Silent Hill
Created | Updated Sep 21, 2005
Silent Hill is the survival horror series by Konami and KCET, first launched in 1999. It was more tense, plot-complex, and overall more frightning that any of the other previous survival horror game, challeging Capcom's famous Resident Evil series. Three games have been released so far, and a fourth is due this autumn.
Silent Hill - The Town
The Silent Hill series is set in the town by the same name, a quaint tourist town situated in the American countryside, by the Toluca Lake. In the first Silent Hill it is said that the town was first a small village and nothing else before the tourists began to arrive. Now Silent Hill has grown large, complete with an amusement park, a hotel and plenty of shops for tourits to spend their money. But strange things seems to take place in the town, seemingly involving the occult history of Silent Hill, the fire that broke out in a building 7 years before the first game takes place, and the drug market that is attracting the tourists. Throughout the games the player will learn that Silent Hill has a long dark history, stretching through the Civil War and the colonisation of the native's land.
The Games
Silent Hill (1999) PS
Seven years ago Harry Mason and his wife found a baby by the road and adopted her as their own, naming her Cheryl. Though the wife soon passed away from a disease, Harry Mason continued to love Cheryl as his own daughter.
At the start of the game we find Harry Mason and Cheryl going to the town resort of Silent Hill for vacation. Strange events soon take place. A cop on a motorbike drives past and only moments later Harry sees the bike lying by the side of the road; the cop is nowhere in sight. Soon afterwards a figure suddenly appears on the road, Harry turns the car and slides off the road. When he regains consciousness Harry discovers that Cheryl is missing and he finds himself in the midst of the evil slowly engulfing Silent Hill, the Otherworld, "a world of someone's nightmarish delusions come to life."
The streets in the first Silent Hill are named after various horror authors, as a joke for hardcore horror-fiction fans. And if you care to look carefully enough there is 'REDRUM' written on a door in one of the streets, honouring the Stephen King's The Shining.
Silent Hill 2 (2001) PS2, Xbox, PC1
Three years ago James Sunderland's wife Mary passed away from a terminal disease. James is unable to recover from the loss but one day he receives a letter from his wife telling him to meet her at their "special place" in Silent Hill. James, uncertain whether this can truly be a letter from his wife, or merely a bad hoax, ventures to the old tourist town and finds a mist-shrouded hell full of crawling monsters. He also find several people who like himself are searching for something although nobody is clear what it really is. Who's that little girl running around and seems to know a lot about Mary? And who is Maria, an almost complete look-alike to Mary? James persists in his quest to his one desperate question: "Mary...could you really be in this town?"There are several released version of this game much to the distress of fans. All the later editions, Restless Dreams, Greatest Hits, Inner Fears and Director's Cut, included a subscenario where Maria took the part as the protagonist, where the story of her journey before she meets James unfolds.
Play Novel: Silent Hill (2001) GameBoy Advanced
This game was only released in Japan. It is a play novel going through Harry Mason's experience as well as the cop Cybil and a boy named Andy who lived next to Harry and Cheryl. It includes stories about Harry and Cheryl's life together before they go to Silent Hill.
Silent Hill 3 (2001) PS2, PC
Seventeen years has passed since the first events surrounding the mysterious darkness in Silent Hill. Heather is just a normal teenage girl who loves to shop and has a sharp attitude to almost everything, but one normal Sunday the past catches up with her. Escaping from a stranger who claims that he is a detective that has been sent to find her, she suddenly finds herself trapped in another realm, a realm of terror and twisted elusions. Heather doesn't care about the woman Claudia's religious gibberish about an 'eternal paradise' though, she just wants to find her way home to her dad. Yet she is already trapped in the net spawned from Silent Hill and her fate seems intertwined with Claudia and the detective Douglas... "They've come to witness the beginning. The rebirth of paradise, despoiled by mankind."
Silent Hill 4: The Room (due 2004) PS2, Xbox
Henry Townshend, living in South Ashfield, a town neighbouring Silent Hill, one day finds himself mysteriously locked in his own apartment. After five days of entrapment Henry finds a hole that has opened up in his bathroom. He is about to venture into the madness of Silent Hill.
So far only two previews have been releashed, and several screenshots. All of these certainly depeict a game worthy of the Silent Hill series.
Atmosphere in Silent Hill
The Silent Hill games leaves the gamers with a sense of paranoia about the dark enviroment. Sometimes the camara, whether this is intentionally or not, do not always stick to a straight angle and so the horrifying monster can very easily sneak up on the protagnoist unnoticed (though the player does have a radio in every game which makes static noise whenever these monster are near, a concept that only goes to make the game even more intimidating). Another excellent addon to the tension is the occasional sudden sounds, like glass crashing or a chilling scream, or cut-scenes, which appeared most succesfully in the first Silent Hill, some here and there in Silent Hill 2 but really only as a reminder of its precessor, and hardly any (but some very good ones) in Silent Hill 3. It gives the rigth 'kick' to the game which is really where most other games in the genre fails to produce the same effects.
In fact it was this atmosphere that made Silent Hill so popular. Any horror survival game will have 'boo' effects too them, like in Resident Evil where a brain-eating zombie may at any point jump through the window. But the makers of Silent Hill played around much more with camara angle and, espically in Silent Hill 2, the effectiveness of true silence, so that if an enemy would suddenly appear or a scream would creep out of a room, the jump would be much higher (in fact, in my case, somewhere around the roof).
The alternate Otherworld in Silent Hill also has it's very effective side. Players will suddenly find themselves in blood-covered, rusty, and altogether deranged scenes. Bodies of unidentifyiable things are hanging on walls, much more scary than a zombie hanging over a dead body. Because what players experience in the alternate reality is so surrealistic, it is more or less the perfect image of nightmares. In Silent Hill 3 with the modern graphics, the producers managed to make scenes where corridors and walls starts to pump with blood right in front of the eyes of the player. This 'real-time' horror did all but lessen the fright in the game.
Music and Sound In Silent Hill
The composer Akira Yamaoka has shaped the atmospheric and emotional music for the whole Silent Hill series which has been praised as some of the best gaming music ever. The music he makes for Silent Hill is not only of one style but many, ranging from melancholy piano tunes, as in Never Forgive Me, Never Forget Me featured in Silent Hill 3, to heavy rock pieces, like Angel's Thanatos in Silent Hill 2.
In the third installment there was a 'spoken' breakthrough in Akira's music as he applied the voice of Joe Romersa in Hometown and Melissa Williamson, who has sung and given voice to several games and anime including the English version of Cowboy Bebop, who both sang the lyrics of You're Not Here, Letter- From the Lost Days and I Want Love and qouted from the game in several pieces. Akira Yamaoka has truly helped to make Silent Hill what it has become, a dark, sinister nightmare which is so addictive and enjoyable. He is still designing music for Silent Hill which will be heard in the next game in the series.
"The moment you first listen to the sounds of Silent Hill, your emotions dip into the world of Silent Hill."- Akira Yamaoka
Nature of Silent Hill (MAJOR SPOILERS!)
Silent Hill has a lot of underlying layers of symbolism that many gamers around the whole has mused over since 1999. Some have dedicated their time to organise the many theories about the game and what it is actually about.
In the first game Silent Hill is said to be slowly devoured by the evilness of Samael, a demon from the Otherworld (this proved to be false, but due to poor translation from Japanese to English, many still thing Samael is the hidden villain of all the games). The true antagonist, God that has been reborned into a demonic form, is subsequently killed by Harry Mason but God's influence apparently continues as can be seen in the following games. What each player in all games find is that what they see is by no means of the reality we experience in our everyday lives.
Silent Hill has become deserted and isolated from reality, shifting between this world and the Otherworld, populated by fearsome monsters, a world of blood-stained landscapes with deranged decorations of corpses where nightmares and insanity take physical shape.The Otherworld is where the darkness is spawned and it creeps slowly into every nook and cranny of the town of Silent Hill. From one moment to another a protagonist will find scenes completely changed from depressive gray streets to blood-covered halls. Apparently what is seen in Silent Hill is different from person to person, and is a projection of the mind of the protagonist, of sins and self-dispise (mostly apparent in Silent Hill 2).
There are many files and discussions going into much details about what Silent Hill really represents, discussion that never finds an end because Silent Hill can never truly be revealed as it is. It's really up to intepretation.
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1Letter From Silent Heaven is the title of the original scenario with James. The one featuring Maria as the protagonist is named Born From A Wish
