Silent Hill 1 Review
A quick plot summary:
The story takes place 7 years after Harry and his wife find a baby girl abandoned on the side of the road near Silent Hill. After Harry’s wife dies, his now 7 year old adopted daughter Cheryl wants to go back to Silent Hill. On the way there, Harry crashes his car and Cheryl goes missing in the town.
Throughout, Harry explores the town of Silent hill searching for his daughter. Instead discovering various monsters, cult activity, and where her daughter really came from along with the horrific history behind the small rural town.
What me thoughts are on the game itself
Seeing as this is a ps1 survival horror game, I figure a good comparison at least in terms of mechanics has to be the other survival horror series I have played a lot of, that being Resident Evil. The voice acting in Silent Hill 1 is obviously significantly better than the first Resident Evil, and the story is at least in my opinion more interesting.
The gameplay mechanics behind each are fairly similar, if you are familiar with the style you will try to conserve ammunition as much as possible opting to either use melee when necessary and just run around enemies so you can use your ammo for actual bossfights. Silent Hill offers a greater variety of melee weapons, and I felt throughout that there was more than enough ammunition on the normal difficulty mode.
The puzzles/riddles or whatever were kinda weird and often unintuitive but I also wonder if this is just because I have played too many modern games where the puzzles are either non existent or something stupid like the start of bioshovck infinite. You know, good old yellow paint gaming.
I found it fun. And exploring the town was exciting, the story provided more than enough motivation to keep going and the monster designs were really fun and creative.
My favorite monster design in SH1
This thing, a grey child. So the monsters in Silent hill, at least for the first three games are meant to be some sort of reflection of a characters psyche. In the case of Silent Hill 1, the monsters are a reflection of Alessa’s psyche. She was afraid of other children as they bullied her in school, so this monster is meant to be a reflection of how she saw other children. Pretty freaky looking, also very small and annoying.
My favorite scene in SH1
Lisa is just such a tragic character, and in some ways I feel like the inspiration from twin peaks comes out here in a weird way. I feel like Silent Hill has this similar, mysterious, creepy vibe. Although Silent Hill is clearly a horror game, it still manages to get some great melancholy going on and tragedy with some of its characters. Lisa being the victim of Kaufman and the town more generally. Also I wonder if she is just stuck like this forever, forgetting she died then dying like this over and over.
Also, these FMVs took something like a total of 20,000 hours to fully render.
My favorite song off the soundtrack
Yea, pretty cool. Twin peaks vibes like I said before.
Some little things I thought were interesting
There’s a pinball machine in the first area of the game which is a replica of the very real pinball machine “Medievil Madness.” Just so happens to be my favorite pinball machine too. Apparently the devs were addicted to it during the development of Silent Hill.
This is a quote in regards to the movie based on silent hill 1, I think it’s really funny. Also the bit at the end “There is no political correctness in Silent Hill.” Super funny.
I think a good question can be asked here, can you imagine what it would be like to be Chrisophe Gans daughter? lol
Some interpretation of the story/events
I thought it was interesting just how much stuff went into creating this sense of emptiness in the town, but also how fleshed out the cult is and all the weird symbolism regarding “god”. Dahlia in particular is really interesting as a character and the way she delivers exposition.
Throughout the game, Dahlia delivers little bits of exposition and instructions for Harry. One of these is telling him about the Mark of Samael, sort of suggesting that something bad is about to happen and he has to stop it. But this isn’t really the case as she is hoping that Alessa/Cheryl give birth to the cults “god” which just so happens to look very much like Baphomet/Samael. It’s a little strange that the appearance of this “god” changes between games as they appear completely different in Silent Hill 3 but I assume this is due to similar reasons to why different silent hills appear for different characters like in Silent Hill 2.
Also Kaufman and Dahlia are truly awful people, honestly. Very fun villains.
I used to think that the flowers within the town which I think are called white dahlias, were the cause of the nightmare world and that everyone was just hallucinating the things they saw. And to some extent, the fact Kaufman sells the stuff would seem to support some interpretation like this. But really there’s no way some if not all of the stuff that occurs in the nightmare world isn’t real. Most obviously, how did Cheryl/Alessa give birth to Heather otherwise? Oh also the flashbacks to the past where Alessa shows Harry what was happening to her in the town.
I feel like this series probably benefitted a lot from forum culture kinda like the tv show lost did. There’s a lot of red herrings I think throughout the game, but there also appears to be a lot of kabbalistic lore. Stuff referencing Samael, Lilith, and the Demiurge. Kinda weird.