After Capcom’s Resident Evil became a surprise
success in 1996, everybody wanted a piece of the survival horror pie…or, perhaps, the
money that came from selling that pie? Yeah, it was the money. Not sure why I mentioned
pie at all, really. Without question, the most acclaimed and beloved pretender to Resident Evil’s
throne was Konami’s 1999 smash hit, Silent Hill. Silent Hill borrowed a lot from Resident Evil in
terms of its style and gameplay, but it stood out by bringing a unique perspective to the horror.
Resident Evil did a great job of making you worry about what might lurk in the dark corners of
your room, but Silent Hill made you worry about what might lurk in the dark corners of your mind.
All of this is to say that Silent Hill is a game of spookums, but it is also a game of thinkums. It
then adds heaping loads of stinkums into the mix as the series progresses, but we’ll get to that.
Unlike Resident Evil, however, Silent Hill’s time in the sun was brief. Whereas the former is
still going strong today, having reinvented itself successfully for several generations of
audiences, Silent Hill failed to evolve. Though, as a number of entries on this list will
demonstrate, it wasn’t for lack of trying. We will be looking at every game in the
series and ranking them from worst to best, but first: the rules…and a quick disclaimer.
Firstly, because there were so few Silent Hill titles, we will be counting phone games. We are
regretting this decision even as we’re making it, but this would be an even shorter list
without them, so apologies in advance. We will not count pachislot games, however,
because we still have our standards, even if Konami doesn’t. We also won’t be counting
later ports, remasters, or collections. Usually that’s because later versions of games
can be different enough, improved enough, or bigger enough that it only muddies the waters
to consider them. In Silent Hill’s case, though, it’s because just about all of them are
substantially worse! Way to go, everyone. That’s about it for the rules, but I will make
a point of saying that we will avoid spoilers to the best of our abilities. If there’s a game on
this list that you’d like to seek out, fear not; we’ll keep the major plot reveals to ourselves.
There is one other note about the content, however: Trigger warning for…well, everything.
Any terrible thing that human beings can do or have done unto them happen regularly
in Silent Hill. We will avoid speaking descriptively about those things, but please
be warned that the game’s visuals themselves can often be upsetting. That’s what they’re
designed to be, of course, but a warning is in effect for the duration of this video.
Also, we will be making jokes about these games. That’s sort of our duty, as emotionally
stunted idiots on the internet. In doing so, we are not making light of the real-world seriousness
of similar issues. We are appraising these games, and these games happen to contain objectionable
behaviors. We do not mean to belittle or demean that impact. We just want to point our noses into
the sky and say rude things about video games. Basically, the games are intense. Do
you know who else was intense? Moses. He lived in tents most of his life. There.
If you’ve decided not to watch any further, we’ve at least left you with
the greatest joke in history. With all of that said, and with us
already trembling in fear, let’s rank ‘em. I’m Ben and I’m Peter-mid Head, and this is
Every Silent Hill Game Ranked from Worst to Best. #15: Play Novel: Silent Hill (2001)
Game Boy Advance Books and video games can both get deeply into
the audience’s mind. In books, that’s because descriptions on a page literally require the
reader’s brain to do the work of assembling words into images, characters, and actions. In video
games, you’re performing the actions yourself. Well, not literally, thank god. Especially in this
series. But you have some tactile responsibility for what happens, when, and how. Something
like Silent Hill can work in either medium, but Play Novel: Silent Hill attempts, to some
degree, to work in both. And it works in neither. Admittedly, the game never got an official
English translation. We have fan translations, but if we’re unable to judge the
quality of the original writing, we can’t really hold that against it. What we can
hold against it is…everything else. Play Novel: Silent Hill largely retells the story of
Silent Hill in a choose-your-own-adventure style campaign centered around Harry
Mason. It then adds a second campaign, starring kindly police officer Cybil Bennett.
There was also a new character, Andy, who was introduced for a third campaign, intended to be
told across four chapters of DLC. Konami seems to have only ever released the first chapter,
and that chapter now seems to be lost media. Here’s hoping it surfaces at some point, if
only so we can be disappointed by that as well. Visual novels are far more popular in Japan than
they are in the West, so I am aware that I am not the target audience, but there’s precious
little “visual” content here. There are few puzzles in the traditional sense, and usually your
interaction is limited to picking an option from a list in which everything seems equally viable.
There are a variety of endings, but obtaining them requires slogging through the same text
that failed to be engaging the first time. I understand, of course, that Silent Hill could
not be ported to the GBA, but surely a different kind of Silent Hill game to suit the hardware
would have been the wiser move. That might also have been rubbish, but at least we’d have
gotten a game and not a PowerPoint presentation. #14: Silent Hill: Mobile (2006)
Mobile Researching this one is a nightmare, as this
three-part Silent Hill mobile game is completely distinct from another, more-famous three-part
Silent Hill mobile game. And as if Silent Hill: Mobile weren’t a generic enough title to
begin with, the other game – which we’ll get to – was itself released as “Silent
Hill: Mobile” in Japan. Thankfully, it was called “Orphan” in the West, which is
better on the grounds that it is a different word. And because people often refer to Silent
Hill: Orphan as Silent Hill: Mobile, this one keeps getting buried deeper
and deeper in the ground.Which…right, okay, that is where it belongs, but
it’s the principle of the thing, you know? And that’s also why we can’t show
you footage of the game, as everything we found was mislabeled Orphan footage. It’s
my own personal Silent Hill nightmare. Anyway, Silent Hill: Mobile was released in
three chapters, which are three parts of one story rather than one game and two sequels. And
that story is…the first Silent Hill game. Sort of. Maybe? It’s hard to tell, being as it’s a game
I can’t play, can’t read, and can barely research. Most of my information comes from this Famitsu
report, which…well, I can’t read that, either, but the translation helps a lot. To quote the
plot summary: “The night road is suddenly, the flying is gone, the silhouette is gone,
and the accident is wrong.” Classic tale, really. It continues, “At present, there is
a deep fog, a bag, and a quiet taste.” Which… …right, this isn’t going to get
me anywhere. Poking around online, this seems like a retelling of Silent Hill as a
point-and-click adventure game. There was also a rudimentary combat system. At least, I assume it
was rudimentary. I have a difficult time imagining that it wouldn’t have been. And looking at
images of the characters and items from the game, it’s safe to assume that some attempt was made
to capture the interactions and puzzles of the original. But that’s about all we know.
This is a genuinely interesting footnote in Silent Hill history. I did my best with
what little is out there, but I sincerely hope I can learn more about it later, when someone
manages to unearth it and document it properly. #13: Silent Hill: The Escape (2008)
Mobile The Escape is by far the most technically
impressive Silent Hill mobile game, but it’s also far less of a Silent Hill game. In terms
of design, it’s closer to the first Doom, only with a far slower pace and gyroscope integration.
The story is…well, you’re looking at it. You’re someone. Who? Doesn’t matter. You’re somewhere.
Where? Doesn’t matter. You’re looking for the exit. Why? Well, so you don’t get eaten by
monsters. Okay, that one has a valid answer. You roam corridors and can tilt your phone to
perform various actions – such as looking around or reloading your gun – but all
you’re really doing is finding the exit and interacting with it to load the next level.
There’s mileage in a mobile Silent Hill game of this type, but what we got is a concept
rather than a game. If this really were Doom, the frantic action and gory fun could translate
nicely to a gyroscopic shooter. With Silent Hill, though, it’s a poor fit. Aren’t I supposed to
be unnerved? Aren’t I supposed to be working through the repressed memories and half-forgotten
horrors of my character’s past? Why am I just headshotting nurses and moving along
like this is some kind of hunting trip? The Escape is a strange game, mainly because
of how not strange it is. Silent Hill is supposed to be weird and grotesque. Perhaps
it could be reimagined as a corridor shooter, but it’s not “reimagined” here at all; it’s
just a name and some imagery plopped into a template. You can unlock the ability
to play as an alien and as a Shiba Inu, but those should be nice bonuses rather than the
absolute upper limit of the game’s creativity. If the monsters and environments of Silent Hill
are meant to represent something, here in The Escape they can only represent Konami’s complete
misunderstanding of what the series is. It’s blood and rust and wobbly nurses, and if there
were ever anything beyond that, Konami forgot what it was long ago. There’s literally nothing
beneath the surface. In a way, maybe it’s best that Konami let the series die. They certainly
couldn’t remember why it was worth keeping alive. #12: Silent Hill: The Arcade (2007)
Arcade There’s something fundamentally wrong with the
very concept of Silent Hill: The Arcade. And we don’t mean the missing “Game” at the end of its
title; we mean the fact that it exists at all. Silent Hill as a series is defined by a number of
things, and none of those things suit an arcade experience. That’s not to say that spinoffs in
general can’t work, but it is to say that frantic light-gun experiences aren’t the way to go.
Silent Hill is about grotesquerie. It’s about psychological disturbance. It’s about lurking
horror, both all around you and inside of your brain. It’s about pain and regret and
lingering trauma. It’s about nightmares from which one cannot awake. It’s not – you’ll notice
– about shooting wave after wave of monsters. I know what you’ll say, and you’re right to say it:
Resident Evil has its share of light-gun spinoffs, and in our list of every Resident Evil game,
we didn’t complain about those. Well, okay, we did complain about those, but not
about their fundamental right to exist. The thing is, though, that Resident Evil is more
elastic. That’s why you’re sometimes solving puzzles in a mansion, sometimes being chased
through a city by an unstoppable monster, and sometimes roundhouse kicking Spanish gentlemen.
Resident Evil can easily enough be boiled down to situations in which you are surrounded by the
undead and need to fight your way out. In those moments, the game is indeed about the monsters.
Silent Hill, though? Those games are never about the monsters. They are about what the monsters
represent. If you want the monsters to matter, they can’t be targets in a shooting gallery. If
you don’t want the monsters to matter, then I’m not sure why you’d call the game Silent Hill.
But is the game any good? Well…it’s okay. It’s certainly not good enough to warrant a complete
redefinition of what the series even is. There’s a sad story at the core about a girl named
Hanna and a sunken ship and some teenagers, but none of it feels like it has weight. How can
it, when you’re concentrating on racking up high scores and combos? As a light-gun game, it’s fine.
As a Silent Hill game, it’s an embarrassment. #11: Silent Hill: Book of Memories (2012)
Vita The final official Silent Hill game to be
released, Book of Memories seems like it was intended to kill the series. Let me be very
clear about one thing: I am not blaming developer WayForward for this. WayForward has developed a
large number of great games – most notably the Shantae series – and has worked wonders with
other company’s IPs. DuckTales Remastered, Contra 4, Double Dragon Neon…erm…Barbie and the
Three Musketeers…you get the point. WayForward is a developer whose competence has never
been in doubt, and yet Book of Memories is thoroughly disappointing. What happened?
Konami happened. WayForward received its marching orders thusly: They were to make a
Silent Hill game that had little in common with “traditional” Silent Hill games. It was to
have a top-down camera. It was to make use of as many of the Vita’s features as possible. It was
to be different each time you played it. Konami certainly had a long list of demands for a game
they weren’t interested in making themselves. At heart, Konami was looking for a game that
would be engaging and replayable, but they didn’t seem to realize that the best Silent Hill
games were already engaging and replayable, and they managed to be those things without control
gimmicks and roguelite elements. Silent Hill 2 wasn’t different every time you played it; it
was just a good game. Leave it to Konami to ask, “How can we get fans to play Silent Hill
over and over again?” and answer it with, “Make it nothing like Silent Hill.”
WayForward was fenced into designing a randomized dungeon crawler with a custom
character…something that inherently works against Silent Hill’s weaponization of one very
specific character’s very specific traumas. They created a room-by-room button masher, in which
enemy hordes represented nothing other than obstacles to wear you down before you reached
the dungeon’s end. The game was received poorly, with its extremely slight story receiving specific
criticism. Not only were fans getting something they didn’t want in terms of gameplay,
but they weren’t getting what they wanted in terms of narrative or atmosphere, either.
WayForward was set up to fail. Could they have created a genuinely good Silent Hill game? It’s
possible, but we’ll never know. Thanks, Konami. #10: Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008)
PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC Also the name of a dance to which nobody in their
right mind wishes to be invited, Silent Hill: Homecoming is an interesting attempt to evolve
the franchise. Did it need to evolve? That’s up for debate, but Homecoming at least tries to do
something different. And by that, I mean that it takes “Silent Hill” mostly out of Silent Hill.
Homecoming mainly takes place in Shepherd’s Glen. The protagonist – Alex Shepherd –
is a combat veteran suffering from severe PTSD. Sort of. Look, we’re trying
to avoid spoilers, but that’s the premise, so let’s stick with that for the purposes of this
list. He returns home after a discharge – again, let’s stick with that – to find that his family
is missing, with the exception of his catatonic mother. Does this have anything to do with spookum
overflow from the neighboring town of Silent Hill? It’s impossible to know, unless you’ve
read the first two words in the game’s title. Again, trying so hard to avoid spoilers that I’m
dangerously close to being at a loss for words, Silent Hill: Homecoming tries to tell its own
story, but ends up leaning too much on the stories of the first two games. Alex’s struggles – once
we learn what they are – are damningly similar to James Sunderland’s in Silent Hill 2, and
they’re bolted on to a creepy, child-sacrificing cult subplot that ties into the first game.
Was there really a need for a sequel that did lesser imitations of two previous plotlines?
Homecoming is also plagued by performance issues, pointless dialogue trees, and a near-complete
lack of atmosphere. Gory things happen, yes, but very few effective things happen. The
gameplay is among the weakest in the series, with a combo system that is almost always
at complete odds with enemy behavior, and which often fails to work as intended.
It also feels overlong and bloated, with a town that is more populated than ever before.
And, yes, Shepherd’s Glen is allowed to be more populated than Silent Hill. That’s okay! But the
increase in the number of characters does not come with an increase in quality, and most of
them could be cut without sacrificing anything significant. They don’t make the game scarier or
better, in other words; they just make it longer. #9: Silent Hill: Orphan (2007)
Mobile Unlike the other Silent Hill trilogy for
mobile phones, Silent Hill: Orphan was designed and written from the ground up for the
hardware. This is an innately good decision; not only do you free yourself from trying
to force a much larger, incompatible game onto a platform that doesn’t easily support
it, but you free yourself as well from the inevitable comparisons to the source material.
Silent Hill: Orphan, then, has an opportunity to actually find an identity for itself.
The game was released in three parts but, again, it’s less “a game and two sequels” than it
is “three chapters of a story.” Each of the games focuses on a different character, but they overlap
and interlock in a way that’s quite interesting, and which provides new perspectives on
experiences you’ve had in the other parts. The action plays out point-and-click adventure
game style, which is a genre that has had a huge amount of classic entries, but relatively few
horror-themed ones. Orphan handles it decently well, and tells its story naturally and pretty
effectively over the course of its brief chapters. It’s far from perfect, of course. The interface is
fundamentally limited, with only a few commands, and everything from navigation to combat feels
like it needed serious refining. There’s also a reliance on the pixel-hunting and moon logic
for which the genre had so often been derided. But there is a story here that’s fittingly dark,
even by Silent Hill standards. We won’t spoil it, but Orphan centers around a massacre at Sheppard’s
Orphanage. Yes, a massacre at an orphanage is only the beginning. Thirty years later, three
survivors of that massacre – Ben, Moon, and Karen – find themselves forced to confront
the tragedy and learn exactly what happened. It’s laugh-a-minute, as you might expect.
No, in all seriousness, it’s rough, gruesome stuff, tempered though it is by the
limited graphics and clunky puzzles. Orphan is an admirably disturbing translation
of the Silent Hill experience to phones, and it’s actually the best of the handheld games
in the series. That’s…not a high bar to clear, admittedly, but it’s worth seeking out for
fans of Silent Hill. Or fans of absolute, all-encompassing misery. I don’t judge. #8: Silent Hill: Downpour (2012)
PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 Silent Hill quickly became one
of gaming’s prestige franchises, but it almost as quickly fell into a rut of
mediocrity and disappointment. Konami knew that they’d need something truly special to restore the
series to its place of former glory. And so they turned Silent Hill over to…Vatra Games. Who had
made exactly one other game. And it was this. Oh, dear. The same year Downpour released, Vatra
games closed up shop, content with having thrown their clump of dirt onto Silent Hill’s coffin.
And yet, of the games released after the series’ heyday, Downpour does manage to be one of the
better ones. We accompany an escaped convict on this particular stroll through Silent Hill.
Being as everymen – OR EVERYWOMEN – carry enough sadness and regret to populate the town
with monsters galore, a convicted lawbreaker provides particularly fertile mental territory.
But don’t fret; there is sadness and regret as well! Your character’s young son was forcibly
drowned and, at the start of the game, you commit an act of brutal revenge upon the man you
hold responsible. Revenge is a recurring theme, and a really great one for the town of Silent
Hill to dig its claws into. It’s one thing to see your emotional state reimagined as
a set of monsters; it’s another to be reminded that you, yourself, willingly became one.
However, the game was simply not very enjoyable, and the multiple endings were too easily
telegraphed by on-screen button prompts, allowing you to be acutely aware of which
path you were taking through the game. When a character is hanging by her fingernails,
“choosing the option to walk away” doesn’t have nearly the same weight as walking away
yourself, and it’s all too obvious when you’ll be judged for your actions and when you won’t.
Respawning enemies, near-identical environments, and a lack of direction all make
the town sequences feel aimless and, if we’re going to be honest, pointless. The
environments are repetitive and the performance issues embarrassingly pervasive. Additionally,
the characters – particularly the nun and the radio DJ – are “weird and quirky” for the sake
of weirdness and quirk. Whereas previous games were effortlessly unnerving, Downpour works
extremely hard to achieve the same effect, and that effect is dulled by just how
clearly the game is straining to do it. #7: Silent Hill: Origins (2007)
PlayStation Portable Early in development, Silent Hill: Origins was
meant to have a “dark comedy” tinge. Think Dead Rising. Or, actually, think the TV show Scrubs,
which was cited as the inspiration. I wish I were joking. I really do. Thank the lord,
somebody realized Silent Hill and Scrubs have profoundly incompatible tones, but why that
was even a consideration in the first place is beyond me. I think I speak for all Silent Hill
fans when I say, no, I don’t want no Scrubs. I’m sure the game would have been Silent
Hill-arious, but I can’t help but be glad that development turned sharply in the opposite
direction. Fans instead got a leap back in time, with an adventure that chronologically
precedes Harry Mason’s trip to the town. As tormented truck driver Travis, players get
to meet younger versions of characters from that game and see how certain events transpired,
such as Alessa’s horrific burning…but that was previously framed as an accident, while
it’s now being shown as intentional. Indeed, much of what we see here is at odds with what
we learned in the first game. Far from shedding light on those events, it provides a version
of the backstory that is at odds with them. If the intention of Origins were to reveal to
gamers that the first game had misled them about how things went down…well, that was always going
to be met with resistance. More likely, though, the developers simply misinterpreted the first
game, further reducing its value as a prequel. In terms of gameplay, Origins is
significantly easier than most others, but that’s not a bad thing, especially for
those who enjoy Silent Hill stories more than they enjoy Silent Hill combat. What is
bad is the introduction of quick-time events, which are, have never been, and never
will be satisfying ways to fight. Origins tries to sell itself as a prequel, but
it’s one that neither suits nor benefits the story it’s trying to tie itself into. Remove the
prequel nonsense from the equation and you have a passable horror game with a protagonist
who, like all of us, deserved better. #6: Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)
PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC I’ll say up front that Silent Hill 4: The
Room is not about being stalked through Silent Hill by a ghostly Tommy Wiseau who
keeps asking about your sex life, and we are all poorer for it. Instead, it’s another
game that doesn’t take place in Silent Hill; you’re in South Ashfield. The protagonist, Henry
Townshend, travels to various hellish places, only a few of them even near Silent Hill.
There have been conflicting stories about development, but Silent Hill 4: The Room was
either intended to be an isolated spinoff or a completely unique horror game. Either way, there
are very few strands that tie it into what we saw in previous games. In Silent Hill 2, James
– not that one – can find the grave of Silent Hill 4 antagonist Walter Sullivan. In Silent
Hill 3, Heather can read an article by Joseph Schreiber about the Hope House Orphanage, a
character and location we learn more about here. That’s…pretty much it, really.
Walter was not only a serial killer, but he has a ghostly connection to your apartment.
Unless Henry can get to the bottom of a series of murders, in which someone is continuing Walter’s
gruesome work, he’ll never be able to escape. As you complete Henry’s portrait of a serial killer,
your apartment becomes more and more haunted, with the requisite Silent Hill awfulness
bleeding into what was once your sanctuary. And we do mean bleeding. No figure of speech is
too literal in these games. It’s a cool concept, even if the game around it is quite shaky.
The combat is clunky and the adventure is small, with many locations revisited in the second
half of the game. Is that bad? Not necessarily, but it does mean that you’ve seen most of it by
the time you’re halfway through. Also, the end of Silent Hill 4 is one protracted escort mission,
which locks you into a bad ending if your escortee takes too much damage, something you may not even
realize until it’s too late. Her AI isn’t great, either, and the length of the sequence means
that even shouting “Come on, Eileen!” will lose its cathartic value long before it’s over. Which
is a shame, because that’s a really good joke. #5: P.T. (2014)
PlayStation 4 Considering how important of a developer
Konami is – and, especially, was – the company does an extraordinarily poor job of
keeping their games playable. Case in point: If there is anything on this list
that you’d like to try right now, there’s a good chance that you can’t play it
on your current system. With P.T., though, it’s not due the fact that hardware evolves
and Konami fails to rerelease its games. Instead,it’s because Konami actively
decided to remove it from availability. P.T. stood for Playable Teaser –not Peter
Tiny – and was a free download. Teaser for what? At first, nobody was really sure. It
was released by a company called 7780s Studio, which had made nothing else. Finishing the game
revealed the truth, but doing so was not easy. The entire thing centers around an endlessly
looping corridor, with imagery that grows more disturbing and puzzles that are inscrutable
to the point that you won’t be sure if you are making progress or just – quite literally
– running in circles. Also, a dead lady keeps killing you. Fun for the whole family.
The solution is far from straightforward, with you at various points needing to speak into the
PS4 controller’s microphone, do literally nothing, and trigger the laughter of babies, but only after
enough time has passed for any of this to matter. The ultimate reward? The reveal that it’s a teaser
for Silent Hills, a new game involving Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro, and Norman Reedus.
Good lord, with a team like that, you couldn’t possibly make a game that would split the gaming
community down the middle! Oh. The point is, P.T. was the promise of new life being breathed
into a franchise that – as this list demonstrates quite clearly – desperately needed it.
Then Konami and Kojima had a very public falling out, and we never saw anything
more of Silent Hills. We don’t even know how much the events and characters of P.T.
would have had to do with the full game, though it’s safe to say that Norman Reedus would
have stuck around. Otherwise, the man earned one extremely easy paycheck for walking down a street.
P.T. isn’t a full game. It was never for sale. You can’t play it legally anymore. And yet it was
so good, so well done, and so well crafted, that it rockets this far up the list. Now
imagine if they had actually made the game! #4: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009)
Wii Hands up, everyone who expected one of the
best Silent Hill games to be on the Wii? Okay, now waggle those hands around. That’s what you
Wii people like doing, right? Listen, we know how strange it may sound to recommend playing Silent
Hill on the Wii. It’s like recommending playing Postal on a Leapfrog. But Shattered Memories
benefits from the unique features of the hardware. Fiddling with the Wii remote is a reasonable
way to make it feel like you’re fiddling with Harry Mason’s mobile phone, and the IR sensor
lets you shine your torch around more precisely so that when it illuminates something hideous,
you’ll have only yourself to blame. It’s great! Shattered Memories is a remake of the first
game. Except that it isn’t really. It’s more of a reimagining…except that’s not quite accurate,
either. Or maybe it’s too accurate? It’s difficult to speak too much about this game without getting
into spoilers, so if you know, you know. And if you don’t know, I’ve confused you. You’re welcome.
Developer Climax Studios, after impressing Konami with their work on Silent Hill: Origins, pitched
a game called Silent Hill: Cold Heart. It involved a young girl struggling with depression, a
dangerously cold environment, a psychological profiling system, and periodic evaluations from
a therapist. If you’ve played Shattered Memories, you know just how much of that made it into this
game. And if you haven’t, you probably didn’t notice that I slipped you a little clue.
That framework was used to create another perspective on the events of the first game, a
perspective which could, indeed, shatter into various narrative splinters depending upon choices
the player makes. It’s a messy game, and it’s psychological profiling is better in concept
than in execution, but it’s one of the most emotionally effective entries in the series. It’s
an experience as worth having for those who played the first game as those who didn’t. It provides
a place for both these groups to come together. A cold, dark, lonely place, where things are
rarely the same the next time you look at them. #3: Silent Hill (1999)
PlayStation There are some who feel that the low-poly, jagged
grime of the original game set a standard for atmosphere that no other game in the series
has been able to match. They may look better, or be more overtly horrific, but none of them
managed to unnerve in quite the same way as a jittery early 3D PlayStation game could. We
understand the appeal, and there’s no denying that, as clunky as the first Silent Hill can
often be, it retains its capacity to disturb. It also does something that the sequels never
really tried to do again. In those games, the town of Silent Hill is a personalized, tailor-made
Hell for our protagonists. In this first game, however, we control Harry Mason, a man seeking
his missing daughter Cheryl. He isn’t working through any trauma, he isn’t fighting repressed
memories, and he isn’t battling manifestations of his personal demons. Instead, Silent Hill
in this game is taking its spooky cues from a different character entirely: Alessa. We control
Harry, but the story doesn’t belong to him. He’s an interloper who has no business here, and
his only goal is to find Cheryl and scram. Alessa is a child who had been chosen by a
cult to serve as the vessel for their God…and we’re talking Rosemary’s Baby-style. She’s
not opening a portal or summoning a demon; she’s being impregnated and forced to birth it.
The ritual goes wrong. Good news all around, really…except that Alessa’s psychic powers
activate in the chaos and she is horribly burned as a result. Trapped between life and death,
suffering immense physical and emotional torment, with the cult not allowing her to die, her
personal Hell is brought to life in Silent Hill. The voice acting, the writing, the primitive
3D visuals, the fog that was a mechanical necessity to save on rendering distant
objects…everything that could be seen as a drawback works in tandem to create
a memorable world that operates on the logic of nightmares. Even if there were no
combat and no danger, and the entire game were just a leisurely walk through this world of
decay, Silent Hill would retain its ability to haunt. The setting is perfectly realized,
owing, ironically, to its imperfections. #2: Silent Hill 2 (2001)
PlayStation 2 Like Resident Evil before it, Silent
Hill was embraced both commercially and critically as a truly important work
of horror. And, like Resident Evil, Silent Hill in its first sequel did more than just
double down on what worked the first time around. They both expanded their scopes and focused on new
characters. They retained the chilling atmosphere, haunting visuals, and repulsive monsters,
but otherwise crafted an experience that was unique enough to stand on its own.
Silent Hill 2 was also the first – and far from the last – time that Silent Hill itself would
change to specifically torment its visitors. And we do mean “visitors,” plural. We control James
Sunderland, but we also meet Angela and Eddie, two other travelers working through hells
of their own. Silent Hill demonstrates its ability to be many things to many people,
and, for better or worse, that became its defining characteristic in the games to come.
The previous game did a fair job of worming its way into players’ psyches, but Silent Hill 2
takes that as its central focus, truly earning the label “psychological horror.” Here, the town
turns our protagonist into its plaything, helping Silent Hill 2 stand out from its predecessor,
and it’s not this game’s fault that later games would rob this one of its unique approach.
Then, of course, there’s Pyramid Head, Silent Hill 2’s most important contribution to the pop-culture
canon. And, once again, it’s not this game’s fault that later sequels dulled his impact by either
creating similar monsters in his image or plopping him wholesale into their worlds…despite the
fact that he was very specifically created by James Sunderland’s inner turmoil, and
shouldn’t have turned up anywhere else. The game is emotionally upsetting and genuinely
terrifying by turns, with a surprisingly mature story about loss, regret, and guilt at
its core. It’s a remarkable achievement for a game of its era, and, for many, it’s the
peak of the series as a whole. We see exactly why. We disagree, but not by much. It was a
close race, with the winner just barely being… #1: Silent Hill 3 (2003)
PlayStation 2 We’re giving Silent Hill 3 the nod for one very
particular reason: Heather Mason. Our protagonist in this game is the best in the series, and
she connects us to the town in a way that we haven’t been connected in previous games. Silent
Hill obstructed Harry. It toyed with James. But Heather is at the very heart of the events here.
The game picks up the plot of the first game, but retains the intense psychological torment
of the second. Far from being an excuse to tread old ground, Silent Hill 3 instead
pulls from the best of both of those games, presenting familiar concepts in ways
that challenge our preconceptions. The least-spoilery thing we can say is
that Heather is Harry Mason’s daughter, and Harry did the thing any sane human
being would do after leaving Silent Hill: He moved as far from that hell hole as it was
possible to get. But the events of Silent Hill 3 see Heather journeying to the town for reasons
of her own. Or is she journeying back to the town? The gradually-revealed mystery of Heather’s
connection to Silent Hill dovetails nicely with a teenager’s natural questioning of her own identity
and what she’s meant to do with her life. The fact that the town of Silent Hill has any kind of role
in Heather’s coming-of-age story suggests that it’s going to be an even more difficult journey
for her than it already is for most people. Heather is gradually learning how the
world works, and then she’s thrust into also having to learn how Silent Hill works.
That’s a wonderful, horrifying complication, and the game handles it marvelously. To
go along with our favorite protagonist, we have our favorite take on the combat, which
is more challenging now but not overcomplicated or overemphasized the way it would become.
Ditto the exploration, which manages to feel just a bit more open and better designed than
the previous games. It rarely feels like you’re being moved forward across a linear path,
even when that’s exactly what’s happening. Also, the game looks positively stunning for
the PS2, retaining all of the gruesome charm of the previous games without losing anything
by bringing it into sharper focus. It builds upon what came before without distracting from
or diluting what made the prior two games so effective. Whichever of the three you personally
prefer, it’s difficult to argue that Silent Hill 3 isn’t a perfect end to the trilogy.
And it should probably also have been the end to the series. Not that Silent Hill
had to stop here, but having seen everything that comes next? We all would have been
better off if Konami let the series rest in peace. At least we aren’t likely to see them
desecrate this corpse again any time soon.
