Silent Hill: A Nostalgic Nightmare

If you do not want spoilers for an almost-20-year-old game (Christ I'm old), TURN BACK NOW. You have been warned.

Fall, 1998: The Love Horror Story Begins

As I recall, I was at school (8^th grade) when I first heard of Silent Hill. My best friend (let’s call him AtOmOs, you know who you are) spent lunch time excitedly telling me about “this horror game that’s coming out soon”. Apparently, you played as some dude (Harry Mason) who was in a car accident with his daughter (Cheryl). He woke up from a coma in a deserted town with his daughter gone, and scary shit ensued.

It might not have been the most eloquent description, but it was enough to make me really, really want to play it. I finally got to do so the following year, soon after the game’s release: luckily for me, AtOmOs was the proud owner of a pirate copy of the game, as well as a "modded" Playstation that could play said copy.

The game made a hell of a first impression with its advisory screen:

Disturbing? Really!? AWESOME.

Then came a quote (“The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh”) that was probably just mistranslated nonsense but which, to my fourteen-year-old mind, sounded, like, really deep, man.

The subsequent introduction cinematic set the tone of the game. It didn’t have anything overtly scary going on, just some melancholic, discordant music, and scenes that introduced every major character, without really explaining who or what they were. Not that it needed to, though, because: 1. the archetypes were pretty clear cut (the plain-looking protagonist, the little girl, the cop, the creepy old lady, the nurse, etc.), and 2. most of these characters are listed in the instruction booklet anyway (remember when games had those, as opposed to obnoxiously feeding you on-screen hints?)

Yet I always found that there was something off about the characters’ faces and expressions. To this day I can’t determine if this was intentional, or if it’s just the hardware limitations of the time playing in the game’s favour. My guess is that it’s probably a bit of both.

Then I started the game proper, and holy shit.

If you've played Resident Evil prior to this, seeing that sign while not having a weapon is scary as fuck.

Well, it looks like I won't have to deal with the dog after all...

Uh oh.

At least I have a lighter, and... it's raining now? Oh, I get it, this game is an allegory about climate change. Well played!

Oooooooh, maybe the dog got run over by that wheelchair! That explains it all, nothing sinister going on here, folks.

Nothing sinister, that's for sure. Ha ha.

OK, OK I get it: climate change is bad, and so is rolling over dogs with wheelchairs. Can I please wake up now?

OH JESUS! Because, you know, crucified dude and all. Also, AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH!

WTF THESE THINGS CAME OUT OF NOWHERE. Also, is this monster killing me or servicing me? It's kind of unclear.

To quote Hotel California: "I had to find the passage back to the place I was before"... oh. Oh crap.

I was a relatively boring (some would say sheltered) teen, and had never been exposed to that kind of imagery. And to say it in terms I’d never have dreamt of using back then: it fucking blew my goddamn mind.

And also blew something else (if you know what I mean) and then tore me a new one. Worth it, though.

The amazement continued when, after waking up in a diner, obtaining a gun and a malfunctioning radio, and fighting off a monster, I found I could freely explore the deserted, foggy town. An open-world survival horror game? HELL YEAH.

Oh. You meant "open world" as in "the world has opened up into impassable, bottomless pits? That's... cool too, I guess? 

OK, so Silent Hill is not technically an open world, but try telling that to my awestruck 15 year-old self. Even though the path was in fact pretty linear, with locked doors and impassable chasms corralling me onward, the town of Silent Hill still gave an impression of space and freedom I’d never experienced in Resident Evil, or any other game for that matter. Maybe it was the fact that, unlike Resident Evil (the second and third installments of which were also set in a city), Silent Hill didn’t use fixed camera angles. Maybe it was that the quaint, Stephen King-esque small-town setting that resonated closely with me, since I just so happened to live in small town on the border of Maine. In any case, I adored Silent Hill.

Contrary to Resident Evil with its nonsensical street layouts and implausible building design, Silent Hill felt like an actual town. A common complaint about the game (and the franchise in general) is the overabundance of “broken” doors that can’t be opened, but even then, the town genuinely looked and felt like a place where people might once have lived, as opposed to a blatantly video-gamey arena, and to me this made it all the more terrifying. This is not to say that Silent Hill is 100% realistic, but I found that the “imperfect” details (such as the streets, which seem much too wide) only added to the surreal, dreamlike atmosphere.

And so after being handed a gun by a police officer (90's game logic at its finest) and picking up the aforementioned broken radio that reacted to the monsters' presence, I wandered these snowy, foggy streets for a while, dodging the occasional pterodactyl…

"Ha ha, nope," says the pterodactyl monster. "It's MY Key of the Lion now!"

…or skinless dog…

Truly, your powers of observation are astounding, Harry.

...

Look, those were alright monsters for a late 90’s horror game, OK?

In any case, what made them truly scary was not their design (more on that later), but rather that their presence was mostly hidden by the fog and yet telegraphed by radio static, making me dread the actual encounter.

The first part of the game – though to be fair, most of the rest of the game also follows this model – was the typical “search for clues” fare, in this case finding pages of Cheryl’s scrapbook, which led me to the local elementary school (but not before I had to find a specific house, which contained a map to the three keys needed to open the door that would let me proceed; again, this is a 90’s survival horror game). But then I finally collected the keys and opened the door and stepped into the house’s backyard… and the world became dark again.

This was absolutely brilliant, I thought. I was a relatively seasoned survival horror player, fresh off of my 100^th replay of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut, and so the foggy town with its few monsters had been a breeze for me. Now this comfort zone was being taken away, and the dread turned up a notch: it was just like the nightmare in the introduction. As I wandered the backstreets by flashlight, heading toward the school, the radio started spewing static, and wouldn’t stop doing so for the next minutes: it quickly became apparent that the monsters were far more numerous now that darkness had fallen. Still, I managed to avoid the creatures without too much difficulty, and went on to the school.

It was when I entered the building, when I saw the books at the reception desk with their cryptic poems (clearly clues for an upcoming puzzle, all written in blood, of course), that I knew this game was going to be something truly special. It wasn’t the gameplay or the mechanics themselves that had me so entranced: no, it was the presentation of it all.

Even without the blood splatters, this would still be creepy as hell. It's the printer. You know that printer is up to something.

At its core, Silent Hill isn’t much different from any other survival horror game of the era, but the oppressive, unrelenting atmosphere, the music (more like noise, really, but it works perfectly) and the set pieces (there’s just something that feels viscerally wrong about a mostly realistic elementary school filled with occult puzzles and demon children) all work in concert to make the finished product much, much greater than the sum of its parts.

Oh yes, remember the Freddy Kruger-clawed, midget demon things from the opening nightmare? They were back, in force: when I stepped into the school's courtyard, the radio started emitting static again and I could barely make out shambling shapes headed toward me.

My friend, who'd been watching me play, was growing more and more anxious by then, but I was ecstatic: I had finally found a true horror game. One that wasn’t just B-movie-style, in-your-face horror, but instead used more subtle methods to build up dread, and wasn’t afraid to play up occult themes. I took a step forward. My light fell on the faceless abomination. I took aim with my handgun, and…

"COME GET SOME!"

Tragically, this was there that my initial experience was cut short: AtOmOs – after I’d repeatedly ignored his pleas to stop the game – reached over and shut off the console. If you’re reading this, you prat, know that I still haven’t forgiven you for this. Even if you did kinda-sorta make up for it by eventually lending me your console so I could play it at my leisure.

And play I did, although after a while I ended up having to give back the console and pirate CD (granted I could have kept the CD, but it was of little use without a modded console to play it). Though I had my own Playstation and plenty of other games to keep me busy, I swore that I would one day track down a legitimate copy of Silent Hill and – to paraphrase Bryan Adams – replay it until my fingers bled. It was a few years later that I finally found a near-mint copy of Silent Hill at EBGames for 15$. To this day, it remains one of the best 15$ I ever spent, though my fingers have remained disappointingly intact after all.

Horror Revisited

Flash forward to this summer, when, after having played (or at least sampled) most of the Silent Hill franchise’s offerings, I decided to replay the venerable first installment to see how it held up, almost two decades after its release. This year was the time for me to do it: according to the instruction manual, Harry Mason is a 32-year old writer. At this exact point in my life, this makes him the most relatable protagonist in the history of ever.

For my latest playthrough, I had come full circle: I was playing an emulated version of the game on my PC in order to be able to take screenshots for this post. This had the added benefit of (very slightly) increased graphics resolution, as well as being able to save the game at any time, which, when you're a responsible (yeah, right) adult who's already way past your bedtime and can't be bothered to head back to the nearest save point, is a blessing.

And so, how does it hold up?

This is a complicated question to answer. For the concise version, I’m tempted to go with “relatively well, all things considered.”

Let’s address the obvious: this game was made during the infancy of 3D games. To vulgarize: the graphics, by 2018 standards, suck balls. Mind you, they were genuinely impressive for a 1999 game. Alas, that time has passed, and technology has moved on. One thing I have to say, however, is that a lot of the environments remain quite impressive even today, if only for the sheer amount of small details that were put in them.

Honestly, any game that features a derelict nightmare mall with a shop called "Just Cats" is an instant classic in my book.

Textures are grainy and tend to visibly stretch and distort as you move around, and character models, though quite passable for their time, are blocky messes.

Case in point, the first boss: Giant Fire Condom

The gameplay doesn’t fare much better: the game uses the unwieldy “tank” control scheme common to survival horror titles of the era, and even by that standard, controlling Harry Mason seems sluggish and imprecise most of the time, especially compared to the more responsive controls of Resident Evil. Granted, this may stem from the fact that Harry is “realistically” animated, and doesn’t exactly stop on a dime. This is refreshing in some ways: I like, for instance, how Harry goes “oomph” and recoils if you run into a wall; as opposed to Resident Evil characters, who’ll just keep running in place like idiots.

The camera is usually decent for an early 3D game, and normally follows the player (save for a few specific spots with fixed camera angles, most notably at the very beginning of the game), but may get “stuck”, especially if you’re in a tight space (NOTE: most indoors areas in this game qualify as a tight space), and completely screw your field of vision. Thankfully, there’s a button to reset the camera behind the player if needed, which is a huge boon when trying to navigate monster-infested corridors.

There are other, rather nice touches that hold up today. The fixed camera angles in the introductory nightmare sequence seen above, for instance, remain for me an all-time high of horror gaming. It was so effective that the same angles were copied, almost frame by frame, for the live-action Silent Hill movie and - in my opinion, made for one of the movie's most compelling scenes. The falling snow, something not seen in any other game of the franchise except for Shattered Memories (which grabbed that concept and ran it to its logical extreme), can be seen realistically falling to the ground and fading/melting, something much more advanced games (*COUGH* Skyrim *COUGH*) don’t feature. I also found that the light effects, though dated, have aged better than the rest of the graphics: I particularly like that you actually get a lens flare when turning the light toward the camera.

The perpetually foggy and/or dark setting goes a long way in covering some of the rougher graphical elements, especially the monster models. Most of them, as you'll have noticed from the earlier pictures, look bland, blocky and, often, outright silly when viewed up close. Thankfully, the game does a fantastic job of making you NOT want to see them up close: the grotesque sounds made by most of these creatures, paired with the oppressive radio static heralding their presence, ensures that most players will either give them a wide berth, or try to keep their distance as they unload pistol/shotgun/rifle rounds into the aberrations.

Perhaps because of the bleary textures and choppy controls, I still find that Silent Hill’s “Otherworld” segments trump those from all other installments of the franchise. It’s a dark, disorienting, oppressively terrifying mess that, playing alone in the dark at 2 a.m., really gives that surreal impression of having walked into a nightmare. Then again, it may just be the nostalgia speaking; there’s no denying that this game had the earliest – and largest – impact on my imagination when it comes to horror.

The bottles are a metaphor, because Silent Hill, it's like a drug, man. I'm addicted. I can't "keep out". This shit is deep, man.

The plot, without going into too much detail, deals with an evil cult and is rather surreal, taking cues from the likes of Jacob's Ladder and Twin Peaks; after a while Harry starts questioning whether he's dreaming and/or losing his mind, and I find that the game really gets across that dreamlike feeling of not knowing what's real or not. By far, the nebulous-yet-engrossing plot remains to me the best aspect of the game, and my favourite Silent Hill story to this day.

As for the voice acting that carries this story across, it is… infamous, like that of many other games from that time period. Though for me, the actors’ monotone delivery of inane lines (Harry seems the most spaced out of the lot) kind of adds to the game’s surreal aspect. However, there’s no denying that the dialogue is absolutely risible; here, have a listen. And a laugh:

Final Thoughts

Silent Hill is a profoundly nostalgic nightmare. There’s no question that I'm a drooling fanboy my personal attachment to the game colours my opinion of it, but even I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I had a slightly hard time getting back into it last summer: the primitive graphics and iffy controls kept me from wholly immersing myself back in the game at first. It took me approximately a half hour to get past that, and then it might as well have been 1999 again. But I can definitely see how those without an existing attachment to the game (or worse, you poor, young souls who didn’t even get to experience 1999) might just find that, holy shit, this game has kind of not aged well, especially compared to its absolutely stellar second and third installments, which, in my opinion, hold up much better by today’s standards. I still think you should give Silent Hill a chance if you like horror games and have never played it (ESPECIALLY if you want to fully understand Silent Hill 3, as it's a straight sequel to this one), but I definitely won’t hold it against you if you don’t.

On that topic, I recently spotted a used copy of the game at a local game store for about $60 (Canadian), but it’s also available for download on the Playstation store for a fraction of that price. There’s also a bootleg “PC” version out there (IE, the one I played while writing this post), but be warned that it uses the European version of the game, which censors the knife-wielding monster children normally found in the school and opening nightmare, and replaces them with the hollow-faced, Freddy Kruger-clawed, teddy bear-looking things seen in the above screenshots.

Well, at least, all versions of the game have the nightmare carnival horsies.

Happy Halloween!

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