Here we are. October. The month of proclaimed horror, with ghosts and zombies and spiders and things jumping out at you shouting aboogly woogly woo.
SO TO SHOW THAT HERE'S SOME HORROR GAMES
The first game we're playing this month is one that's already pretty well known, but its Silent Hill. Released in 1999, this game released to critical acclaim in the fact that at the time it knew the best ways to make people poo their pants. Well times have changed. Grand Theft Auto causes controversies, graphics are all that matter in a game, and all games must have guns to be good. But hey, we're talking about the good times here. But its 2013, nearly 15 years after Silent Hill's initial release. Horror has changed, so can Silent Hill still prove to be as scary as it was back then?
Beginning with the plot, I say that so Mich I might as well make it a bullet point, begins with Harry Mason, driving to the town Silent Hill withe his daughter, Cheryl for a vacation when a person stumbles onto the road. Harry tries to avoid the person, but spins out of control and crashes. When he comes to, he finds himself inside the foggy Silent Hill, with Cheryl nowhere in sight. After following a figure that looks like Cheryl, getting attacked, and dying, Harry wakes up in a diner and meets Cybil, a cop who came into Silent Hill in order to find a number of missing persons, only to find herself trapped inside, with no way out. She gives Harry a gun while warning him about the monsters outside, and sets off to continue her investigation, while Harry sets off to find Cheryl. Harry soon finds himself in the middle of a plot involving cults, demons, and gods, and soon learns that something much bigger is going on in the small resort town, Silent Hill.
Now the gameplay. In Silent Hill, your goal is to get from point A to point B, beat a boss and watch plot progression. During the trek from point A to B, you'll have to avoid enemies and, more frequently, solve puzzles, usually by using a contextual key on a contextual lock. Makes you wonder how anyone in this town got around. One thing that this game continues to do is be scary. That moment when you hear static always makes me tense, and when I start taking damage from behind from an enemy I couldn't see, I buy a one way ticket to the Nope Express over to awayvil. There's even some cut scene scares that also prove to scare people. So the games still scary. That's good. Now the only problem. In order to reach the scares, you have to win a battle against the controls.
First is the weapon controls. In order to attack with melee weapons, you have to prepare your attack with the L2 button, and then strike with X. While preparing to attack, you won't be able to move. It takes a moment for Harry to swing whatever weapon he's holding, making you a sitting duck. And if you swing at the wrong time, you'll take damage and miss the enemy. This can make even the most basic encounters difficult, so don't be surprised in the beginning if your health drops like a brick. The other option is to use guns. These can make it so that you'll deal damage without taking some yourself. However, even these have cons. Ammo in this town can be scarce at times, which is understandable, since this is a resort town after all. Harry is also prone to missing if he's not close enough to the enemy or is in the dark, meaning that in dark areas you have to gamble with a chance of shooting the enemy at the cost of the enemy seeing you and making a mad dash to rip your face off, or missing and wasting ammo. This is also understandable, since Harry is a writer, and I'm willing to assume that most writers are sharpshooters. This doesn't, however, justify his inability to walk normally.
Anyone who's played Silent Hill sees where I'm going with this, but Harry Mason has tank controls. For those who don't know what that means, let me enlighten you. In a normal overhead game, if you press up, you'll move up, regardless of which way your facing. Same with all directions. So basically your moving in each direction relative to the camera. In tank control games, if you press up, you won't go up, but rather you'll go forward in whatever direction the characters facing. Therefore, your now going forward relative to your character, and not the camera. So left and right are now turning, and forward and backwards are now that direction relative to Harry. When exploring the over world, this is fine, but when the game decides to get cinematic, controlling Harry becomes more like controlling, well, a tank. And if there's an enemy around during this point, death will probably soon follow.
In terms of presentation, its good overall. The graphics have definitely begun to show age, but there's a certain charm that it would lose if it was remade for modern systems. And it doesn't stop the game from getting all of its points across to scare you. It still shows archaic choices though, like how characters don't have eyes or mouths and communicate through bobbing their heads up and down. And the music is great. Though most of the time its just ambient noise and the sounds of the monster and your radios static detecting said monsters, when music does play, it shows that stuffs about to go down, and it leads to a fantastic soundtrack that helps get you immersed in Silent Hill, and it picks up the slack where the graphics miss.
There's even replay value in this game. First of all there's multiple endings depending on certain combinations of characters you save. There's five endings you can get, one of the five becomes available after getting the best ending. Getting the good endings can be hard though, so make sure you explore everywhere, otherwise you'll be leaving Silent Hill with the worst ending. Regardless of what ending you get, you'll be ranked on time it took to beat the game, number of saves, things of the sort, and if you get a good rank doubled with a good ending, you can get additional weapons and items for your next playthrough, like chainsaws, katanas, and other things like that.
But is it worth doing even a single playthrough of Silent Hill? Hm. Well the game still succeeds to scare people, so if that's what your looking for then, yes this game comes recommended. It definitely shows its archaic design though with its graphics and controls, so its kind of hard to recommend this game to people coming for its story. If you power through it, then that's no problem, but there are more comfortable ways to experience the first games story. First is Silent Hill Shattered Memories, a reimagining of the first game on the Wii, PlayStation 2, and PSP. Of course, as many people know, don't go there if your looking for horror. More on that game later. And there's also the first Silent Hill movie. That's all I can say about it. Maybe later. The first Silent Hill is available, for the PlayStation Network for the PlayStation 3, PSP, and PS Vita.
In response to the Racoon City or Silent Hill choice, The Silent Protagonist would turn around, though he'd probably end up in Hinamizawa.
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