Locked Door Puzzle

Having finished the PS2 port of Silent Hill: 0rigins this week I thought I’d take a look at this chilling survival horror series as a whole, and see what contribution Konami’s small town adventure has made to storytelling in video games.

Inner Fears

If you’ve never played a Silent Hill game then the first thing you need to know is these games are scary, genuinely scary. When the first game was released on the Playstation in 1999 Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark were the kings of horror gaming and both relied heavily on cheap shocks and featured very typical antagonists such as ghosts and zombies. Silent Hill was something new focusing on psychological horror it found ways to surprise and disturb the player, even the monsters were twisted bizarre creations unlike anything else in gaming.

A memory that has stuck with me for a long time is playing the opening of the first game for the first time. I run into the foggy town chasing after my character’s daughter down a side alley, however the alley leads me to a dead end. Suddenly a horde of weird creatures making horrific noises come at me and with no weapons I decide to make a run for it. However the alley has gone as if it was never there and I’m trapped! With no way out I’m quickly overrun by these monsters, dead. Suddenly my character wakes up on a sofa… was it a dream? Probably not, but what really happened is never explained.

To be completely honest I found this playing sequence, alone late at night back in ‘99, so scary that I stopped playing the gaming and only returned to it a few years later at the urging from friends who insisted the game was a masterpiece. That may seem a little silly now but it was such a leap forward in horror gaming going from “oh crap a zombie dog has just jumped through a window” to “what the hell is happening here? is my character crazy? what is this place?”. You see Silent Hill leaves you with questions, trying to understand what is going on, you play through the game never really knowing what to expect next.

Born From a Wish

Now Silent Hill games have monsters and combat so they’re called survival horror but for me I think these kind of games are the real successors to the near dead adventure gaming genre. Game progress is achieved through puzzle solving and driven by the story and characters. The goal here is not to level up your character, get the best weapons or defeat the final boss your real goal is just to try and understand.

The actual storytelling in Silent Hill is as masterfully done as everything else, there are no overly long cutscenes filled with bloated exposition, and characters do not stand around while you churn through a dialogue tree pumping them for information. Characters you meet are as enigmatic as the town itself appearing only briefly and telling you mere hints before running off to leave you on your own. Much of the story must be pieced together from the things you find: newspaper clippings, medical records, old hand written notes. The story is a puzzle you find piece by piece, and it’s never made explicit much is left for you to figure out for yourself.

On top of that the horror you face throughout the game is often part of the story too, especially in the first couple of games where everything means something. In Silent Hill 2 James keeps jumping through a series of holes that represent his descent into madness and faces up against the ominous Pyramid Head who is a manifestation of his guilt made flesh to punish him. This isn’t just pretentious over analysis, this is the designer’s intention. The game isn’t just built to try and scare you, which it does, but it’s built to tell the story as best it can.

Getting into the area of personal preference I think Silent Hill is at its very best story-wise in the first two games. The first game is the story of secrets hidden behind small town life and the malevolent forces the people there unleashed. The second game is a favourite of mine and many others, it forgoes dealing with the occult and instead tells a personal story of grief, guilt and depression. The darkness in the game is all about your character dealing with their personal demons. If more games told personal stories and worried less about saving the world I think game storytelling would be in a much better state.

Restless Dreams

Having said all this Silent Hill is not perfect, the controls in first game are very clumsy and the stories in the later games are a lot weaker often rehashing the same themes and characters the first game covered. More than anything having just finished 0rigins I think I’ve reached a sort of Hill-fatigue where having seen it done over and over again I just don’t find it scary anymore.

Silent Hill 4: The Room took a lot of criticism for deviating from the established formula, using a character trapped in his apartment as a central hub and much of the story taking place outside Silent Hill. However I think this kind of experimentation is exactly what the series needs at this point. It was this kind of a rethink that Resident Evil 4 used to drag that series out of repetitive mediocrity. Sadly however the UK developed Silent Hill: 0rigins and the upcoming US developed Silent Hill: Homecomings look as if they’re going to stick the formula as closely as possible.

If you’ve not played Silent Hill and have any interest in horror then you’re doing yourself a great disservice if you don’t at least check out Silent Hill 2. In terms of interactive storytelling I think at its best Silent Hill is a great example of how to tell an intelligent story and let the player put it together themselves instead of dishing it out to them through unwieldy dialogue.