Silent Hill

Title: Silent Hill
Platform Played On: PS3 (PS1 Classic)
Release Date: January 31, 1999
Date Played: February 2012
Time Played: 9h 32m 32s
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 5/5

Opinion:

Harry Mason Walking Down A Street of Silent Hill

Yes, it took me 13 years to play a PS1 classic, and I loved every minute of it.

One of my friends (Devin) is a huge fan of the series, and has always told me that I should play it. I thought of him, when I saw that Silent Hill 1 was available on PSN as a PS1 classic download. It was now or never, so I jumped in.

I must say that I was immediately impressed by the opening cut scene. Although nothing like today's life like CGI, but on par with the Final Fantasies of the time, which were pretty damn impressive. The cinematic foreshadows some of the game's events and features a very fitting score and sets the mood just right. Visually Silent Hill is no less impressive, its got to be one of the best looking PlayStation 1 games. The city geometry and textures look unique, unlike other games of the time where you could tell that a building or texture was copy pasted several times. There are many objects in the environment that did not necessarily need to be there, like random mail boxes, car tires turned to make it look like someone pulled in to the parking spot, life rings near the water, ropes, street sign detailing and a lot of other little details without which Silent Hill's atmosphere would not be nearly as good. The developers were able to use in game mechanics to their advantage in order to accomplish such polish. Since Silent Hill is a spooky town, the developers used one of the primary spooky elements to us humans... fog.  And with fog, the draw distance is so short that it allowed them to jam pack a ton of detail into the environment without the PlayStation 1 hardware buckling under the processing intensity.  This is one of very few example of excellent game design, it plays both ways, help create a spooky in game atmosphere, and at the same time helps the engineers with making the game.

The First Time You Realize That Things are Messed Up

The game starts with you (Harry Mason) waking up from a car crash and realizing that your daughter (Cheryl) is missing form the car. Finding Cheryl becomes your primary mission. As you explore the nearby city of Silent Hill you encounter strange beasts and even alternate dimensions. As you progress through the game you begin to unravel the mysteries of Silent Hill.

I didnt find Silent Hill to be necessarily scary, but it does have a ton of spooky/creepy moments, coupled with a phenomenal sound direction even at 13 years old Silent Hill creates an awesome, desolate town full of monsters ready to tear your head off atmosphere.

In essence Silent Hill is an adventure game, I would definitely not classify it under the survival genre. The enemies are fairly straight forward, and boss fights are more of a puzzle than anything else. Granted I played it on easy, but I died only once, and even that was a puzzle death. The game provides you with more than enough ammunition and health packs, I ended up never using the large health packs (I think I found around 15 of them), nor did I use the ampules (buffs) at all.  I only used the small health bottles (about 15-20), and still had around that many left when I finished the game.

It took me a little over nine and a half hours to finish the game, without puzzles that time would have been somewhere between tree to four hours. What I am trying to say here is that majority of the time you find yourself solving puzzles trying to make sense of whats going on. Speaking of puzzles... I applaud you Konami (developer), what a great job on the puzzles.  For once I was actually interested and intrigued by the creativity in puzzle design.  Most games have stupid cliche puzzles, such as move the blocks around to get the red block out of the square, or match three puzzles, or pipe dream, or a Sudoku puzzles. Silent Hills puzzles are a completely different cup of tea, they are thought provoking and creative. A lot of them are comprised of poems that you have to read and make sense of, others require you to think logically, and use the items in your inventory to achieve certain goals.

Silent Hill features 5 different endings, one of which is a gag ending that you can only get after finishing the game multiple times.  The other four endings have to do with your actions throughout the game.  All in all it boils down to saving the people you meet.  I could not save anyone, although I was extremely close to saving the doctor, which would have gotten me a Good ending; however after getting to his hotel room, I could not figure out where to use the code.

I think it is clear that I was very impressed by Silent Hill, I found myself wanting to keep playing it even at 2am when I should be going to sleep because I have to get up for work the next morning.  The story was engaging throughout, and I found that the game was of perfect length. At the end, when you make sense of it all it is a little weird, but I can easily overlook that since the getting from point A to point B (beginning to end) was so enjoyable. I feel that Silent Hill is a bit like playing through an X-files episode.  I would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes puzzles/adventure games and doesn't mind getting spooked once in a while. Silent Hill, you impressed me all around and I can not wait to play the sequels.

My Finish Screen