You play as Harry Mason, who was driving down the motorway with his young daughter when he had a crash, wrecking his car.
He wakes up in a cafe and begins looking for his daughter, Cheryl in the misty, desolate and monster-ridden town of Silent Hill.
Now, before I go any further - This game is messed up. It is so tense and creepy at points that you will put off the playstation and wrap a towel around it just to stop the evil madness getting you. (I actually did that)
The use of sound effects in Silent Hill, combined with the 'Dark' sections of the game and the overall psychologically disturbing tone throughout makes for one of the best fright-fests in gaming history.
Whilst looking for Cheryl you will encounter a few strange characters in the town who all have their own agenda and mysterious reasons for being there.
One such person is Dahlia Gillespie, a cultist who is also trying to find her daughter, Alessa.
This is where you really get tangled up in the inspired and cryptic storyline, but I'll leave that for you to work out.
This game although slightly dated now compared to next-gen games, is absolutely worth buying. It is full of dark puzzles, horrific monsters, spine-curdling sounds and bone-shivering scenery. It far surpasses Resident Evil games for frights, yet plays very similarly to an R.E game - just...scarier.

Fright fans, fans of psychological horror, Resident Evil fans, fans of classic games or puzzle games, as there's lots of puzzles. And monsters.

The town itself, Silent Hill is fantastic. It is enshrouded in mist and quite a few streets lead to vast unscalable chasms. All the shops and houses in the town are quaint and it gives you a real feel of being in a resort town, but with no people. Just strange creatures in the mist... The graphics and scope of the town is, for the time it was made, stunning. It's massive and detailed for a ps1 game and you really get the feeling that something grand has gone wrong here.
The sound is one of the main parts of the game as well. For instance, you get a pocket radio at the start of the game which emits static whenever an enemy is nearby. This will be one of the scariest components of the game, as the static grows when you and a monster get closer to eachother but the fog obscures your vision, disorientating you until it comes into view - sometimes from behind! Indoor sections of the game are equally as terrifying because you will be using a flashlight attached to your jacket. The flashlight only illumnates a small area in front of you, so when the radio starts faintly crackling as you're traversing a dark corridor, you get the fear. Big style.
The storyline has been subject to a load of theories about exactly what happened through the game. The story shifts through different realities, making it hard to keep up with the at times cryptic dialogue and cut scenes. There is an air of Satanism throughout, but it is never really fully established.
There are also a generous 5 endings to view, depending on a couple of desicions you make in the game. Each ending unlocks something new and different for the next playthrough. amazing!
The intro music is to me, the most iconic game music I've experienced on the playstation, and the sparse other music therein is very fitting to the close atmospheres of Silent Hill.

Ok, It's not perfect. The cut-scene dialogue is atrocious. There are massive gaps between sentences, making it sound hilariously wooden at points not to mention complicated, overly cryptic or banal.
Also, the controls are a bit stiff. This can make avoiding attacks a bit frustrating.
Sometimes you can become totally lost trying to work out a puzzle that requires a certain thing that you've not picked up. This has happened to me with every Silent Hill game I've played so far, so you're not on your own if that happens.

Play it again, but with the lights off. I unlocked a new weapon for the next playthrough, so I was off - back into the creepy resort town for another slab of nail-biting terror. Also, you'll want to play it again just to try and make more sense of the story, or achieve another ending sequence.

Terrified. At some points in the game I cleared a corridor of some creepy little ghoulish children things and went into a room to check it out. I came back out only to find a new creep waiting right in front of me ready to attack! (It was these moments in particular that made me turn off the console and hide under a duvet for half an hour)
Aside from absolutely terrified, I was genuinely interested in the world of Silent Hill: The newspaper clippings and articles lying around featuring the horrific accounts of townsfolk, the ghostly flashback scenes depicting past times, the places of Silent Hill such as the school and the motel... It all amounts to a fully realised game with its own style and definitave atmosphere.

Konami - also responsible for the Castlevania and Metal Gear Solid series. They are gods among men.

You will like it. You will fear it. You will maybe prefer the second and third games, but this must come first. It is an absolute classic, and it will give you nightmares for weeks after. In a good way.

You might hate it. It is slow and clunky at points, the cut-scenes are laughable and well, it just might not seem all that scary to fans of say, Dead Space. (which is also amazing)
Also it could be too scary! seriously, I couldn't play it at first at night or without someone with me.

It's 11 years old so it may seem dated but I must insist you give it a try. It is a compelling, frightful game that will delight you in it's oblique scenery and creature design and torture you with it's scary atmospheres, sound effects and psychological mind-games.

buy it buy it buy it

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Created Jun 07, 2010 at 11:16am • Submit your own review...