Silent Hill (video game)

Silent Hill (video game)

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Silent Hill (video game)

Silent Hill is a survival horror video game, the first in the eponymous series. It was released exclusively on the Sony PlayStation, in North America on January 31, 1999, Japan on March 4, 1999, and in Europe on August 1, 1999. The game opens with protagonist Harry Mason taking his daughter, Cheryl, to the resort town of Silent Hill for a vacation. On the journey to the town, Harry crashes his car avoiding a figure on the road, and wakes to find his daughter missing, and the town deserted and enveloped in fog. The game then follows Harry's journey through the town and his attempts to find and rescue his daughter, as well as his uncovering of the many secrets the town holds.

The first game in the series, it received a strong critical reception and went on to generate multiple sequels, including the third entry in the series, which was a direct sequel to the events of this title, as well as a prequel title. Strong sales saw the game being included in the Greatest Hits and Platinum range of budget titles. A film adaptation, whose storyline was based heavily on this game, as well as incorporating elements from many other games in the series, was released theatrically on April 21, 2006.

Gameplay
Plot
Development

Influences and references
Silent Hill Play Novel

Music
Reception
References
External links

Gameplay

Harry takes aim at an unseen monster

The goal of the game is to safely guide the player character, Harry Mason, through the dilapidated town of Silent Hill in search of his lost daughter, Cheryl. A major threat to Harry's survival are the hostile creatures wandering along the streets and inside buildings, and poor visibility means that Harry will almost always be surrounded by thick fog or darkness.^[1] The player will locate a pocket-size flashlight early in the game, but the light beam only illuminates for a few feet.^[1] For this reason, sound plays a large role in Silent Hill's gameplay, as the player will often be alerted to the noises enemies make, rather than the actual sight of them.^[1] As well as the flashlight, the player will also pick up a radio, which alerts Harry to the presence of creatures by emitting static when they are in proximity, allowing him to detect monsters before they can ambush him.^[1] Another obstacle to Harry's success is his own fragility; being an ordinary man with minimal experience in handling weapons, he cannot sustain many blows from enemies, and will gasp for breath when he has sprinted for a large distance.^[1]

Silent Hill is typically shown from a third-person perspective. In pre-scripted areas, the camera occasionally switches to other angles for dramatic or disorienting effect; this contrasts to older survival horror titles which used such camera angles throughout the entire game.^[2] Because Silent Hill does not feature a heads-up display, the player must check the game's menu to determine Harry's health.^[3]

In order to navigate through a given area, Harry needs to locate and collect a map, many of which are stylistically similar to a tourist map; accessible from the menu and readable when Harry has sufficient light, Harry will write places of interest directly onto the map to aid the player. Navigating through Silent Hill frequently requires finding keys or solving riddles to progress,^[2] and the player regularly faces bosses in each area. Harry defends himself against these, and other monsters infesting Silent Hill, with a number of weapons; both melee weapons and firearms may be found, and limited ammunition may also be acquired during the game, but Harry's inexperience in handling weapons means that his aim, and thus the player's targeting of enemies, is often poor.^[4]

Plot

A map of "Old Silent Hill", the first area visited in the game

The game's opening cinematic depicts Harry Mason and his daughter, Cheryl, driving to the resort town of Silent Hill for a vaction, when Harry swerves to avoid a figure in the road. Regaining consiousness after the crash to find Cheryl missing, he sets off in search of her on the streets of Silent Hill, which are deserted, foggy, and where snow is falling out of season.^[5]^[6] Having followed a figure that looks like his daughter,^[7] he finds himself in an alleyway that transforms by the sound of an air-raid siren into a hellish version of the same world, covered in blood and rust. He is ambushed and overcome by strange monsters at the end of the alleyway, but wakes once more to find himself in a cafe, with the world returned to normal; here he talks to a police officer, Cybil Bennett, whose motorbike they saw on the side of the road before the crash.^[8] Cybil hands him a gun and leaves to find help, while Harry sets out to continue his search.^[9] A sketchbook in the now normal alleyway leads Harry to the local school,^[10] where he contends with puzzles, monsters, and the school transforming to its "Otherworld" state, including a mark on the ground that he finds on the courtyard.^[11] Though he does not find his daughter, he spots a girl who vanishes before his eyes;^[12] hearing a church bell ringing, he sets out to find the source, and meets a woman named Dahlia Gillespie at the church, who gives him an unusual item, the Flauros, and cryptic warnings about what is to come.^[13]^[14]

Departing, she tells Harry to visit Alchemilla Hospital,^[13] where he encounters Dr Michael Kaufmann, a doctor who is as bewildered as Harry about their circumstances,^[6] and later, finding himself in the nightmarish Otherworld hospital, also meets Lisa Garland, a terrified nurse.^[15] Though she knows much about the town and its history, he is unable to get answers before he is transported back to the normal world, where Dahlia reappears and tells him the mark he has seen in various places must not be completed, lest the darkness devour the whole town.^[14] Meeting up with Cybil, who has seen a girl out on the lake,^[16] the pair find a hidden altar in an antiques store, but Harry disappears out of sight of Cybil, much to her confusion; Harry, meanwhile, finds himself back in the Otherworld with Lisa, who gives him directions to the lake, but also tells Harry she feels she's "not supposed to leave".^[17] On the way to the lake, the player may determine Kaufmann's fate - and the game's ending - by choosing to assist him in the resort area; soon after, the Otherworld nightmare begins to take over the town completely.^[18] Regrouping with Cybil and deciding to stop the mark's completion at Dahlia's suggestion, Harry heads to the lighthouse and Cybil to the amusement park.^[19] As a cutscene shows Cybil attacked by an unknown assailant, Harry once more spies the apparition of the girl at the top of the lighthouse before heading to the amusement park himself.^[20] Here, Cybil appears possessed, and the player may save or kill Cybil, once again affecting the game's ending. With the girl appearing once more, Harry unwittingly uses the Flauros to trap her; Dahlia appears, revealing that she manipulated him into trapping her as he was the only one who would be able to get close, and that the girl is in fact her daughter, Alessa.^[21]

With Alessa's powers out of control, Harry awakens to find himself in a distorted world resembling the hospital, simply known as "Nowhere". Here he finds Lisa, who has come to realise she is infact a monster, and begins to transform infront of a horrified Harry, who flees;^[22] her diary, left in the room, explains that she was the nurse who attended to Alessa. Continuing on, Harry views a flashback in Nowhere, and soon finds Dahlia, Cybil and Kaufmann, as well as a figure in a wheelchair, wrapped in bandages - Alessa. Both the flashback and Dahlia's words explain that Dahlia sacrificed her daughter to fire seven years ago, in an attempt to nurture and bring about the birth of the cult's god that resides inside her.^[23] In so doing, Alessa's soul was split in two, and the god could not be born, so a spell was cast by Dahlia that would ultimately draw the other half of the soul back to Alessa.^[24] The other half of the soul manifested itself as Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife found and adopted in the form of a baby when they were on vacation in the area at that time.^[25] In the present, Alessa, sensing Cheryl's return through an increase in her power, manifested herself in the town to place the marks Harry has seen in an attempt to keep the god at bay.^[26] With Alessa's plan defeated and the two halves of her soul now back together, the god creature begins to manifest and kills Dahlia instantly, before turning its attention to Harry, who ultimately defeats it.

Four normal endings are available, depending on whether Harry saves Kaufmann and Cybil. The Bad ending is received if neither Kaufmann nor Cybil are saved, where Alessa births the god and appears as a young woman in white robes; after Harry kills her, Cheryl's voice thanks Harry for freeing her and says goodbye. Harry falls to his knees, and the game cuts to Harry's corpse lying dead in the crashed jeep. The Bad+ ending is similar, but sees Cybil run to him to convince him to flee the decaying Otherworld, which fails, and both are consumed. The Good ending finds Kaufmann alive; he throws Aglaophotis at Alessa to exorcise the god from her body, and it now appears as a giant, winged demon. After its defeat, Alessa transfers her soul into a new baby, giving it to Harry and opening a portal to escape. As he does so, Kaufmann tries to follow, but is dragged into the depths by Lisa. The Good+ sees Cybil escape with Harry and the new baby. Finally, the UFO ending is an Easter egg, accessible if an item is used at certain points in the game, and sees Harry abducted by a fleet of UFOs. This ending has been carried over to most of the games in the series, including Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill Homecoming.

Development

Silent Hill was first unveiled at E3 1998 in Atlanta.^[27] Later that year, it was demoed at the European Computer Trade Show in London, where it was estimated to be around 40% complete.^[28]

The game had issues in passing censors before it could be released outside of Japan. The "Grey Child" monster went through between two and three design changes for the NTSC (North American) and PAL (European) releases, respectively, before it was finally approved by censors. Originally a faceless, humanoid monster which resembled a nude child, it was deemed too graphic for audiences, particularly in a game which forces the player to kill them, and so the NTSC edition of the game featured a modified version with larger body and altered head.^[29] In contrast, in the PAL release of Silent Hill, the Grey Child monsters do not appear at all, and were instead replaced by "Mumbler" monsters that appear later in the game; however, the ghostly and mostly-transparent monsters known as "Larval Stalkers", based on the same design, were approved and appeared across all versions.^[29]

Influences and references

Silent Hill alludes to a wide amount of real world items. Team Silent were avid film, literature, music and art fans. As well as referencing their favorites they also used them unsparingly in creating the plot and atmosphere of the game; which they wanted to be distinctly western.

The surname of Lisa Garland is taken from the actress Judy Garland, Cheryl Mason's first name is based on Twin Peaks?s actress Sheryl Lee, Michael Kaufmann is a combination of Troma Studios producers' Lloyd Kaufmann and Michael Herz and both Alessa (originally named Asia) and Dahlia (originally named Daria) are names derived from relatives (daughter and former wife respectively) of Italian filmmaker Dario Argento.^[30]

On the side of a garage door near the gas station is painted in blood, Near the gas station is a garage door with the word "REDRUM" painted on it in reference to The Shining.^[31]

Some of the creatures and puzzles were named or designed with the books Alessa was fond of in mind, such as The Lost World^[32] and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.^[33]

The names originally intended for the characters of Harry and Cheryl were "Humbert" and "Dolores," the narrator and title character of Lolita. The American staff altered the names, given that the names were uncommon.^[30]

Silent Hill Play Novel

In 2001, a radically altered version of Silent Hill was released for the Game Boy Advance. Entitled Silent Hill Play Novel and released only in Japan, this version was a choose your own adventure-style graphic novel. The game contained a retelling of the original game's story through text based gameplay, with the player occasionally being confronted with questions concerning what direction to take their character, as well as the puzzles, which were a major part of Silent Hills gameplay. After completing the game once, the player also has the option of playing as Cybil in a second scenario, with a third made available for download once the second scenario has been completed.^[34] When the game was exhibited, Western critics were unimpressed, and criticized the lack of any soundtrack as severely detracting from the "horror" factor of the game.^[34]^[35] An unofficial English translation of a portion of the game exists, but it is only a brief demo, and the project has become stagnant.^[36]

Music

Akira Yamaoka composed the soundtracks of Silent Hill and its sequels

The original soundtrack for Silent Hill, composed by Akira Yamaoka, was released in Japan on March 5, 1999 and its catalogue number is KICA-7950. Track 41, "Esper�ndote", was composed by Rika Muranaka.

Reception

Silent Hill received a strong critical reception, gaining an 86/100 and 84% aggregate at ratings sites Metacritic and Game Rankings, respectively.^[37]^[38]

Comparisons of Silent Hill to the Resident Evil game series were inevitable, especially given the latter's popularity at the time. One reviewer labelled Silent Hill a "shameless but slick Resident Evil clone".^[3] Others felt that Silent Hill was Konami's answer to the Resident Evil series^[4] in that, while they noted the similarity, utilised a very different form of horror to induce its scares, attempting to form a disturbing atmosphere for the player, in contrast to the visceral scares and action-oriented approach of Resident Evil.^[2] Adding to the unnerving atmosphere was the audio, which was well received; ambient music was described as "engrossing",^[39] and works to set the player on edge.^[2] Less well received was the voice acting which, although some reviewers remarked was better than that found in the Resident Evil series,^[3] was poor overall, and accompanied by pauses between lines that served to spoil the atmosphere.^[3]^[2]

Reviewers noted that Silent Hill used realtime 3D environments, in contrast to the pre-rendered environments found in Resident Evil, and that to this extent, fog and darkness were heavily used to disguise the limitations of the hardware.^[3]^[1] Along with grainy textures that also arise from hardware limitations,^[4]^[1] most reviewers felt that these factors actually worked in the game's favour, with IGN describing it as "adding to the atmosphere of dilapidation and decay".^[4] In using 3D environments, however, controls became an issue, and in toughter areas, manoeuvrability became "an exercise in frustration".^[4]

Sales of the game were strong enough to gain Silent Hill a place in the American PlayStation Greatest Hits budget releases;^[40] the sales threshold for inclusion in this label was originally 150,000 units sold,^[41] but this figure was later adjusted to one million, and then half a million, before being handled on a title-by-title basis.^[42]

The game's popularity as the first in the series was further recognised long after its release; a list of the best PlayStation games of all time by IGN in 2000 listed it as the 14th best PlayStation game,^[43] whilst a later 2005 article by GameSpy detailing the best PlayStation games listed Silent Hill as the 15th best game produced for the console.^[27] A Gametrailers.com video feature in 2006 ranked Silent Hill as number one in their top ten scariest games of all time.^[44]