Silent Hill Review

Ever since I beat Silent Hill 2 back in May of 2023, I have thought about that beautiful, heartbreaking game at least once a day for these past 20 months, as I have developed such a deep love for every element of that game and what it sets out to accomplish (as well as a staunch refusal to ever even consider picking up the remake) that I not only consider it to be one of the greatest games of all time, but also one of my very favorite works of art ever created. Because of this, I have been eager to jump back into the series by playing the game that started it all, and while it took a while for me to find a decent PS1 emulator (I ultimately went with Duckstation), I managed to get it all up and running at around the same time I was wrapping up my time with Red Dead Revolver. Playing through this game for the first time was an excellent way to kick off the new year, because despite some minor gripes that I had with it, Silent Hill was a fantastic game that had me fully absorbed in its narrative, world, and atmosphere for the entirety of my five hour playthrough.

Whether it's the storytelling, environments, gameplay, music and sound design, or the game's final letter that is literally impossible for me to read or listen to without crying my eyes out, I have always associated Silent Hill 2 with a profound, deeply sad sense of tragedy, but while that core emotion wasn't really present in its predecessor, that didn't detract from just how gripping Silent Hill was to experience. Rather than focusing on its purgatorial manifestation of deep-seated fears and traumas like in the sequel, walking through the streets of the game's eponymous town feels like treading the line between an already bizarre reality and a waking nightmare amidst the looming presence of occult rituals and drug trafficking, as the fog-shrouded setting frequently morphs its dilapidated buildings and roads into transient, pitch-black abysses of rust and grunge. The inherent unease that came with the exploration segments of Silent Hill was amped up to pretty much never feel truly safe thanks to the disempowerment that it invokes through the game's combat sections, with Harry Mason's own vulnerability paired with the slow weapon handling making it just as viable to run away in fear from the various fleshy pterodactyls, oversized larvae, and deformed humanoid monsters as it is to try and kill them. Silent Hill also does a fantastic job of tying its gameplay to the central mysteries of its engrossing narrative, as the cryptic puzzles, items, and notes that are scattered throughout each section give you just enough details to get you closer to piecing together what's really going on while also being opaque enough about what is or isn't real to keep that sense of wandering into the unknown alive throughout the entirety of your playthrough. Akira Yamaoka's flawless sound design and music were the key elements in making the mood of Silent Hill feel so oppressive and tense, with the mechanical clangs and analog distortions that come from exploring the game's locales meshing beautifully with the suffocating industrial drones and ethereal ambient soundscapes.

Although its cast did not feel as layered and three-dimensional as the ones that would go on to populate its follow-up (aside from Lisa, who I did end up genuinely feeling bad for), the characters in Silent Hill were still interesting enough to serve their purpose in the game's story, with Harry Mason's everyman persona making him an effective player insert while also making him easy to root for thanks to his determination to find his missing daughter. Amongst everything that this game has managed to do so well, the only element of Silent Hill that I found underwhelming would be its boss fights, and I managed to beat pretty much every encounter by standing completely still, spamming my shotgun, and occasionally popping a healing item whenever I got hurt. That being said, I also managed to find the final boss in Silent Hill to be quite annoying, because while I do think that the claustrophobic camera controls worked brilliantly throughout most of the game, the angles chosen for this fight made it so that I could barely see where him and his attacks were coming from, which led to a lot of running around in circles and hoping I didn't get inexplicably struck by several bolts of lightning. This wasn't able to taint the rest of the game's brilliance, though, because while it doesn't reach the masterful heights of Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill was still a phenomenal survival horror game that proves to be just as spellbinding as it was back when it first came out in 1999.