Rabbit Hole

After getting Silent Hill 1 to work on my PC I powered through it-refusing to put it down. I can now see why so many people obsess over this series. In a couple hours I will have my hands on Silent Hill 2 and will be ready to continue the saga. For a PSX game Silent Hill is still fairly new (the PS2 came out after a year of this games release), but still as it stands this game is an amazing example of what the PSX is fully capiable of.

One thing that sets it aside all over games of its time is that the environment is fully 3D. Christ, even Final Fantasy didn’t have a fully 3D environment until much later on in its history. It’s impressive to see how Konami achieved this; through the use of fog. I read somewhere that Konami used the fog in the environment as an excuse not to draw the environment very far off-you can see this when you port it to PC because the distant environment tends to drop off.

The gameplay is instense; much scarier than its PSX counterpart Resident Evil 1. It’s scary in its own special way… Silent Hill doesn’t rely itself on cheap pop-out scare tactics. You often find yourself saying “What… the… F*&#” when entering a new area; truely the developers of this game have some pretty sick minds. Silent Hill 1 isn’t your normal run of the mill survival horror, it’s CREATIVE! One moment you will find yourself in an abandoned hospital, then suddenly you will be transported to an alternate scarier clone of that same hospital. Sure its a prime example of my much hated “reduce, reuse, recycle” method of creating video games, but Konami actually used this technique properly!

One thing I noticed off the bat was the sound. Your speakers/headphones are constantly doing something. Whether its the static from the radio picking up monsters, creaking floor boards or the distant groans of an enemy. Everything seems to be where it belongs. I became obsessed with my headphones since the equalizer is used amazingly.

It’s also interesting to see how much this game represents the sandbox genre without even knowing its doing it. Sometimes you are stuck within a certain building, but when you are outside running about you are free to explore; free to do whatever you want within limits. This brings me to my next point-multiple endings!! Everyone loves multiple endings and Silent Hill 1 is full of them… 4 to be exact (plus the bonus UFO ending). I usually don’t have the ambition to play through a game again, but I am really tempted to play through it and try to get the UFO ending.

The graphics are well beyond excellent for its time. In fact the graphics (on the PC port), are pretty decent even with todays standards. With most games of its genre graphics really aren’t everything, but you can tell Konami worked extra to polish this game to a golden shine. There isn’t much more to say about Silent Hill, but to say “GET IT! and PLAY IT!” if you haven’t already. Silent Hill isn’t as populair as say Resident Evil, but maybe it should be.