five bucks... do it, play it in a pitch black room by yourself with no other distractions and try to recreate the creepy-terror this game instilled in 1999.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/19/12

Game Release: Silent Hill (US, 01/31/99)