Welcome to Silent Hill!!!
Harry Mason and his daughter, Cheryl, are driving down the highway when a mysterious girl pops out into the middle of the street. Harry crashes and then passes out in the car. When he wakes up he notices that the door is open and Cheryl is missing. This is where the adventure begins. Harry goes out into the cold streets of Silent Hill to try to find his daughter and to uncover the mystery of the town.
The game play in Silent Hill is very clunky and choppy, but after some time it becomes manageable. In a lot of ways it is reminiscent of the Resident Evil series. There is a reasonable amount of guns and melee weapons, ranging from a 9 mm to a lead pipe. One interesting game play element is that all of the weapons have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, the shotgun is powerful but it is more of a short range weapon and it takes time to reload. Even though the variety of weapons is pleasing, you really won’t rely on them until you have a boss fight. Most of the game is spent running away or past enemies in order to save ammo for important battles. The inventory menu makes it easy to manage items and also equip weapons.
The puzzles are basically the same as any other survival horror game. Throughout the game there seems like an endless amount of puzzles where you have to find a certain key or you have to move objects out of the way in order to get to another section of the area. Now that it is 2006 the puzzles in this game feel stale and unoriginal, but when the game was first released the puzzles seemed and more acceptable for the time.
Silent Hill has to be one of the top graphical games on the Playstation. The cut scenes are top notch and very powering for a game that was released in 1999. On the streets of Silent Hill the graphics are very grainy and foggy. While in the alternate universe, the graphics are dark and very hard to see. This adds to the scare factor in the game. The environments (school, hospital, church, amusement park) are done very well and add a creepy experience like no other.
The enemies from the game make the Silent Hill series stand above the rest of the games in the survival horror genre. The dogs look vicious, the demon babies are scary, and the roaches will give you goose bumps.
The sound is exceptional. When enemies are near, static will come in through your pocket radio warning you that you aren’t alone. This sound alone will have anyone on edge and feeling uneasy. The music plays a major role in the creepiness of the game. It seems like at certain points the music intensifies when there is uncertainty. The voice acting is a little cheesy and most of the characters just sound way too overdramatic. The replay valve is very high. All together there are 5 different endings for the game. The way you play the game determines your ending. While it is nice to have high replay value it is annoying to know that in order to get the full story you have to play the game a total of 5 times. Silent Hill does a great job in depicting a mysterious town full of evil. On the other hand the game is very short and is full of unoriginal puzzles and clunky controls. Even with all of that in mind, I still recommend Silent Hill to fans of the genre. It is a great start to a creepy, disturbing series.