Silent Hill Series Part 1

 

Hey! Where's the usual box cover picture!? Well today's review is gonna be different because, I will be reviewing all the main series of Silent Hill! Well if you want to be specific, Silent Hill 1 all the way to 5 aka Homecoming. I will only talk about my feelings when I was watching the gameplay for Silent Hill 6 cause I haven't played it and I don't plan to. I shall talk about that later after I give you the reasons why I loved the older games more. So let's get started with Silent Hill, the first game that came out back in 1999. I was only 7 years old ='D... Ah the memories of the days when games were truly terrifying.

So basically this are the two things I would talk about during the review of Silent Hill.

(This review is gonna have sooo much typos but I'm to busy to edit them ;~;)

1) How scary it is. And NO I do not mean jumpscares. I mean the atmosphere

2) The riddles cause this is... or was a very important aspect of the game since the first one.

3) A bit on combat cause most of the time they are the same.

"Not judging on graphics since this is a very old game, but this deserves a 9/10 when we're talking about horror games."

Just a heads up, I did not play this game when I was a kid(I was only 7), my mom played it but I did get my try at killing a few monsters and running around so I do know the controls, very typical survival horror game controls. Other than that I only helped my mom solve riddles.

You start this game as Harry Mason and you need to remember this name since he appears in the later part of the review as well. His daughter, Cheryl Mason, for some reason, wanted him to take her to Silent Hill, and being the good daddy he is, agreed. While driving there, he saw a little girl on the road and got into a car crash. When he woke up, Cheryl was gone and he sets out to find her in this foggy town. He followed the sounds of footstep to a dark alley until he reached a dead end where he was attacked by weird monsters... and then he died. THE END!! BEST GAME EVER!

No. He woke up in a cafe where he meets a police officer, Cybil Bennett and asked if she'd seen his daughter. Cybil was like "Nope." and then we find out that she has not seen anyone other than Harry. After she leaves, a pterodactyl looking monsters crashes into the cafe and this is where the game truly starts. The monsters in the game is based on the mind of Alessa Gillespie, each of them having a background story of its own. You'd have to wiki everything since they don't tell you in-game.

In Silent Hill, you experience the two sides of the town. The normal, which is foggy but bright and more of less clean and the alternate, where the streets are dark and the walls are covered in blood and rust. What I like about this game is that it's really creepy, you go to elementary school and a hospital. I mean those two places itself is horrifying, not to mention you need to do through both the normal AND the alternate version of it. 

 

 

When walking through the streets of Silent Hill, you'd always feel the sense of unease even if there is absolutely nothing around. Every room you enter makes you ready your weapon or just hang on to your diaper cause you might pee your pants. I remember very clearly in one room which was the bathroom. My mom checked everywhere to make sure there wasn't any items to take and then headed out. As soon as she was near the door, there was a soft sobbing of a female child. I never wanted to go to the bathroom alone for weeks. Even right now as I am looking for pictures for this review I am feeling kinda creeped out.

"The piano riddle"

The next thing I wanna talk about is the riddles. Silent Hill riddles would most probably want you to rip your hair out cause they are hard. If you want to unlock a door you need to solve that and it isn't like "You need a code. *finds code* DOOR OPENED!" Most of the important notes lying around gives you very minimal hints to get your through to the next area. An example would be the piano riddle. There are several pages of that paper and you need to play the keys to unlock something. I can't remember cause that was like 13 years ago, but I do remember is that me and my mom got tricked and was pressing the wrong buttons all these time. Why? Cause even the title of riddle was a hint and we weren't reading that. 

We were stuck there for a god damn long time but when we finally solved it, we felt like a genius! And that was really fun because we solved something on our own rather than some random paper saying "Here's the code 1234! Use it 8D!" Solving the riddles in Silent Hill adds on to the feeling of mystery and they did it very well in their first game.

"The next game. Silent Hill 2 - 9/10. Still not a bad game but horror went down a bit"

Silent Hill 2 starts out with you being James Sunderland, who lost his wife 3 years ago to a terminal disease. However, he just recently got a letter from his wife saying that she is in Silent Hill waiting for him. In his time in Silent Hill, he meets quite a few more people who were there for a specific reason as well. 

Silent Hill 2 didn't drift too far from Silent Hill. The difference was the added difficulty, not to the combat, but for the riddles as well. Players get to choose how hard they want the riddles to be. I played the game on Normal riddle and it was still quite challenging. I have heard from somewhere that in order to solve some puzzles of the game in Hard difficulty of the game requires some knowledge of William Shakespeare, although I could have mistaken that for Silent Hill 3 since Heather is the one that is interested in literature. I'm not too entirely sure about it but if it's true, I am definitely not gonna play that.

One of the puzzles was the one in the prison where you have to read the profile of people who have been hanged and judge who is the innocent one. If you answer wrongly, two monsters would attack you.

You will now be introduced to new monsters as this time, the monsters are based on James's guilt.  Also, this is the first time you'd meet the icon of the entire game, Pyramid Head. He's works more like an executioner or a punisher

"James - 'I was weak. That's why I needed you... Needed someone to punish me for my sins...'"

In terms of horror, Silent Hill 2 isn't as scary, but it's still creepy enough. You still need to visit a hospital, but hey at least you don't have to go to a school now. Instead, now you need to go to the prison.  They kept the same feeling of the alternate and normal world and the atmosphere was still there. The mystery of Mary's death and the appearance of Maria who looks exactly like her. Laura, a little girl who claims she knows Mary is a total jerk to James.

The Invisible Prisoners were the ones that creeped me out. They don't attack you, and you can't see them but your radio keeps having static and James keeps looking in their direction(even though they are supposed to be invisible) and they keep chanting... something. You can kill them and they cry in pain and can't fight back cause they're trapped in a cell.

Nothing much has changed when it comes to combat. You still get a plank/pole thing as your first weapon. The swinging is still kinda weird. The difference is that ammos has become much more available. By the time I reached the hospital and I was all trigger happy and shooting everything. James will now get tired after running for awhile.

Also note that if you bought the HD Remake for the PS3, there is a glitch with the sound when James is catching his breath when you choose "New Voices". He sounds weird even though the rest of the voice acting improved a lot. The original voice acting was really artificial.  
 

"I don't know what to give you DX!! I love Heather but the monsters are so frustrating D<!! 8/10!"

Okay last game for this part! Silent Hill 3. You can most probably see a pattern now. The ratings just keep dropping. but I have my reasons but we'll get on that later. Silent Hill 3 is a continuation of the first Silent Hill but instead of controlling Harry Mason, you now control his daughter Heather Mason, who was once known as Cheryl Mason. She is now caught up in the continuation of what Harry been through, all the cults, God, crazy people... Claudia Wolf. This time, the cult of Silent Hill wants to resurrect their God again, and since they need Heather to do so(I shall not spoil the reason why.) they are now hunting her.

For the first time, you get to control a teenage girl(who by the way has a fear of mirrors) and she is AWESOME! She's nonchalant and when people tell her some stories about cults or bullshit and stuff like that she'd be like "Is every person here a mental case?" and her dialouges are funny mainly cause she's a very typical female teenage girl which I personally think the developers did a fantastic job on her character.

First, let us start of with the combat cause this is something I want to rant about. *breathes* THERE ARE TOO MANY MONSTERS! Instead of taking my time to get into the feel of the game and checking places out one by one, I had to keep running and dodging every monsters in every room cause I get a tiny dagger at the start of the game and sure soon after I get the gun but ammo is very very little.I spent more time focusing on not getting hit, than what the game is trying to offer me.

"Just look at that! 3 nurses in one tiny hospital room!"

Oh, just run past them... They're slow. No. The dogs are fast and the lunge at you. The nurses are slow but their pipe has a freaking long range for some reason and you seems to only meet time in tiny corridors or rooms. Those... blade things are easy to avoid until the start spinning then you're screwed cause they become fast and you are trapped in a tiny room with hordes of them. You try dodging them for the ENTIRE game. I'm not kidding. Since the start of the game, which is the mall, you are swarmed with monsters in 90% of all the corridors. I didn't like that. I wanted to check everywhere to see if there are things to pick up but no, I am blocked by monsters and it wouldn't be worth it for me to risk health to get health. 

Why not just kill them? Cause like I said ammo is little and I'd rather save them for the even harder and faster bosses. Melee weapon? Pipes are slow and the tiny switchblade has neither range nor damage. I mean I can understand why, Silent Hill focuses on protagonists who are very average people who may not know how to use weapons and not to mention Heather is just teenage girl but the amount is just too much for me to truly enjoy a good game cause when it comes to horror and riddles, this game isn't bad.

"Yeah you see this? This is the very first few monsters you'd meet in just the start of the game. Try killing that with a pole"

*breathes again* Fuuuuu... okay... Next to the riddle. The riddle in this game is as hard as the previous games, but the number of those puzzles are dropping which is kinda sad but I'm still okay with it. The puzzles mainly consist of "Find the code" which I find annoying but at least they do it in a way that you have to solve this riddle to solve that code which makes up for it. As I have said in the review on Silent Hill 2, I am not sure which game requires the knowledge of Shakespeare on Hard riddle difficulty, it could be this one I suspect so it's cool with me and the riddle in this game. I am satisfied. Now on to the last part. THE HORROR!

"Tu Fui, Ego Eris"

Silent Hill 3 is terrifying. The type of horror in this game is different from the previous games. In the previous games, the horror comes from almost nothing. There isn't much in the game to scare you, just minor scares here and there but still even when there aren't any scares, you still feel creeped out. In Silent Hill 3 though, they made the horror more direct, still not jumpscares though. They show you why you should be afraid, they let you know that something is coming yet you are unsure what. Maybe it's just me cause I really do not like seeing mannequins in horror movies or games, so I'm showing you guys what scared me the most just walking into the room.

Yeah... Do not want... The worse was they added "Haunted House" in the amusement park. As if the game was not scary enough, the had to add horror within a horror game. 

In my closing statement for the first part of these reviews, I'm just gonna say, throughout the whole Silent Hill series, these 3 are my favourite of them all. They are scary, yet exciting, not too much action to the point where you forget about the horror. Even though I complained about Silent Hill 3's monsters, I still loved it, well mainly cause Heather is awesome but still it's a good game. I don't know where you can get Silent Hill 1 but Silent Hill 2 and 3 had a HD Remake for the PS3. If you're more of the Let's Play kinda people, I'd recommend Helloween4545 mainly because he's funny and likes to talk to Heather, yet gives his own views about the game and he's competent in gaming. Most of the time he agrees with Heather, which is rare since he always laughs at most other protagonists. Best of all, he's British! Mmm~ Accent

And for a bonus for reading this much into the review for the first part. Here's a picture of Heather 8D!