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Silent Hill 1 (PSOne)

A Disturbing Game?
There have been games before that have attempted to scare the living daylights out of their respective players (the Resident Evil series being a recent and popular example), but not quite like this. Thanks to an incredible atmosphere, Silent Hill takes the feeling of fright felt in Resident Evil and refines it to a level not seen before, becoming one of the scariest and most disturbing games on the market now. Read on, and be frightened.

Lurking Fear
The game begins with a wonderful intro, having an almost dreamlike quality to it. This sets the story of Harry Mason, the main character of the tale. It all starts on a windy back road, where Harry and his daughter are driving along late at night. Harry spots a woman standing in the middle road and swerves to avoid her, rolling his Jeep off of the side of the road in the process and knocking himself out. When he awakes, his daughter is gone, and he walks off into the unusually dense fog to find her. The quest for his daughter is the overall goal of the game, but don't think that there isn't any other intrigue here.

Throughout the game, Silent Hill offers some of the most disturbingly graphic content ever seen in a game, and presents it in such a way as to make even the hardest gamer peek over his shoulder in fright while playing. While other games have been all about throwing zombies and bats and such at you in an attempt to create fear, Silent Hill takes a more subtle route to the adrenal glands of those sitting around the television. Like a good blend between a good H.P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker story, Silent Hill presents the player with some situations that aren't quite right, and other situations that are just plain wrong. With sounds and fleeting sights, the game suggests a lingering horror lying just beyond your line of sight, or just behind that door, or even right behind you, but doesn't always throw it right in your face.

Enemies in the game tend to be the slow lumbering type, ranging from demonoid babies to possessed nurses, and their presence is always known before they attack thanks to a very innovative idea. Very early in the game, you, as Harry, find a pocket radio that begins to make some sort of odd static noise. You'll find out soon enough that this noise is a harbinger of bad things to come, as whenever an enemy nears, the sound of static gradually increases until the radio is screeching with intensity and you know that you'd better get ready to shoot something. This way, you'll always know when something's stalking you, and you'll quickly learn to fear the sound of static when you enter a dark room.

What about that Fog?
Truth be told, this game has about the most fog and vision limiting darkness I've ever seen in a game, but it's done with a purpose. Here, it serves to set the ambiance and leave the player wondering what's roaming through it. The fog provides a very good effect, as you can sometimes see silhouettes of nearby enemies walking past or turning toward you. In the dark, however, it's completely black. You'll find a pocket flashlight early on in the game to help illuminate your immediate surroundings, but everything else is completely lost in blackness. The lighting effects of the flashlight are very well done, gradually illuminating your surroundings, often causing you to discover some freaky things that are lurking closer to you than you realized.

The graphics in this game are very detailed, no doubt aided by the fact that the fog and darkness only necessitates rendering objects immediately around the character. Nevertheless, the towns and buildings that you run through as Harry are immaculately accurate, to the level that you wonder if perhaps the developer contracted out an architect to design the buildings for them. The school has classrooms, a principal's office as well as bathrooms on every floor and a chemistry lab that looks disturbingly like one of the labs we have at my school. Of course, the lab here doesn't have little knife-wielding zombie children running about.

Sound in the game is perfect, every monster is accentuated with their own unique and disturbing sounds, and quite often you'll enter a room or an area of town and be greeted by some sort of odd background noise that doesn't seem to have any source, but serves to really make you get scared. There really isn't any music in the game, except for one great tune in the intro, but there are the occasional mechanical background noises that sound almost like techno music, but I wouldn't classify them as such.

Plot and Gameplay
The story line here is rather confusing, told mainly through encounters with the few remaining inhabitants of Silent Hill (the town), some you can trust, other's you can't. Most characters show up briefly at unexpected times and are introduced with a short, high-quality CG sequence, before popping back to the normal game engine and starting an extended dialogue to tell their story. Sometimes their info only adds more questions to your quest to find your daughter, but they serve to move the story along, and give you hints about what's going on.

The gameplay itself is slow and plodding, requiring lots of exploration, frequently broken up by a quick battle with an enemy. Weapons include a pistol, shotgun, hunting rifle, and a few largely useless hand-held weapons, and ammo tends to be on the sparse side. There are a good number of puzzles, fewer than many games of this type, but the ones here tend to be very tricky and actually require good thought. Clues are usually found in odd poems (frequently written in blood) and it's only by deciphering the meaning of these obscure lines that the player can move on. There are occasional bosses that must be defeated, but they usually only require a bit of movement and a lot of gunpower.

Thankfully, the boss enemies don't typically require you to run around much, because if they did you'd be toast. The control in this game is simply its worst feature, and it will probably cause some players to grow frustrated and put this title down too early. The game is analog (and Dual Shock) compatible, which helps, but the developers chose to go with the control scheme similar to that of Tomb Raider, where pressing upward always causes the character to walk forward and left always causes him to rotate left. Unfortunately, with the analog stick, this scheme never seems to work well, and, in this game, even with the digital pad it's no better. The controls just feel very, very slow, like it's taking an hour to turn around, and walking up a spiral staircase is a real challenge. The addition of a button to turn the character around would have helped a bit, but a different scheme would have helped things immensely.

Be Afraid
Any player who enjoys a good intellectual dose of fright will love this game, so long as they can ignore the terrible control. Really, without the control issues, it would have been difficult to find a flaw with this title, but as it is the game can be a struggle to play. Ignoring that and just looking at the plot and fright factor, though, this game really shines, and if you can manage with the controls, and don't mind wandering about in the dark and fog too much, you'll get a kick out of this title.

Finally, readers of H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker or Dean Koontz will probably find themselves right at home here, and will certainly enjoy the opportunity to delve inside a story rivaling those of the authors listed above.

Tim Stevens / Gamesdomain.com.