Silent Hill

"At the threshold of reality, a gulf of darkness."

Imagine peeling the skin off reality to reveal something dark and terrible shuddering beneath, the twin world to our own drenched in evil. This is the proposition of Silent Hill.

Taking on the role of author Harry Mason, you will search desperately through the vacation town of the game's title for your missing daughter Cheryl. In the course of your search you will descend increasingly into an alternate nightmare world filled with demons, and by the end of the game, the boundaries between reality and dreams will have dissolved completely, leaving you stranded in the nightmare.

When Silent Hill first appeared in the survival horror gaming world, players' heads spun 360 degrees, and not because we were a bunch of little Linda Blairs. Most of us had felt quite terrified throughout the Resident Evil saga to date (two games and a 'director's cut'), but in Silent Hill we were to experience something unprecedented. The game plunges into the heart of nightmares without ever stopping (or stooping) to explain anything. It embraces abstraction, normally the province of the novel or the film but almost never the video game. You will be challenged as characters you've developed empathy for die in cruel or inexplicable fashion. You will bear impotent witness to terrible events - cult and child murders - which nobody can stop. You will embark on a personal quest to save your daughter, but what was originally your clear goal eventually becomes a lone thread of sanity to cling onto in the face of ever greater horrors.

I don't just think Silent Hill is an awesome horror game. I think it's one of the most powerful horror experiences of any form in the whole history of the genre. And it's certainly a development in gaming that no subsequent survival horror game can afford to ignore without looking weak.

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The decision by widower Harry Mason to take his daughter Cheryl to Silent Hill for a holiday will undoubtedly go down as one of the most rueful in fictive gaming history. As the pair drive into town, Harry swerves his car to avoid hitting a figure on the road and the vehicle crashes. When he comes around, his daughter has vanished from his side and he finds himself trapped and alone in the eerily deserted and snowbound town. His immediate and urgent goal is to find Cheryl. He seems to catch a glimpse of her through the snow and gives chase, a scene strongly reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg's film Don't Look Now. But as he lurches down an alleyway, the sky suddenly plummets into blackness and the nightmare begins...

You control Harry from a free-roaming third-person perspective, and you will be immediately struck by the fact that you're playing a 'regular guy'. You have no special physical skills or weapons. Your civilian aim with guns is lousy. You will cower when surprised, slip when you dash off someone's front porch, and gasp for breath after you go for a run. The game always favours this human frailty over graphical sparkle, the atmospheric over the crystalline, and the motion-capture used to achieve it is amazing, both in the game proper and in the lucid FMVs. It's spooky how real all of the characters seem when their movements are so dynamic, this illusion being more powerful than anything that might have been offered by cleaner graphics or more textures or polygons, or other things that some gamers will count.

You will marvel at the enchanting drift and fall of individual snowflakes, and watch them arc by you as you begin to walk and run around. The bigness of the town is daunting at first. You can wander past entire blocks, observing the individual shopfronts, benches, hydrants and parked cars. The atmosphere and the sense of mystery arising from this vast public space being entirely deserted is overpowering, and surely the opening scenes of Silent Hill are some of the most threatening and beguiling in any game ever. The chill moaning of the wind on the soundtrack completes the effect, with your sloshing footsteps being a lonely contrast. Silent Hill always reminds you that you're just on the 'other side' of real life. Gardens, letterboxes, abandoned cars and shops, someone's backyard or patio - the paraphernalia of everyday life abounds, but it's all deserted and creepy.

There's an initial moment's reprieve when you reconnoitre in a cafe with the woman who is apparently the only other living soul around, the terminally foxy cop Cybil Bennet. (Listen to those squeaky leather pants! LOOK at those squeaky leather pants!) But this moment, like all other moments which precede devastation, ends. You're now besieged by demons and terror, and thrown head-first into mortal peril with ne'er a glance back.

Winged beasts circle in the fog and swoop to peck your brains out. Vicious skinned dogs prowl the snow-dead suburban gardens until you come into range then rush to tear you open. Never before has the sensory anticipation of attack been as terrifyingly conveyed as in Silent Hill. You can hear your foes from far away - a flutter of wings, the soft pad of dogpaws. You'll strain to hear whether the sounds are approaching or leaving. When you realise something is making for you, you'll manically scan the snowy fog trying to spot the dark form of your attacker before it's too late. In this early stage of the game in the open streets, the vastness of space around you makes you feel completely vulnerable from all sides.

The coup de grace comes in the form of the infamous Silent Hill radio. This item which you obtain early in the game is tuned to the demonic frequency, and when it's switched on you can hear various kinds of static fading in and out which will alert you to the nearby presence of enemies. By growing accustomed to the quality of static, you can even place your foes and discern if they're airborne or on the ground. It's one of the most original and chilling 'radar' devices ever devised for a game.

Combat control as you fight off your attackers is spot-on, with a chaotic and even cringe-inducing feel for a civilian playing with missile weapons, and a more solid feel for what all humans instinctively know how to do - swing wildly with a melee weapon when their life is in danger. Gun ammunition is spread quite generously in Easy and Normal modes, but you will really struggle with it when you play on Hard. The solid range of melee weapons such as the knife, lead pipe, axe or 'emergency' hammer can be used to make numerous brutal attacks: overhead blows, flails, wild slashes or quick jabs, all controlled by the duration and timing of button presses. This is intensely visceral, with every blow sending gouts of blood splashing from the target to the floor. The analogue controller drills the impacts of combat into your bones. As if this weren't jarring enough, the most inspired effect is the thudding of Harry's increasing heartbeat which you feel when he's injured. Such organic horror effects completely bind your senses into the experience.

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Silent Hill can make daylight terrifying, so imagine what happens when it plunges you into desolate indoor darkness. Yes, when you first reach the elementary school section of Silent Hill, your constitution takes a severe mauling as the game hits fully disturbing stride. Imagine the empty school building at nighttime, the vacant echoey corridors and classrooms picked out by your flashlight. Now we go one step further. When you reach the 'nightmare' version of the school, with blood and flesh-clotted grilles, the corpses of eviscerated children strung up amongst the walls with barbed wire, and shuffling pig-like 'teddy bear' demons and cockroaches hiding in the nooks and crannies, it is truly screaming time. The alternate realities of Silent Hill are hellish visions, and it's also amazing to me that the children-in-peril themes of this game made it to the market intact. (And I'm damn glad that they did!)

The ante for hands-on repulsion and gore soars ever upwards. You meet new monsters, they do more dreadful things to you, you do even more dreadful things to them, and so on and so on as the game forces you mercilessly towards the zenith of bowel-scooping mortality. In school, the vile teddy bears lurch at your legs, grunting and squealing as they skewer your thighs with big talons. The cockroaches don't do much damage but they gnaw on your feet with a memorably disgusting sound. When you're forced to explore a derelict nightmare hospital crammed with mutated doctors and nurses, the way that one nurse will grab you to hold you in place while a second one slashes you with a scalpel is particularly loathsome. Smashing your humanoid enemies apart at zero range, by blade or by blunt, and in a fountain of blood, practically feeling the flesh rend, is at once a gross and thrilling experience.

If you're outnumbered and struggling with ammo, you can exploit the ducking and weaving evasion skills you've learned from Resident Evil - just don't crash into any lamp posts or school desks while you're at it. Your flashlight has a beautiful spotlighting effect complete with lens flare, but you'll be too frightened by the prospect of what's in the corners of each room, or behind that next door, to really stand around gawking at it. If you feel insanely brave, you can choose to switch the flashlight off which plunges the screen into murky darkness. This can actually be used to your advantage throughout the game, since the light alerts certain monsters to your presence. However, the prospect of trying to slip unnoticed past some slothful demon in the dark, and fearing that you might brush it by accident then be attacked, is too much for most people to handle.

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On the puzzle front, you're weaned in with 'doors and keys', but gradually broken to the high level of abstraction that both fascinated and frustrated a lot of players who had never experienced anything like this before. Poetry, blood-stained pianos, lists of hospital patients and inscrutable cult mythologies must all be apprehended and gradually absorbed into your dream logic. Your nightmare becomes physically manifest in bizarre navigational threats: You may enter and exit the one room only to check the map to find you're now on a different floor, or in a different place altogether. Subtle distortions of your perspective such as this one escalate throughout the game, constantly making you question your actions and your sense of reality. When you realise how few safe reference points you have, you begin to feel deep unease that can't be cured by looking at any map.

The handful of characters you meet in Silent Hill are far more memorable for their presence and highly questionable actions than for anything they say, and this is the way it should be. The cop Cybil is always disappearing for elusive reasons. Nurse Lisa Garland could almost be your ideal companion - if only you could ever shed that little coil of fear at the back of your mind that wonders why she refuses to leave the hospital. The mad gypsy prophetess Dahlia Gillespie (dressed in your old school tie, no less) delivers expositional rants that you feel you should understand, but never do.

The performance style in conversation is to have subtitles on-screen for the dialogue while you hear the characters speaking. The long pauses between the awkward lines are very surreal... and therefore accidentally work to great effect. Sometimes it is overacted, sometimes underacted, yet it is in the alchemical weirdness of Silent Hill that it all succeeds. These people seem very real, and the chaotic cruelty bound into their fates produces some of the most devastating story turns you will ever face.

The amazing soundtrack of the game has a similarly disorienting effect. Not obviously musical for the most part - with a few notable exceptions such as the evocative theme song, complete with shimmery Twin Peaks style guitar and knockout montage from the game - it is one of my all-time favourites, being deeply scary, abstract and original, and creating the impression of a dark world where nothing is resolved. There are bitter shuddering chords, pulses, tortured piano strings and frightening percussion attacks. In the school you are pursued by the endless and torturous chiming of a clock. When you return to the streets of the town, you hear air-raid sirens and a wailing as if you're listening to the frequencies of an alien broadcast. The sounds of machinery are amplified and distorted to create threatening mechanical effects throughout the game. And at other times, some dark synth will pick out discordant themes that are dismal and poignant.

Combine these rich alien atmospherics with the already rich sound effects for all of the characters and the monsters in the game, and the static squall of the radio, and the effect is astonishing...

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Silent Hill as an enormous replayability factor, thanks largely to its system of unlocking extra weapons and features. The game itself is such an opiate that I have played it quite endlessly anyway, and when you become very experienced with it, you can actually survive it in under a couple of hours. It also unlocks fun menu features, such as the ability to change the colour of all blood in the game or access extra view modes. If you're particularly masochistic, try handling the whole experience in an over the shoulder view.

A predictable and almost off-handed downside to the replayability is that the game is so abstract, the different endings Konami chose to create are in no way self-evident. Who could possibly say what is 'good' and 'what' is bad in this world? It will take a fair few plays (or a single visit to some internet guides) to work them out. And by the time you're deep in the game, many avenues of meaning will have opened up regarding the mystery of what's going on in Silent Hill and where your daughter might have gone. Drugs, cults, dreams, nightmares... your awkward groping conversations with Cybil become so banal and helpless that they absorb meaning like a sponge. Silent Hill keeps taking you deeper and deeper until you're staring into an abyss of possibilities, and then it keeps you there.

I've seen large numbers of players react very badly to the punishing experience of Silent Hill. In the face of endless too-neatly resolved stories that bombard us daily in mainstream films and TV, this isn't surprising. Some people flail desperately trying to tie all of the game's elements together, to find some kind of meaning that reassures them that the world isn't all chaos and that we can still pack everything into neat and separate boxes. These people have taken a major hit... abstractions, nightmares and chaos are the goals of Silent Hill.

One of the core purposes of all horror is to both challenge and excite people by having them confront their mortality. Silent Hill threatens us because it reminds us that people we care about may be taken from us unfairly, that there are evils in this world that we will never understand, that the threshold of dreams will always be a mystery to us and that we are extremely flesh-and-blood. But it definitely isn't just about being unpleasant; like all great horror, it simultaneously plays the flip side of the coin. The knife-edge rush of fear is thrilling and makes you feel incredibly alive. There is true fascination. There are surreal and beautiful sensory experiences that you will not find in any other genre. You can immerse yourself in a grueling session of Silent Hill, come away from it with a still-pounding heart, then look around at the real world with your heightened senses and be reminded of the extraordinary which is to be found in the ordinary.

There are endless eye-opening sights in this game, and too many wondrous, suspenseful, horrifying or memorable moments than I can contemplate at once. In the hospital you'll see putrid IV drips, and visit a morgue where you swear corpses are going to leap out at you - but then they don't. Watch a carnival ride come to life on its own at night. Receive the phonecall from hell. Run blindly through the dark in pouring rain, pursued by slavering monsters you don't dare stop to count. Fly right out of your seat when a sewer beast drops onto your head without warning. Watch your daughter vanish into a pure cloud of snow. Turn your flashlight off and hold your breath as a monster shuffles by you in darkness. Climb a lighthouse and watch the world disintegrate.

For intense sensory fear and a headlong journey into the abstractions of nightmares, nothing can touch Silent Hill. It's definitely not for everyone, and even many people who love it can't face playing it for extended periods because it's just too terrifying. It's truly disturbing because it brings horror so close to home, into the elementary school where your brother or sister or children might go everyday. It creates mysteries and leaves you with them. Your senses are assaulted and you're endlessly stalked by enemies that rip you apart. If you think you can face even half of that, or better yet, if you are intrigued but still reticent, you are in the best position to appreciate the incredibly powerful experience offered by this game. It's horrible, it's beautiful, it's too compelling to ever turn away from and it can change the way you look at things. And it's also an exhilarating game with a juicy arsenal of weapons, solid blood-drenched combat and intriguing puzzles.

Scariest game ever? Yes. And one of the best games ever.

-- Silent Hill 10/10 --

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 03/21/01, Updated 10/16/01