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Silent Hill review

Game: Silent Hill
Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: Action (Horror)
Developer: Konami

Staff review by Marc Golding

July 29, 2011

She was sitting on the seat beside you, and then: she was gone.

The car won’t drive anymore -- you'll have to ditch it. You strain your eyes to seek her out, but the snow makes it hard to see. Cheryl is out there, somewhere in the whiteness. She’s a little girl lost, drowning in a sea of powder: The lonely resort town of Silent Hill has claimed her.

And as her anguished, guilt-ridden father, you simply must find her.

You enter the town on foot, and -- wait, isn’t that her up ahead? You give chase down an alley and things start to change. First comes the pulpy carcass, splayed out on the concrete. Then comes the incursion of darkness, which is sudden and complete; the blackness dropping like a curtain. The camera moves up and away, makes you feel small, pans over your position dizzyingly.

Through an iron wrought fence you push on, panic mounting. The path narrows, the walls begin to choke your forward movement. You careen clumsily onward through the severe angles like a pinball -- what else can be done? And that’s when you see something bloody and incomplete strung up before you. That’s when the tiny bandaged wraiths swarm…

Two kinds of people haven’t experienced Silent Hill before. The kind who don’t enjoy horror games at all, and the newer gamers whose introduction to the series may have begun with the flawed Shattered Memories or the unremarkable Homecoming. To the former group: you’re wasting your time. If you don’t want to be scared, you’ve come to the wrong place. For the latter group, however, you owe it yourself to start at the beginning, with the first game of the series. And the best.

Even the best Silent Hill, though, is far from perfect, especially now. I am two ways about the game, and that never used to be the case. My enthusiasm for chasing ghosts through evil, shrouded streets was once unequivocal. Now the uneven brilliance of KCET’s classic first entry to their faltering canon is tempered by the unkind effects of time.

Now I am ambivalent.

In its day, Silent Hill would genuinely unsettle you. Somewhat stupidly, it was a game I could hold up as evidence of a more sophisticated strain of horror game; the Jacob’s Ladder of gaming to Resident Evil’s Romero films. It is fraught with filthy things that go bump in the night, but they are not of the usual ilk, and the jack-in-the-box scare is not their weapon of choice.

Evil shades of children who walk through walls in the school are not scary because they crash through windows to startle you, but because they simply should not be. Similarly, nurses should not be demon automatons skittering in the dark of a hellish hospital. This rarer breed of monsters represents perverse takes on our expectations as we wander, lonely and tortured, from one haunted locale to the next.

Equal helpings of indifference and annoyance taint my nostalgic journey. The annoyance comes of the game’s clunky controls -- which were always clunky, but now, we demand silky control schemes because we’ve played Resident Evil 5, and it’s what we expect. We are less forgiving of the ponderous controls with which we must direct our protagonist through chaos.

The indifference arises from the dated presentation, the languorous pacing. Again: Silent Hill was never pretty, its pacing never perfect, but time spent with more refined fare has made the unsightly graphics less palatable, made the storytelling drag.

Despite all of this, Harry Mason’s mission to find his lost daughter either in this world of snow-covered solitude, or another world of night-clad hell, is easily the most compelling the series has ever offered. The puzzles make the most sense -- inasmuch things can make sense in a world of madness. We are given thematic context, not a road map.

And that's the key: Silent Hill left things unsaid, unexplained, unseen. Playing the game is like unearthing a monstrous otherworldly fossil in the darkness -- you are equal parts fearful of the impossibility of what you can make out, and unsettled by the dreadful mystery of what you cannot.

No game had treaded that fine line quite so masterfully before, and no game has done so since. Silent Hill's own sequels have explained away all of our dread, like the parent who shows their child the behind-the-scenes video clip forever ruining their favourite magic show.

But before more recent dressed up husks ruined the magic, there was Silent Hill. It's far from perfect now, and it never was. But it was pure dread. And it still is.

More Reviews by Marc Golding
	My Hero (Sega Master System) You play the role of The Hero, but you look like Edward Carnby, specifically from Alone in the Dark 2, right down to the blue leisure suit and pitiful de...
	Silent Hill HD Collection (Xbox 360) I am not enamoured of any two old games slapped together (just Silent Hill 2 and 3 in this case) being called a “collection” in the first place, e...
	Silent Hill: Downpour (Xbox 360) Some might argue that the canon was lost once it left the hands of its original developers; since that time it has been passed from studio to studio, each with ...

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