Silent Hill

"Not Fun"

Silent Hill is credited with being the “Scariest Videogame Ever Created”. What ever group of people said that should be given a cookie. You might be lead to believe that the cheap thrills found in titles such as Resident Evil or Alone in the dark are “scary“, but that’s not the case. They lack many important aspects that create the sense of horror. What they lack is countered by Silent Hill, and that‘s what makes Silent Hill such a scary game. What do the other games lack you ask? The atmosphere, urgency, fear, panic, and many other aspects that makes Silent Hill one of a kind. Probably not all of them positive, either.

You begin as a middle-aged man named Harry Mason. Harry is going on vacation to the town of Silent Hill until his car crashes abruptly. He gets out and looks around, he checks around to find his daughter, Cheryl, but she’s no where to be found. He ends up looking around the town until he finds clues to where she could be. The game starts off horribly slow. You’ll be forced to run around on streets that are about 20 times the actual size of a real street. There’s a massive amount of running back and forth, while weaving in and out of monsters that lurk the streets of Silent Hill.

What you’ll notice first is that Konami added a lot of fog. If you’re outside, chances are it’s going to be foggy. I’d imagine if you got rid of this fog, the game would lag tremendously. Therefore I conclude that is just covers up design flaws. What it does do, however, is add a little something called: Atmosphere. You’ll never know what’s behind that old car or inside of that crumbling building, because of the fog. The fog subsides when you go into small spaces (such as alleys or inside buildings.) The atmosphere that is created is that of an eerie one. You’ll probably we at the edge of your seat during the duration of the game. Provided you can last that long.

Since they don’t have the fog inside of the building to hold the atmosphere over you with. They’ll use all kinds of eerie things. Each room usually has its own designated sound that’s mysterious. A grunt or silent tapping makes up most of these sound effects. They make you wonder what’s in there with you. This will be accompanied by fear and panic to run out of the room before whatever made that sound gets you. Here’s where Silent Hill falls right on its ass.

You’ll be scared, you’ll be wondering what’s going on, but they don’t capitalize on the fear you feel. Only once or twice can I recall me actually “Jumping” at the game. It’s a rather pathetic they let this all go to waste. Konami had a lot of potential here to make the gamer too scared to pick up even the controller. What they do include is still more than most games. Just, if they were going for some kind of “Super Scary” game, they should’ve added more stuff that’ll make you jump.

Another thing that they did wrong is that of the gameplay. There’s nothing like being stuck on the same puzzle for about 2 months. This problem is countered by the fact that you can always set the “Riddle Difficutly” on “Easy”. This will dumb down all the riddles to around preschool level . There’s more modes that you can set the “Riddle Level” to as well. Hard will make you just quit the game, because it’s so unbelievably……..well…hard. Normal serves as a challenge for just the regular Joe that’ll pick up the game in his spare time. The harder the riddle level, the less clues that will be given to you, the player.

Common Sense should be able to tell me that

Moving along, since the gameplay has one error that they managed to fix before I could complain about it, there has to be other for me to complain about. This one is that the game moves too damn slow. You’ll end up running around to places that you’ve already been to previously.

The developers are so damn lame, they just took a school and made it look ugly. That’s it, they didn’t change anything else in the building other than a few puzzles. Concluding that the developers are damn lazy people. This process is repeated throughout that whole game in about all the buildings that you play at. I’d imagine they just used the storyline as an excuse to act lazy. “Here’s why the buildings change!. In reality, we’re just lazy and don’t want to make new places for you to explore.”

Next if that of the music….wait..what music. There’s barely any music at all in the Silent Hill. They have mainly sound effects, but no real music. The most you’ll hear is static coming from your radio. This happens every time that you run across an enemy. The radio makes a static-type sound. You can always turn it off if you wish. This adds some challenge to the game. Most the monsters are usually what most people would call “Weird” From dead students with knives that come after you, too nurses with some odd stuff in their backs. Most the monsters will make you wonder “What the hell”. There’s not shortage of them, either. The game puts them all over the damn place. You can usually run right by them, however.

Konami really managed to get their crap together when it comes to the graphics. They look beautiful to say the least. Everything is super detailed for the playstation. Each room has its own feel to it. They all look somewhat different, each with its own little obstacle. The obstacles can range from just a tentacle in the wall too a grand piano in a music room. You never quite know what’ll be waiting for you behind each door. There’s a high polygon count on each texture as well. You can tell that the walls are to be rusted, and it really gives a sense of how dismal the area really is.

Silent Hill‘s high points are marked by that of the good‘ol CG movie. These look like most other CG movies that are on other play station games They’re about 3 times as detailed as the regular graphics. There’s not many of these CG movies, but they’re used to sort of tell the story with visuals.

In the end, you have a game that’s nothing but a hollow shell. Composed of and slow game progress. The fact it’s scary isn’t enough to hold it over.

Final Verdict

Graphics = 9
Sound = 5
Gameplay = 5
Control = 10

Final = 6

Silent Hill is not fun, unless you're a hardcore fan of the genre.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 08/31/03