Video Game Deconstruction: Silent Hill

Some of you may remember my past rant on the Survival Horror genre, and how I talked about its steady decline. You may also remember that my major point of reference was to the Resident Evil games, simply because it was the one I had the most experience with, and my brief tangent on how hard it is for me to find a form of media that succeeds in scaring me. For the longest time, I have been dying to get my hands on the legendary Silent Hill, both because I frequently heard that it was a great game, but also because it was supposed to be incredibly scary. Well, I recently finally got to play it all the way through, and all I can really say is:

Holy shit.

Silent Hill succeeds in everything it sets out to do. It has solid gameplay, a truly terrifying atmosphere, and a deep story that leaves you thinking long after the ending cutscene plays out. This is not only the pinnacle of what Survival Horror should be, but what all media should set out to do: Tell a story that immerses the viewer, but doesn't talk down to him or her with endless strings of exposition that points out every plot point.

As should be obvious, this article will contain heavy spoilers for the game. However, I will first go into depth on what exactly makes this game so scary, and why it works so well, and will try to keep story spoilers to a bare minimum. So if you don't want spoilers on the game's environment, don't click the jump link. If you don't mind that, but don't want plot spoilers, I will mark out the relevant stopping point with a fairly conspicuous marker.

Silent Hill succeeds in doing the one thing that almost nothing can: Scare the shit out of me. Sure, some things manage to creep me out, at night, when I'm alone. But Silent Hill really put me on edge for the entire time I was playing it, and then some. Now, to be fair, I imposed a number of rules on myself for my initial playthrough:1) I may only play when I am alone.
2) I may only play at night time, and with all the lights off.
3) The rest of the house must be silent when I am playing.

This helped me get into the proper mood, and really expanded the game's influence on me. But what makes this game so scary? Allow me to discuss a key scene from the game:

You start exploring a back alley. You come across a dead dog. Kinda gruesome, but nothing too bad. As you go deeper into the alley, everything slowly gets darker, until you eventually hit complete darkness. You light a match so you can see: its soft glow illuminates a good 2-3 feet in front of you. An air raid siren sounds in the background as you enter a building. Cots and overturned carts litter the hall. From your limited field of vision, everything seems to be metallic, and either rusty or bloody. Your path eventually becomes a dead end, where you find a mutilated corpse strung up onto the wall. You turn to leave this horrible place, when you are suddenly attacked from behind. Your paltry match does not provide nearly enough light to see who or what is attacking you, or even how many attackers there are. You try to run to safety, frantically searching for the door, but the hall has many twists and turns, and your small amount of light cannot help you as you slam into walls and fixtures in your mad search for an escape. No matter how fast you run, your attackers seem to always be right behind you, slashing away at your defenseless back. You eventually succumb to the wounds, fall to the floor, and die.

This is the FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF THE GAME. As you can see, the game starts you off with a very clear message: It doesn't fuck around. So why were you in that terrible place to begin with? You are Harry Mason, a father who was passing through town with his very young daughter, Cheryl, on their way to their favorite vacation spot. While driving, a young woman appeared on the road, causing Harry to swerve to avoid her and ending up in an accident. Harry awakens later to see Cheryl missing. He steps out of his wrecked Jeep to find her, only to see her venturing into a nearby alley...

The rest of the game is Harry's journey in searching for his daughter. And this provides the player with something that very few other games bother with: Motivation. In most other games, your protagonist of choice has little to no reason to be exploring these awful places. You will find yourself constantly saying to yourself, "Aw hell, I really don't want to go in there. Why am I doing this anyway? There's a much more logical path of escape, like, right over there, that most likely isn't filled with things that can rip my head right off." But here, you have every reason to be going into that dark basement. Its entirely possible that Cheryl is down there. Why am I crawling into this pitch black sewer? Because my sweet little helpless girl is on the other side. Its a fairly simple, but effective, way to keep the character going forward, and to keep the player invested.

One of the biggest contributors to the game's terrifying environments is a fairly simple thing: Lighting. Most of the game takes place in very dark areas. Your only source of light in these places is your pocket flashlight, which does a very good job of illuminating what's in front of you, and not much else. In fact, keeping your flashlight on will draw enemies to you. It's entirely possible, but very difficult, to navigate with the flashlight turned off, and is actually much safer, as enemies won't notice you at all unless you fire your gun, run, or get right in front of them. However, if your light is off, you can't pick up items, check your map, or open locked doors. Add all this to the fact that, even when your flashlight is turned on, you can barely see anything, and you have some pretty scary stuff on your hands.

The next biggest thing, maybe even bigger than lighting, is the use of sound. The most obvious example here is your radio. Harry carries with him a small radio that seems to not work, as it can't channel in any radio stations. However, it emits white noise whenever a monster is nearby. Luckily, the monsters can't hear this noise, so it won't draw their attention, but its still unnerving to hear it start up. At first, its a scary thing to have, knowing that that noise means that there's something nearby that hates your very existence. But after a while, it becomes comforting to have a warning system. Which I guess is why the radio doesn't work in the sewers, allowing all sorts of things to sneak up on you!

Ambient noises play a major role too, and boy, do they work. This game throws everything it can at you. There will be times where you'll enter a room with steel grating flooring, and you'll hear rattling and banging coming from below you. You'll go to leave a room, and hear scraping and thuds on the other side of the wall. These are fairly standard fare, but what about the nearly inaudible snarl when you start up the school's boiler? Or the unnaturally loud and arrhythmic machinery noises that the drawbridge makes when you start it up? The game largely doesn't have any background music, but some areas will have background hellish noises that almost sound like music, but just... off. Some rooms may have just a series of thudding noises, or a steady screeching noise that does a wonderful job of putting you on edge in an otherwise safe room. In short, the game always has something new to throw at your ears and soil your pants with.

Now, this is kind of an odd thing to credit for the game's terror values, but it does a wonderful job at pacing. You'll be spending almost the entire game facing something darker and scarier, and wishing you could go back to where you were half an hour ago. You start in the streets, where its daytime, but heavily foggy. Dogs and large monstrous birds run at you from the mists and put you on constant edge. But then it suddenly gets dark, and your field of vision is even worse. Suddenly the fog seems like a nice alternative. Then you enter the school, full of dark hallways and small demons that have a knack for sneaking up on you in enclosed spaces. The openness of the dark streets seems preferable here. By the end of the game, the foggy streets that terrified you so much seem almost tranquil in comparison to what you're facing now.

Now, all of this is scary in its own right, but to top it all off, you are also given a deep story that is not only creepy, but also puts you into a state of constant doubt. And now we enter...

 

Massive spoiler land. The rest of this article is meant for people that have played the game, or don't mind having most of the plot revealed to them. You have been warned.

On the surface, the events unfolding seem very clear: The forces of darkness are swallowing up the small town of Silent Hill. Demons are running free, Cheryl has been captured by them for some evil purpose, and Harry keeps getting dragged into the Otherworld, a crude, evil, mirror-image of the town, where the monsters are stronger, everything is darker, more run down, and covered in blood, and even the streets themselves are converted into some weird metallic grating. Lisa, a nurse at the local hospital, tells Harry about how before the resort town Silent Hill was built, it was a small village where the residents practiced dark, occult magic. I could explain the rest of the plot here, but it would only male sense to those who already know it, which would be a waste of everyone's time. So to be brief, the story climaxes with Harry having to battle his transformed daughter, who either dies or gets reborn, depending on how you handled previous game events, and ends either with Harry escaping with his newborn daughter, or cutting to the revelation that the entire game was really just a hallucination Harry was having before dying in his crashed Jeep. Either way, starting a new game on your saved file starts with Harry waking up in the diner just after his alleyway encounter, perhaps implying that he's caught in some kind of infinite loop of pain and misery.

Now, that's whats going on on the surface. Throughout the game, there are repeated references that Harry may really just be having some hallucinogenic drug trips. Cybil, the police officer you meet early on, eventually talks about how the town has a huge drug trafficking problem, and how dealers will get tourists hooked on the stuff. You can also find multiple articles and books on the matter, explaining that the practitioners of that occult magic mentioned earlier used a powerful drug distilled from native flowers in their rituals, and this is where these drugs are coming form now. Naturally, this leads to the possibility that none of this is real. Harry could just be imagining all of this. He could be slouched in a stupor in some dark alley, or just wandering the streets in a daze. Maybe those small demons in the school are, in actuality, actual children that Harry slaughtered in his fevered hallucinations? Its worth noting how the "zombie nurse" enemies behave: If there are more than one of them in the area, they will try to grab and restrain Harry. If they are alone, they will actively fight. Perhaps these are actual nurses that Harry is seeing as twisted demons, who don't want to kill him, but will out of self defense?

Or maybe he never walked away form that car crash. A lot of the game takes place in the local hospital, and the only benevolent people Harry encounters in his adventure are a police officer, who would have been on the scene of the crash, and a nurse, possibly HIS nurse. Its possible that the whole thing is just him having nightmares while in a coma in some hospital bed.

As you can see, there are MANY ways to interpret the events of this game. There are more than enough facts present to make a conclusive statement that it happens in one certain way, but there are multiple "one certain ways" that are possible. There are many solid facts that can't be disputed, but there are just as many things that leave other facts open to interpretation. This alone makes the story great, and provides people with the opportunity to have deep discussions on the nature of Silent Hill and Harry Mason.

So, in the end, what you get out of Silent Hill is a fun game that both makes you think AND evacuate your bowels. But most importantly, I played this old game recently, and still found it to be fresh and new. After all this time, nobody has tried to do what Silent Hill has done, and I'm not quite sure what that means. Could it mean that Survival Horror really does still have a place in modern gaming? Or does it just mean that the genre died out because nobody stuck to their guns and tried to make a game as atmospherically intense as Silent Hill? I don't know, but I'm sure I'll have a better idea when I tackle my next big project: Silent Hill 2.