Fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh...

My relationship with Silent Hill started in my apartment as a child, seeing someone playing a video game, hearing that it was a scary game and promptly deciding that I was too much of a coward to be interested and going back to Neopets in the years before the cult bought it. At some point I decided to cultivate a slightly more varied personality and I ended up getting more into video games, specifically Silent Hill.

Have you seen a little girl? Short, black hair? Seven years old? My Daughter.

Silent Hill for the PS1 cost me 40 dollars at a convention was was the third game of the series I managed to collect. It's the game that seems to care the most about spooking you. It has the spooks and the confusing, infuriating layouts. It has the patently unfair surprises that accompany puzzles of the era. The PS1 graphics require you to fill in the blurry, pixelated gaps when it goes for what exactly you're looking at. The monsters are sometimes vague shapes with strange noises. Graphic designers can't compete with what your imgagination says is behind the pixel, so has that going for it when it comes to spookiness. It also feels the easiert to play, as long as you're fine with tank controls. Outside of the horror, this game had a sense of humor with the UFO ending, pulling off an alien abduction that completely interrupts the plot with a goofy song.

I got a letter. The name on the envelope said 'Mary', my wife's name....

Ah, Silent Hill 2. What can I say that hasn't already been said about the fan favorite, objectively best game in the series when it comes to atmosphere and melancholy? Silent Hill 1 does scariness, whereas Silent hill 2 seems to specialize in anguish. The world is dreary, molding and falling apart for our protagonist, James Sunderland, whose world is already falling apart with the death of his wife, Mary, three years earlier. But, he recieves a letter from her, telling him she's waiting in the resort town of Silent Hill, asking for him to come meet her there. Quickly things go from lonely to nightmarish as things become more like SH1.But something is different. The monsters are ...sexual. With exposed legs and cuvrves like pin-ups and occasional areas covered wall to wall in sticky, white..stuff, it's a very different undertone to the anguish than what you would expect. It has the distinguishing characteristic of depicting sexuality in a way that isn't titillating. It manages to make sexuality more gross than usual and make it horrific very effectively without having it be contaminated by "hehehe a boobie". It manages to take subject matter that is difficult to handle and displays it well. Just as much as the horror, dread and despair are all excellent, this game also has a great joke ending that is tied with SH3's for Best UFO spot.

This is God?

Silent Hill 3 is my personal favorite in the series. Heather is the only female protagonist so far, has a great design and a sparkling gem of a personality. Blonde hair, green skirt and an orange sleeveless turtle neck remind may you very heavily of Ashley Graham from Resident Evil 4. Heather, however, doesn't have a Leon to hide behind. This teen girl is as blunt as a baseball bat but her wit is sharp as the maul she wields. The monsters are bloodless, on the whole, but very fleshy. You've got your typical 'Penis Monster', fetal dinosaur, etc. Then you have some REAL winners like 'Hallway monster' and Insane Cancer. Sh3 was the first game I got from the series. I got it from the discount bin for ten bucks at a GameStop. (I remember hugging the employee that found it for me. I may have made that up at some point but i was a very affectionate kid, so I wouldn't put it past me.) SH3's UFO ending cuts the game dramatically short with making our dreams come true through the power of magical girls and UFOs. Remember, kids, the show's not over until the machine guns fire!

What the hell?

Silent Hill 4 had a lot of things working against it. Dev work was split up between 3 and 4, meaning someone had to get the short end of the stick. You would think it would be 4, from how I started this intro but I honestly think it wasn't. Silent Hill 4 has a lot of new features that don't really work out for it so well, but the features are new. In Silent Hill 4 they were trying things out to shake up the formula.Sadly the things they were trying to incorporate didn't work so well together. I own the first 4 Silent Hill games and 4 is the only one i've yet to beat due to the difficulty of the controls and the limited inventory tag teaming me while breakable weapons sets up for an Izuna Drop. The split staff meant that things like monster sound design was barely a considerations, leading to stock sound effects echoing through the halls. The deep grunt of humanoid enemies sounds more like a burp than anything else, causing it to feel like a joke that's gone on too long once you've reached the end of the game. The monsters don't have a unified design theme; some are fleshy, others diseased. the Twin Victim was the only genuinely upsetting monster in the series and it's probably more due to inital presentation than design.

Not everything is bad,though. Silent Hill 4 has the most bananas plot of the 'Team Silent" half of the series. Most people mock it for very valid reasons, and the presentation is lackluster, but I think it really wanted to do something new enough to look like huge dorks trying. You did your best, Silent Hill 4, and you failed on every account. The second half of the game is frustrating and littered with unkillable enemies that do proximity damage, my man. It didn't even have a UFO ending!

Don't worry, Heather will fix that for you in all our restless, fanfiction dreams....

The rest of these chucklefucks

Origins exists. It was made to answer questions that no one really asked. It teases a dramatic story for Travis that is never really delved into.

Homecoming saw the Silent Hill movie by Chrisph Ganz (who made Brotherhood of the Wolf, a movie that helped inspire bloodborne) and said "SILENT HILL 5!" in a bold voice, paused, took a look at itself and meekly course-corrected to "Homecominging, I said homecoming, guys." It's amazing that it ever thought so highly of itself. It's a cheap fasimilie of SH2, plotwise. The monster designs are uninspired to the point of self parody. The advertisements talk up an action-orented control scheme with visible damage on monsters, then delivers laughably poorly. It feels less like a Silent Hill game and more like the Saw game for the X-Box360. Yeah, buy it for a nickle at a garage sale for set completion if you want to, but I wouldn't suggest playing it.

Shattered Memories tried to be a Wii game more than it tried to be a Silent Hill game. This was very much due to corporate interference. At this point the series has tried to recycle the plot of SH2 and failed with homecoming, so now to use the series' reputation to sell the game by highlighting how "psychological" it is for the critics who eat that up so they give it a good score. The game functioned as intended and did a decent job of pandering to those who considered themselves 'Cerebral' with the tagline that "This game plays YOU as much as You play it!" (Silent hill 2 did a better job of this, without the fanfare, by the way.) It was a better game than Homecoming, overall but was kind of frustrated by the platform requiring game play changes, the decaying reputation of the series and new, no-combat game play style.

Downpour is one i've not played or watched an LP of. The designs seem uninspired. The soundtrack featured Korn. I'm sure it has charms, but I don't think those charms will save it in my eyes.

Extra fun fact!

P.T.

P.T. Will always be the one that got away. A playable teaser released on the PS4 with a background of some trees turned out to be an advertisement for Silent Hills. The game play suggests a reality bending game about paranoia, psychosis and fear in the backdrop of an emotionally struggling family. We will never know for certain the details of a game that would likely have involved Junji Ito as a monster designer in addition to the acting of Norman Reedus and the direction of Hideo Kojima because Konami slam dunked PT into the trash and burned it. The teaser is long gone off of servers and if you delete it off your PS4 you're shit out of luck because it's gone forever. In the wake of P.T.'s death many studios tried to copy cat the format. The one who got most popular from it was Bloober Team. This is almost as much of a blow as the death of the game, given how lazy and masturbatory they would become. Rest in Fog, P.T. You gave us all a real sense of hope for the series for the short time you were here.

Silent Hill Ascension: It's Trauma!

" The Hernandez family plummets into chaos as another death shakes their decimated rust-belt town in Pennsylvania. In a dying fishing village in Norway, the uneasy peace of the Johansen family is upended when their matriarch, Ingrid, dies under suspicious circumstances. Survival depends on them overcoming their darkest impulses and the machinations of a cult, as they discover the horror that connects them."

Silent Hill Ascension is a monstrous, disastrous clusterfuck of an "Interactive Streaming Series." You create your own character, on a website or App, get Influence Points and then spend your parasocial currency on how you want the series to progress, kind of like calling in to vote for American Idol but with less compelling characters. It's as subtle and nuanced as any Bloober Team production, showing that they really did, honestly, truly pick Bloober for the SH2 remake because they saw what they were doing and wanted that for some reason. Really, look at the "It's Trauma" sticker. Honestly, it's a fool's choice, but , LOL. LMAO even. If that's where we are, then let's enjoy the ride.

The chat is automoderated. The twitch integration is poorly managed. The chat had to be reduced to emote only within the first day because if you get enough people spamming the same message, it can get through, no matter how vulgar, libelous or plain gross it is. There are micro transactions for the Influencer Points that are TOTALLY supplementary, guys. It's not like people are spending absurd amounts to be able to influence events in the game, meaning your InfluPoints earned by daily interaction are meaningless in the face of cash or anything. But hey, if you WANT to give them money you could get some cool 'stickers' like It's Trauma or SH3's Bread in an obnoxious digital version of a dude laughing at his own poorly told joke and elbowing you in the ribs. Plus! Characters just yell the themes of the story out loud like they know they're living a script and are pissed as hell about it. I might be mad too if I lived in a story designed to sell meaningless microtransactions to people like the foreskin guy.

The animation is a trash fire. Everything is janked up and misaligned. The segue from one idea to another is always poorly implemented if it isn't just ignored straight up. The graceless stumble from one scene to another might as well be the monster itself. Characters just pop in and out for no reason, their motivations are often shallow and they exist only to push the twine-and-gristle plot together. This is very rarely anything other than annoying. If it's not annoying or baffling it's hilarious (Shout outs to Berries Guy). Anyway, nothing is be gained from floundering about at random.Sadly these guys did not seem to know that when they made this dump.

Silent Hill 2 Remake

In our restless dreams, we saw that town.... Silent Hill. Konami promised we'd have fun there again some day. But we never did. Well, we're alone there now, in our special place, waiting for you...

And now they're here to try again....

Silent Hill 2 did a lot of cool, interesting, thoughtful things. It tackled adult situations in a serious manner and stumbled ass backwards into a sort of grace rarely seen, like a ballerina's genuine misstep perfectly conveying an air of suffering on stage while she shatters her ankle. Silent hill 2 is widely considered 'the best' Silent Hill game. So of course Konami wants to try to make money from it again.

Encouraged by the success of the Resident Evil remakes of the 2020s, Konami partnered with Bloobr Team to release a reamke of Silent Hill 2. It realeases October 8th 2024. Plemty of chatter has been heard about this in the circles that care a lot about Silent Hill. There has been a lot of talk about the changes made. Maria's outfit is different, which is not so big a deal, really. Laura's voice acctress isn't a child, which may just be a directorial consession due to the difficulty of working with children. And James and Maria speak like normal people, which may or may not end up being kind of a problem depending on how they're written. They've even upped the babyface on Angela, to bring her slightly closer in line to her actual age instead of a Dawson Creek casting done in polygons.

As is the style of the time, they're offering pre-order bonuses of cosmetics for the game (a Mira mascot head, or a Pyramid Head mask made of pizza boxes for James) and physical merchandise in the form of some puzzle items in various storefronts. None of these are particularly bad things. It's just that I don't trust Bloobr Team to treat any of these characters' stories with care. They fumbled their own original preoperty so badly that any and all belief in them is damaged. We want to believe, but this isn't the X-files, guys. A respectful handling of Angela, Eddie, and James may, in fact, not be out there. I'm going to hold on to hope though, that the next wave of Silent Hill fans like it for something other than Bubblehead Nurses with vein riddled, rotting legs and sagging, bloody boobs.

Now that the remake is out it's been showered with positive scores. It seems like it's doing alright on the whole, but I have some gripes. I don't enjoy the way they did Angela in some pretty important moments, but nothing too bad. They seem to be going out of their way to make Eddie look as bad as possible because they're still a european company and 'fat = bad' is alive and well in the Eastern Bloc. They had him bare-handing icecream, dude. ( I have not seen all the eddie cutscenes yet, so i'll withold judgement , mostly But fuck, that's a bad start.) The levels are swollen to be much longer than the original counterparts. Some parts are enjoyable, but other parts leave the game feeling bloated and dragging. Ghosting is all over the place, but it's part of the problem with the way games these days are made and not so much a Bloobr related mess up, in particular. The enemies are very numerous and you can't loose them through loading screens, making future speed runs a nightmare.
Not all of it s bad,though. There are little Nostalgia Points in places significant to the first game. The original coin puzzle box, the first place we saw a lying figure; places where you, the player, feel the lack of something ringing through you like a bell. They go out of their way to remind people that things change, nothing is the way you remember it. ( Maria even has a DMC 'Not in a million Years' style commentary on the original outfit that honestly feels lackluster as opposed to affectionate or even mean like some devs like to get.)It feels a bit like justifying the chnages if the remake, but it also is a genuinely good theme to put in through the game. There are also bits and bobs in background places. Lots of dog bowls and bones are in apartments for Mira to eat. A weathered road sign for Silent Hill featuring the font from the first game lays in a pile of junk in an alleyway. Douglas's Hat is sitting in a hotel room very similar to the one from 3. It's a little bit of pandering, but it's more subtle than most of what Bloobr does, so I'll give that little bit a pass.
Heard someone compare SH2 R to coloring inside the lines. It does a decent job of bringing something that's severly aged to a new audeince, but it also doesn't bring anything new to the table. Given that SH2 is kind of a Golden Calf, it's impossible to get the perfect remake. You're not going to get a 100% score on this no matter how you approach it. Some live with the ideal of "trying and failing is better than not trying at all'. Some live within the lines and settle for a C+ / B- score, safe in the shadow of deleterious mediocrity.