Reviewed by Charles Dent
 PS2
Genre: Survival Horror
Release Date:
January 31, 1999 (US)
August 1, 1999 (EU)
March 4, 1999 (JP)
Rating:
ESRB: M (Mature)
ELSPA: 15+
SELL: 16+
USK: 18+
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Mode: Single-player
Developers: Konami, Team Silent
Publisher:
Konami
Media: CD-ROM
Input methods: Gamepad
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VIEW | Original Trailer
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Warning: Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing the first game in this seminal survival horror series, head to the internet and start browsing e-Bay for a used copy. And enjoy getting creeped out.
It happens very early here, the moment; that point in a game, movie, book or other story format where you hit the moment where you realize “This [game/movie/book/etc.] is friggin’ awesome.” In Konami’s now-revered (and hard to find) Silent Hill videogame, originally released in 1999 on the original Sony PlayStation, the moment occurs just a few minutes in from the start of the game.
You’ve just woken up in your wrecked Jeep, in a foggy, empty town, and your daughter Cheryl is missing from her seat. Hurting from the accident, you start into the town, and think you see her, but she doesn’t answer your calls to her. She runs further off into the fog, and you give chase. The game cleverly steers you after her, occasionally giving you short glimpses of her as she runs off.
She turns a corner, and you hear a clank as a metal gate closes behind her. You turn the corner, and see a metal grated fence and gate with a sign: “Beware of Dog”. But because Cheryl went that way, you must follow. You press the button to enter the area, and you go in.
Then it happens: the moment.
The music very subtly transforms into the soundtrack of a fever dream. The camera angles come in at unexpected, bizarre perspectives. And at your feet is what’s left of the dog you were supposed to be wary of.
But that’s not what makes it the moment. Oh no. What makes this the moment are the air raid sirens.
At first they’re almost imperceptible, ghostly, far away. But with each step you take, they become more insistent, grating, unnerving; the wail of lost souls, perhaps, or a foghorn on the River Styx. As they become more persistent and audible, your tension grows.
As you keep pressing further into the alley, the walls become a rust-red brick and impossibly tall, and the angles of the camera keep causing you to run into them. Then you reach another mesh fence and gate. You don’t want to enter, but again you must.
A few short steps past this gate, night suddenly falls on the alley, a Stygian darkness that whispers of dread. But you have to go on. You light a match and continue on. You pass a bloody, overturned wheelchair, a corpse on an exam table (in an alley?), yards and yards of blood-encrusted brick and wire mesh and ground, and all the while those sirens rise to a fever pitch. Other unnamable sounds can be heard that you can’t even guess at, and finally, you see it. And then you turn to flee in horror, and you see them.
And then, once they have killed you, you wake up. In Silent Hill.
And that is when you realize what a majestic friggin’ game this is.
No game, or even film or book for that matter, has ever quite so perfectly captured the very essence of a nightmare as Silent Hill. The opening minutes of this game may not pack the visceral thrills and jolts of one of the better Resident Evil games, but that’s not quite what the game creators are trying to do here. Rather than the jump-out-of-your-seat scares and gross-outs that many survival horror games throw at you (although there’s plenty of decent scares and gore to be found here), Silent Hill stakes its claim in the pantheon by building its terror bit-by-bit to a shrieking climax. These first few minutes are the template for this entire game; coincidentally, they’re also probably the most memorable opening minutes of any game in history. How so? I just described all that from scratch, and I haven’t played through the game in nearly a half-decade.
At the time of its release, Silent Hill was quite a sensation; while never as great a seller as the RE games, the series has stood the test of time. That’s in large part to the effectiveness of the original. The other games in the series have been quite good, but moments like that opening are few and far between in the sequels. They’ve been getting the atmosphere right, but maybe they’ve lost the ability to surprise quite as much as this one.
That’s not to say the game is without its flaws; in fact, there’s a number of them. The biggest complaint, not only in the original but in subsequent games, was the control system and camera, which tended to be jittery. There’s more than one moment here where the camera will land you in a wall, and probably wasn’t meant to since the monster you were running from or fighting will almost certainly get you now.
Another complaint was that, well, the story didn’t make much sense. And this is somewhat true. However, this is primarily caused by a deeper flaw -- gaps in the writing. Like many games of its kind, there are certain items you need to discover in a certain order, or else certain parts of the story don’t reveal themselves. Thus, if you don’t find all the clues here, you miss major parts of the story, and start getting different endings, which unfortunately don’t fill in the gaps as to why Cheryl is -- well, I don’t want to give it away. But it’s certainly frustrating to get a certain ending and not understand exactly why it is you’ve come to that point in the story. That’s poor planning. Get all the right stuff in the right order, and it makes a lot more sense.
But you can also make the case, as I do, that in a way this works to the game’s advantage. Remember, more than anything else, that this game is meant to be a playable nightmare. Nightmares often don’t make sense, or there are elements of logic that are heavily implied but aren’t readily apparent. It’s kind of that feeling you get in a dream or nightmare where you find yourself thinking “I know somewhere deep inside of me what this means, but I can’t verbalize or connect it in words”. So, it makes sense in that context that the storyline of the game doesn’t make sense. Got all that?
In that spirit, no pun intended -- well, maybe just a little -- I’ll skip the details of the rest of the story, and allow you to discover the many pleasures, horrors, and surprises of this game yourself. Suffice it to say that throughout the game, you will feel oppressed, watched, beleaguered, lost. That’s “lost” as in “damned”. This is Hell if it were a town.
I’ll close this with yet another moment in this game that makes you realize the awesomeness that is Silent Hill. It’s shortly after you’ve switched into the nightmare world while in the mall and have just received a very disturbing message from Cheryl on a bank of TV’s.
The clue you receive tells you to return to the hospital, which is a long ways across town from the mall. You go out, thinking you have survived the horrors the town has thrown at you so far, so just making it across town, even dealing with what you know must be out there, should be no problem.
So you start down the streets of Silent Hill, gun in hand, crow bar in your back pocket, and begin a steady walk towards the hospital.
One of those things that have been tracking you attacks. You kill it. Not too bad, you think, I can make it. You barely go another ten steps, then another attacks. You kill it, but realize you’re going to run out of ammo soon at this pace.
And then another appears. And another. And another. And another….
You begin to run as fast as you can, The streets ahead of you are transforming; the asphalt is becoming a large swath of metal grating that is hard to run on. You notice a black gap in front of you. You come to a sudden halt as you realize you can’t run down this street any further; the pavement is gone and a bottomless pit of blackness awaits you if you fall into the abyss.
And now they’re closer. You run down a side street, then cut back over to the next main thoroughfare that takes you to the hospital. But they are coming. You can hear them. You can hear the malicious flap of their leathery wings, you can hear the lustful clatter of their claws and talons as they chase close behind you. But you keep running, knowing that you don’t have enough ammo, and even if you did, they’d be on you before you could even aim your gun. So you run.
You are running out of breath. You are getting slower. They are getting closer. You can feel them now, their presence somehow making the night surrounding you even blacker.
And you come to a streetlight, one of the few still working here. You don’t dare look back. You don’t want to look back. But you do.
And in that glimpse (provided courtesy of the in-game camera, whether you try to look or not), you see a sight to blast your mind for the rest of your life, however long that is.
As you run forward, you see them. And in that searing moment, it seems as if all the hosts of Hell are literally at your heels.
Just like in a nightmare.
Friggin’ awesome.
Enjoy the game.
Overall Rating: 5 |
