Impressions: Silent Hill series (1 to 4)

doin' puzzles and gettin' scared

    This is full of spoilers

Just finished playing 'Silent Hill 4: The Room' and it's here I stop with the Silent Hill series.

If you're reading this (and not somebody I'm forcing my blog on) you're probably a Silent Hill fan and already know these first four games are the ones developed by the illustrious (though at times apparently dubious) Team Silent. 

After '4' the Team Silent dissolved. And with them so too does my interest in SH games produced thereafter. There are too many other games out there and only so many years a man can live and so many hours he can justify devoting to video games, love them though a man might. I simply and desperately don't want to play Homecoming, Book of Memories or the one with the frosty cover. Because by all accounts and my own personal fleeting impressions, they look shite.

And no. I didn't play P.T. It is with great distress the whole thing passed me by before I got a chance to play it. 

With video games (as with most things) I'm extremely late to the party. I love horror and games but for some reason it was only in my late 20s I discovered the convergence of those two passions in horror games. 

I set off looking for the biggest, baddest, horror bitch in town and was directed towards Resident Evil. But remembered playing Resident Evil 5 as a teen - splitscreen late into the night with my bud. I was naturally some sexy side-chick and he played as some jacked, crew-cut-space-marine-looking cunt. I don't remember the story at all other than it didn't make a lick of sense and amounted to a dodgy excuse to have the player go to Africa and mow down hordes of zombified Africans. I remember it being really silly, a bit racist and not especially scary. Incidentally, I since played Resident Evil 7 and found it to have all the kinds of spooks I love, and I'm currently happily ploughing through Resident Evil Village at time of writing. 

But no, I swerved Resident Evil in favour of its more sophisticated and sexually mature step-sister: Silent Hill. It sounded like it left a lot up to interpretation and contained a lot of loose ends to sink one's brain-teeth into. My vibe. 

I played SH 1 on an Amazon Kindle Fire (yep), 2 and 3 on the HD collection on PS plus (or PS now or whatever the fuck it's called) and I was serendipitously gifted a PS2 for my birthday and so ordered Silent Hill 4 off the eBay. And I shall now reveal to you the best of the 4 games. You might not see it comiiiing..........






Just kidding it's 2. 

2 is the best one. It's hard to pinpoint just one reason why. It's only 1 and 2 that feel like the 'complete' execution of an artistic vision. I know the myth goes that the devs for Silent Hill were failing at other projects and so were given free-reign to make whatever game they wanted, but this sounds like bollocks. You're failing at your projects so you get put on a big budget AAA game where you have unlimited budget to do whatever you want? Perhaps its spurious circumstances like these that add to the mystery of Silent Hill. That and Konami's mysterious direction-notes for the series which are acutely felt on 3 and 4 in particular (#fuckonami).

It may have something to do with it being my first foray to the foggy town, but 2 is by far my favourite. The very intimate, personal story of James' guilt, depression and existential confusion connected with me in a specific way. The town itself -pullulates with atmosphere. The scenes, enemies, set pieces all haunted to great effect and the melancholy mania of James and the lost souls he meets stay with me 9 months later. It's an incredibly confident game, purposefully implementing empty sections which have you do nothing other than walk forward for a long time, for no other reason than to build tension. Eschewing jump scares in favour of looming imagery, and disturbing characters and plot points - the real-world implications of which dwarf any fear that could be conjured by your average spooky town full of ghosts and ghouls. It's a game that's such a symphony of different elements working in perfect, terrible congruence that it's difficult to pinpoint any one highlight. 

Like its predecessor and unlike 3, the town feels intricately crafted for this game, each rusty gate, car chassis or mouldy stain feels unsettlingly deliberate. The effect it creates is a town that feels dense with secrets and disturbing misdirects. 

I could go on for pages about Akira Yamaoka's mesmerising score (and I'll touch on it again before I'm done), but the dark subtlety of the track: combing town west (which is sadly absent from the soundtrack) does an amazing job of putting the player on edge as they wander round in one of the game's initial interim moments. One thing I want to say about the town of Silent Hill in Silent Hill 2 is that for a place with 'Hill' in the title, the town feels exceptionally flat (I guess that's what North America's like). It's really more of a lake than a hill. Come to think of it, it's also not especially silent with all the screeching monsters and randomly triggered horrifying noises. 

The individual levels in Silent Hill 2 are all great too. I don't think there's any single one I'd characterise as weak, and it's really hard to pick a favourite. It's all good, spooky stuff from the apartments to the hotel. 

The levels complement each other really well and thankfully there's no fucking subway section which obviously makes it better than 3 and 4 by default. Before playing Silent Hill 2 I was aware of Pyramid Head's (thing?) design because he's so iconic and I didn't previously think he was scary at all. Just a dude with a big fucking triangle on his head, it's not really scary tbh is it? Get over it. But from seeing him standing behind those bars in Wood Side apartments I realised why he's loved. Almost all of the game's best moments revolve around him, from the death of Maria to the penultimate boss fight, Mr. Head earns his hype. Well done. 

The section I found the most disturbing was the abstract daddy room. I think it might be one of the most intense pieces of symbolism I've ever seen, with those steel, unstoppable pistons pounding through fleshy orifices evoking Angela's sexual abuse. And that's not even mentioning the grotesque abstract daddy itself, a hideous humanoid monster hunched over and melded to a bed implicitly an adult raping a child. Truly the stuff of nightmares and among the most disturbing things I've witnessed in a piece of horror fiction. 


The abstract daddy, horrendous though it is, is kind of out of place though. The other creatures are quite obviously an extension of James' dead-wife-trauma, with sickly monsters crucified on bed frames, or hyper-sexualised nurses who are at once terrifying and alluring, symbolising his attraction to nurses he met as his wife was ill. The abstract daddy is an extension of Angela's psyche and it's not obvious why James can see it if Silent Hill's power is manifesting people's trauma into personal, terrifying monsters. I thought perhaps Team Silent had planned have a monstrous manifestation of Eddie's psyche too but ran out of time. More interestingly, perhaps the town determined that this abstraction was relevant to James somehow, as it is perverse in nature and the creatures who stalk James seem to have something to do with his sexuality. Angela and James also have an awkward dynamic. Maybe the abstract daddy has something to do with that. That could explain its name. It has been abstracted from one haunted mind in service of another. 

For me the enemies here are the best of the series. A particular pants-shitter for me was while I was exploring the town near the Historical Society on the town's northern road and the mannequins flew overhead into path before me. I know some people meme on this because it's a quite goofy, but I found it so unexpected I did a big wet diarrhoea shit all over my beanbag which also burned a hole in my SpongeBob pyjamas. 

I do like the voiceover work in SH2. It's weird and Lynchian and does add to the atmosphere, but I'd stop short of saying this was a fully intentional choice. Its crappy in a way that a lot of translated Japanese games (at least of that era) are and, in my opinion, it's nothing more than a happy coincidence it creates such an uncanny effect. I do think James' characterisation is great though. His behaviour implying his mind to be slowly unravelling works well to unnerve the player. His character suggests a cool distance to what's happening around him too. His increasingly erratic behaviour doesn't appear to be in response to the horrors, but something from within - some kind of internal malady. A monster gnawing deep within his soul. Like Room 302 in 4, James gives the impression as the game progresses that he might not be on the player's side. That he might not have been completely honest with you and - like everything else in the town - isn't to be trusted. The whole thing with the writing on the letter from your wife disappearing towards the end of the game is one of the many masterful details that help to create this feeling.


I need also to mention Akira Yamaoka's soundtrack. Yamaoka has said in interviews his work on 2 is his favourite and that makes sense. I listen to it practically every day (it's good for concentration). Both versions of 'Theme of Laura' offer a moving, jrock tune that are video-game-soundtrack gold. White Noise, A World of Madness and The Day of Night have a dreamy unsettling atmosphere. Betrayal has an awesome ambient, industrial vibe that sounds like pieces of iron clanking together, like if you were hitting Pyramid Head's head with a girder or something. Betrayal is followed by Blank Fairy which has a cool warped, analogue feel. Alone in Town, the album's standout, is a kind of horrorcore hip-hop beat and almost definitely influenced artists like EL Huervo. Going for balls-out heavy metal for the credits with Angels' Thanatos was quite charming. Very early 2000s. By the way, if you like any of Yamaoka's Silent Hill soundtracks (and they're all pretty good) I definitely recommend Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II. 

So 2 was great. Then I played 3. 

And I didn't enjoy this one unfortunately.  I know it's a fan favourite. 3 is a direct sequel to 1 for some reason. I think a separate story featuring another haunted soul returning to Silent Hill would've worked better. Silent Hill 1 already has a pretty convoluted story and I feel Silent Hill 3's story complicates it further. I get the impression Konami might have believed there was some equity in having a story  continuing game-to-game for some reason. But in my opinion this approach works better for an action/superhero/conjuring franchise and not as suitable for intimate, personal psychological horror. I doubt there'd be much of a market for a Jacob's Ladder extended universe (although I didn't watch that movie beyond the credits). I think it's because when it comes to horror, the more explained it is, the less scary it can be. 

People enjoy Heather Mason. I guess compared to the blank slates of Harry Mason and Henry Townshend she's has a personality. It's the personality of a bratty teenager. Maybe that's enjoyable to some people. She likes a bit of banter, like when she pranks Douglas by threatening him with a knife before saying blondes have more fun and then winking/blowing a kiss at the camera and skipping off into the sunset, knife in hand... But for the most part she seems kind of aimless. Like one day she's out shopping and everything just becomes the otherworld for reasons I forget. Then she starts seeing a bunch of gross, phallic monsters. Goes home. Finds Harry Mason from the first game who is actually her father, but is now dead from getting murdered. He's murdered by the cult because they want to really piss off Heather so she's full of hatred which will make it easier to impregnate her with a demon (???). They did Harry dirty on this one considering everything he survived and all the annoying puzzles he had to do in the first game anyway I digress. So Heather decides to go on a revenge mission... it all feels a bit ad hoc. Like her motivations are just because she hasn't got anything better to do (or maybe that's just what teenagers are like?). 


The themes of this game (along with wanting to finish the first 4 Silent Hills) are what kept me playing. They're sexual again, but this time they seem more focused on sexual threat rather than sexual guilt. I wasn't able to connect with this as much perhaps as I did with 2, but it was still interesting to see how the world around Heather conspires to torment her. Male voices menace and goad her over the phone. She has a creepy stalker. She has visions of blood and sinew. The cult seems to have some wacky plot to impregnate her with a demon of some kind. It feels well-connected to pubescent Heather for the most part, although the nurses are back. Not sure what they're supposed to represent, but never mind. It's similar thematically to Alex Garland's Men, which is the best film I've seen recently tackling the phenomena of being a woman on the receiving end of man's worst impulses. Something which irks me is the way this feminist implication is undercut by having 17-year old Heather be only playable Silent Hill character with different costumes, or posed shirtless on the soundtrack cover. 


(Also being able to change detective Douglas Carter's costume to make him seem like some sort of sex creep might be tied to these themes - it's hard to really tell to be honest.)

3 hits you right away - no lube - with a subway level which is a genuine slog. Pushing this brat down corridor after corridor after finding out which is the right corridor from going down too many of the wrong corridors was just a chore and almost made me quit. It's hard to find your way when everything looks the same. I enjoyed the derelict building, but the then game takes you to back to Silent Hill. And it's exactly the same as it is in 2. The devs used the exact same models. You go back to the Brookhaven hospital for an admittedly unsettling sequence, but this whole thing felt like backtracking. Is it not backtracking if it's a different game? This retread in 2 doesn't even make sense though because isn't 3 supposed to be a continuation of 1? And in that case wouldn't that have you returning to Alchemilla hospital? The lack of continuity here suggests that Team Silent were just under time constraints and needed to finish the game so recycled some assets from 2. The final level was cool in a way. The way Valtiel stalks you and the map draws itself as you travel (something I thought was great to see again in 4), but I had my ass kicked by the boss who was the same model as Heather (I forget why) and basically wasn't able to recover from that fight for the rest of the game. It took me almost 100 tries to beat that dopey last boss without getting hit. I ain't playin' Darksouls here dammit! 


The only thing I find more confusing than the story in these games is the puzzles. I'm pretty bad at most of them and usually resort to Google. I don't know if this is because I'm dumb, but they usually seem pretty obtuse. I found myself most frustrated with this aspect while playing 3. Like the Shakespeare puzzle on the first level which pisses everyone off - I found the worst offender was on the last level, finding those cards. I was stuck looking for one card for ages, and it was in the morgue and I just hadn't positioned Heather in exactly the right way to pick it up. If I'm too dumb to get a puzzle, that doesn't bother me as much as when I don't get the correct prompt by standing in exactly the right spot or something. This repeated sweep of the whole level lead me to losing even more health which made the final boss even harder. The whole ordeal left a bitter taste in my mouth. 

I don't really have anything more to say about 3. So I leave you with this excerpt from the soundtrack:

"The world is teeming (or perhaps teaming...) with unnecessary people. 

It's god's decision that I fight. 

As a knight of honour

as a protector of the seal

I sacrifice myself to the blood of criminals"

From Akira Yamaoka's Dance with the Night Wind

Let's do 1.

The year is 1999. The Playstation is in its fourth year. Konami's Team Silent makes one of the most significant horror games of all time. A big-budget title with an arthouse feel. A direct answer to Capcom's Resident Evil series. I played it, in a hampered way, on an Amazon Kindle Fire running a PS1 emulator. Why an Amazon Kindle Fire? Because sometimes I need to play video games on my commute, or when I'm otherwise not in front of a TV and this was the only tablet I could afford. It wasn't the optimal experience. 

I enjoyed the game, but it felt a little too aged for me to immerse myself and not play it as a retro throwback if that makes sense. Felt more like an odd curio than a game. In an ideal world, I would've played it when it came out. But in 1999 I was 7, and would've been too stupid and too much of a pussy to get very far. And my parents wouldn't have bought it citing its rating to mask that they couldn't afford it. 

Like every Silent Hill, but particularly impressive here, is the level of detail in each environment. Before playing I expected something with Final Fantasy-style pre-rendered backgrounds, but was met with surprisingly detailed, fully 3D environments which probably helped immerse players of the time in the horrors at hand. 


This game has the best opening of any of the first 4 Silent Hill games. You're a widower - Harry Mason - your car crashes and your young daughter runs from the wreckage into the fog of the town. You follow her until you start seeing some disturbing stuff and are set upon by marauding fiends. The confusion, the blood, the eerily ineffable enemies, the Sam Raimi-style dutch angles, the rusted industrial underbelly sitting not too deep below the foggy crust of the forgotten town. This intro sets the tone for the entire franchise really well. 

To my mind, this game has the scariest imagery - aided in part by the inherent creepiness of the PS1 - with darkly imaginative set pieces usually favouring visceral horror over the contextual horror of Silent Hill 2. For me, effective visual horror needs to have an original quality. The genre is replete with zombies for example, so they aren't very haunting. Silent Hill is masterful at creating experiences that are at once creepy and original. Take the death of Lisa for example. A sympathetic character, she suddenly disintegrates before your eyes to sombre rather than scary music. As she falls apart, bleeding from unspecific places, she pleads for help, but you can do nothing other than leave to continue your mission and find your daughter. This was extremely haunting and stayed on my mind long after my Kindle Fire was put in standby mode.

This uncanny horror extends to the enemies. These enemies aren't drawn from the mind of our main man Harry Mason but from series catalyst Alessa Gillespie. I don't really remember the specifics, but Alessa is some sort of virgin sacrifice/reluctant mother for the evil deity that's behind Silent Hill's malevolent forces. As a child she's tortured by the evil deity-worshipping-cult and the enemies are a projection of her torment, (she uses her psychic abilities to project her woes on to the town and lure Cheryl there for some reason I'm not sure... you win a baby at the end of the game's canon ending and it's not Cheryl or Alessa but a reincarnation of both that turns out to be Heather in 3... err...... ...er..) and these are super disturbing, like the monstrous bats and bugs that represent the insects that would bite her as she lay incarcerated in the basement of Alchemilla hospital, or pale children representing school bullies at Midwich Elementary. The most disturbing of all of these are the nurses. Like their doctor counterparts, these horrifying bitches have their spine pulled up as if hoisted on a string as they gouge at you with a scalpel. I believe in Alessa's lifetime they were keeping her alive against her will, as Alessa was suicidal due to the torture. This led her to seeing them as grotesque puppets of the cult. That's why they're painfully contorted like they're on the end of a string - to represent the cult's power and malignant control over all of Silent Hill, and not just of its members. They're pretty scary. And I prefer them to the sexy nurses of later titles. 


On whether I'd recommend Silent Hill 1 it's hard to say. It still has puzzles which left me stumped (as well as some great ones such as the piano keys) and a story that's at times intriguing but bogged down with detail and forgettable subplots (there's something also about a drug ring I think) in my opinion. It's a bit less accessible than its PS2 successors, but actually not much, all things considered. Maybe I'll give this one another go, with an actual controller and play it in a darkened room rather than on my way to work and then get back to you with a more insightful verdict. 

And then 4.

Silent Hill 4: The Room is fascinating. For many it's the worst Team Silent entry, but it dominates Top 10 scariest enemies/moments lists. It's full of interesting gameplay design decisions that make a pretty unique experience. I'm told P.T. incorporated some elements from 4 but I never got to play that one did I? 

Like 'Silent Hill', 'The Room' is something of a misnomer, because 302 is actually a one bedroom apartment with four rooms. It was a fitting game for the unprecedented coronavirus-themed staying-at-home activities which were popular at the time of my play through. I played it in my dank mouldy London studio, and envied Henry Townshend's skanky apartment despite its various blood stains and wall holes. That's renting in London for you. I like to think all this added to the atmosphere. Especially cranking up my PS2, inserting the disc and having the old console whir along. There was something hauntingly old-school about the experience. 

And despite 4 hitting you right away - no lube again - with a subway level, I actually thought 4 was great! At least the first half. The premise is you're a milquetoast guy named Henry Townshend, minding his own business, when one day you wake up and your front door has been chained shut. Chained shut with an uncomfortable amount of enthusiasm from whoever did it. Like who or whatever wants you to not leave, really doesn't want you to leave. Creepy. The creators obviously thought so too because they made this image along with Yamaoka's The Last Mariachi (even though I think it sounds like flamenco) the title screen. This is my favourite title screen of the series. 

There's also some spooky goings-on in your apartment too which are probably related. 

The first level, as I mentioned earlier is a subway level and is therefore annoying, although not as annoying as the subway level in 3. There's an egregious escalator section which you have to do more than once which is frustrating. There's a lot of things that you can interact with but are inaccessible, giving you the feeling that the level is full of unlockable secrets (although horrifyingly, you learn later on that this is not the case). 

Have you ever had a dream where you're about to have sex with someone extremely hot but, for some reason, you never get to? That's pretty much what happens in the first level! You're introduced to somebody named Cynthia who seems gagging for it, owing to the fact that she believes herself to be dreaming. 

Unfortunately for a horny Henry Townshend, she wanders off and you wander after her only to find she's been murdered.
Back in your room you wake up and look out your bedroom window and see an ambulance outside the station taking Cynthia's body away, the implication being if you die in the dream world you die in real life. Sadly, it wasn't Fred Krueger (although a Nightmare based survival horror would be incredible). It was a disturbed serial killer called Walter Sullivan from the cult of Silent Hill everyone thought was dead! The rest of the game has you piece together the specifics of these murders and how they relate to your new found incarceration.

I found the story in this one a bit more engaging than 1 and 3. The town of Silent Hill is pretty much ignored which I was ok with. 4 works as a standalone story with Silent Hill only given a cursory mention in the form of the cult. As the title suggests, the game's central mechanic revolves around your apartment. You have to go back there to save, heal and you only have limited inventory so you also need to go there to deposit and pick up items (I horded a lot of broken golf clubs on my play-through). Household items are cleverly incorporated into level missions. There's stuff in your fridge you can use, oil in your cupboard, radios and phones that give you info etc. Each time you go back it feels like a sanctuary, a feeling accented by Yamaoka's Resting Comfortably. 

But then it changes...

About halfway through the game, your apartment isn't able to heal you anymore and starts to suffer from poltergeists. You have to use holy candles to keep the hauntings away. Pictures and even your walls start to change, becoming more unsettling. Decaptitated heads float past your window. The apartment comes alive with malevolent spirits. It's still nicer than renting in London though.
I love this gear switch. Building up this safe space only to turn it against you. It creates a feeling of violation that I can't recall feeling in any other game. There's also little subtle details too (my favourite thing about all the SH games), like the further you get in the game the more distorted the pause animation is. It's masterful! Or at least it would be if the second half of the game wasn't such a slog. 

"Come on Eileen

Come on Eileen 

Come oooooon Eileeeen!"

From Dexy's Midnight Runners Come on Eileen. 

The game has you perv on your neighbour Eileen for the first half through a hole in the wall. It is said if you play the game in a certain way, you can save Eileen from being killed at the end. I didn't bother doing this because boy-howdy did I hate Eileen. The entire second half of the game is a toxic combo of an ESCORT MISSION and BACKTRACKING. For some reason Eileen gets trapped in the otherworld in her glad rags, complete with heels. And you have to drag her slowly through the rest of the game. If you go too fast, she just sticks around wherever you left her, so it's an escort mission in the truest sense. You can also give her a riding crop to help you attack enemies but Eileen's enthusiasm in this regard left me wanting. The game almost seems misogynistic in its treatment of Eileen, in her purposelessness, characterisation and ultimately in the way she's so annoying. I got what I reckon must be the worst ending, simply because my annoyance towards Eileen actively encouraged me to allow her to perish. (I still love the big head though. Shout out big head).


Those items in the subway level - they were just waiting for you to return later in the game to do more puzzles in the same place. Same with the rest of the levels. The game just repeats the levels it had up until this point, only now it's harder because your apartment is out of commission and you have your needy-neighbour with you. The only consolation is a gimmick where certain unkillable enemies can be fixed in place with a limited magic sword and the backtracking might have you reencounter them. That and big bad Walter Sullivan keeps popping up like Pyramid Head to give you a little scare from time to time. Apart from this though, the games' whole second half gives a frustrating impression of rushed late-stage development, something further emphasised by the inexcusable amount of stock sounds that are used for enemies. There was an opportunity to make some of these enemies truly terrifying, but there's only so scary you can be when your response to getting spanked with a riding crop or shot at point blank range is to burp. 

The game's second half is why I think it's a miss for most people and that's understandable. Still, it's a game full of originality. It gets a lot right and succeeds amazingly with some pretty out-there ideas. A better game might have been made with a bit more time or budget, but it's sad to see this one be so admonished. I hope when Silent Hill is given its inevitable reboot, some of the ideas from 4 make the cut. I definitely recommend this one. It's an underrated gem. And personally my second favourite of the 4. 

So to conclude.

These are my personal impressions of Silent Hills 1-4. I didn't really have much of a point to make other than to write about the stuff that stuck out to me in each game. Did I enjoy them? Yeah! Well sort of... The minute-to-minute gameplay wasn't especially fun. But despite this, I was compelled to play all of them. Drawn to them as if by some mysterious force..........👀

And I'm glad I got to experience this significant chapter in horror history. There's no chance they wont reboot this franchise. It's just a question of when. When that time comes, I'll play it and maybe write about it here. And I sincerely hope they don't let Hideo Kojima go anywhere fucking near it. 

Thanks for reading. 

(the editor) Dan. 

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