The Short and Bloody Life of Team Silent

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The early Silent Hill games are held up by some (including me) as the gold standard in survival horror, in particular because they have distinct and interesting aesthetics, great soundtracks and somewhat more original plots than your typical Resident Evil knock-off. As a result of this, a certain mystique has grown up around Team Silent, the original Japanese group of developers who made the first four game in the series. After Silent Hill 4: The Room various other developers – Climax Studios in the UK, Double Helix in the US and Vatra Games in the Czech Republic – have had their own stabs at making Silent Hill games, none of which have won over the fanbase to the extent that the original games did. Consequently, the accepted wisdom seems to be that nobody who isn’t Team Silent is really capable of making a good Silent Hill game.

That might be true. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that Team Silent were able to make a really excellent Silent Hill towards the end of their existence either. But to make that argument, I’ll have to kick off by talking about what they did right.

Silent Hill

The original Silent Hill is an ugly beast from an ugly era. The PS1 was part of the first console generations to utilise 3D graphics as a matter of course, but it wasn’t until the next generation that you’d hit the point where actual gameplay could look comparably gorgeous to a cut scene. Cartoonish assemblies of blocks could be handled no problem, but try to get realistic and you’d get blotchy, ugly, low-res textures, stiff movements and an appallingly limited draw distance (the distance away from the centre of attention that the console could draw objects before crying and giving up). People wouldn’t really look human, and even in well-animated cut scenes characters would have this disturbing plasticy texture to them.

This is all perfect for a game set deep in the lands of night and fog in a realm where riotous flesh and insidious corrosion are out of control.

The beginning of the story is simple to an archetypal extent. Widower Harry Mason and his daughter Cheryl are on vacation. Harry has fond memories of visiting the resort town of Silent Hill with his wife, so they’re heading in that direction. A policewoman on a motorcycle overtakes them; moments later, Harry notices the motorcycle overturned by the side of the road. Before he has a chance to stop and check that the cop is alright, a child around Cheryl’s age steps out into the road in front of him, he swerves to avoid her, and the car crashes. When Harry wakes up, the town is shrouded in fog and Cheryl is nowhere to be found. Chasing a Cheryl-sized figure down an alleyway, Harry finds himself walking into pitch darkness, with the conventional brickwork and litter of the alleyway giving way to rusty metal meshes, pools of blood and ravaged scraps of flesh. Encountering a mutilated and crucified corpse, Harry is attacked and stabbed by strange mutant creatures.

And that’s where things get really odd.

In a conventional survival horror game in the Resident Evil mode from the PS1 era you expect a few things. Monsters. Not quite enough ammo to deal with them all. A combat system not quite responsive enough to fight them effectually in any case. Jump scares. The whole package is here… but I don’t think the presentation of those ingredients has ever been better, not least because it has a thick layer of sheer delirious madness sprinkled upon it. As Harry progresses through the game he stumbles between two different dimensions – the foggy version of Silent Hill, which you could just about mistake for a real place that happened to exist in a state of Marie Celeste-like abandonment and populated by monsters, and the darkness-engulfed version of the town, with decor reminiscent of a ritualistic death camp that’s been abandoned for decades and then recently opened up for business again. The monsters shuffle about in the fog (or the darkness, as appropriate) and home in on any noise Harry makes, but entirely ignore the wails of static which emerge from Harry’s pocket radio when they get near (a handy mechanic for assessing just how close to danger you are). Vast gulfs yawn open in the middle of the street, cutting the town off from the outside world. Curious discontinuities work their way into Harry’s journey, so one moment he will be exploring a strange shrine hidden in an antiques store and the next he will wake up in the town’s hospital, continuing a conversation he was having earlier with Lisa, a nurse who seems to have some connection to the town’s mysteries. As these shifts continue the whole experience begins to seem to operate on dream logic more than conventional cause and effect, and the physical forms of the monsters Harry confronts turn out to be allegories for the fears and hatreds of the mind controlling what is happening to the town.

The dreamlike atmosphere of the game is embraced by the designers’ willing embrace of the limitations they had at the time. You spend most of your time bumbling through fog and darkness, which of course gives the designers the perfect excuse to cut down the draw distance massively, allowing them to invest a little extra love in what they do choose to show you. The graphical capabilities of the time wouldn’t result in anything drastically beautiful, so they make sure what you see is as wretchedly ugly and run-down as possible. The stiff movements and uncanny valley renderings of the characters in cut scenes makes them feel more like marionettes than people invested with free will and a personality, which makes your interactions with them all the more disturbing. I haven’t heard the Japanese version of the dialogue and I’m not a Japanese speaker anyway, so I can’t really assess how it is, but the English dialogue is as stiff, hesitant and artificial as dialogue from videogames of this vintage tends to be, due to the game hailing from before the time that many people took console game voice acting seriously enough to do a halfway decent job at it. In any other context, that would be mood shattering, but here the stilted conversations combine with the delirious disjointedness of the story to add an awfully Lynchian atmosphere to the cut scenes. Given the numerous references to American horror and mystery books and movies in the series – and in particular the occasional lifting of Lynchian motifs – this probably isn’t an accident.

Another thing the game has in common with Lynch is a genius for the use of sound effects and music. In particular, Akira Yamaoka’s ambient industrial soundtrack for the game is delightful. Supposedly, the other designers thought the sound was glitching out when they first heard what Yamaoka had prepared but he won them over to the idea of using it; I’m glad he did, because it absolutely fits with the aesthetic of the thing – again, it takes the whole “death camp/factory in Hell which is slowly coming back to life” artistic direction and really runs with it. It’s particularly successful at blurring the lines between what is going on in the soundtrack and what is going on in the game world in a way which isn’t confusing; I never got confused to the point where I thought an actual monster which was nearby was just a noise on the soundtrack or vice versa (the use of the radio as a proximity meter helps here), but the impression of something sinister happening off in the distance is more or less always there thanks to the clanks and groans and gasps of the soundtrack.

The gameplay, despite the usual control issues survival horror games of this era tend to have, is actually very cleverly judged. In particular, I found that the action of the game tended to nudge me towards playing strategies which helped with the pacing of the story, and of course the build-up of tension in a horror story relies heavily on pacing. In the earlier stages of the game, where Harry is searching for Cheryl in the schoolhouse and hospital and dodging grotesque clawed child-things and afflicted scalpel-wielding nurses hunched over by the massive parasites on their backs, I found I tended to take a very cautious approach, keeping my flashlight off unless I ascertained that there were no monsters in a room, moving slowly and cautiously, and not engaging anything in a fight unless I stumbled directly into it. In later stages of the game, the slow and cautious method stops working – the paths you have to explore are a bit too complex to fumble through in the darkness and there’s a few too many monsters to be able to reliably avoid if you stay quiet and keep things dark. The end result is that as events hammered towards their awful conclusion, I found myself picking up the pace more and more, spending more time running at full pelt and eventually blasting away at everything I encountered with just as much violence as they were bringing to bear.

I actually find that the scarier section of the game is the earlier portion with the school and the nurses, because just as I’m fumbling around in the dark in them the monsters are also stumbling about blindly in the darkness and not attacking me unless they get close to me or I draw attention to myself, so the line between Harry’s behaviour and his antagonists’ is somewhat blurred. Sure, they get aggressive if you shine a light at them or make a noise, but maybe light and noise is painful to them. Maybe they just want to be left alone too. (In my first playthrough I began wondering whether the monsters were the town’s inhabitants transformed – the shape of the nurses suggests this in particular – which makes your actions early on in the game in the school particularly horrifying if you end up killing a few of the diminutive child-like monsters, which is hard to avoid. I didn’t actually see anything to flat-out contradict that.) But later on, the parts where running around and outpacing the creatures seem to evoke panic and desperation more than dread and fear – which is fine, because at around that part of the plot you’re rushing about the town following the mysterious Dahlia’s instructions to try and sort things out. Equally, the final sections where I find myself strolling around blowing monsters away coincides with the sense of outrage evoked when you find out about Dahlia’s betrayal of both you and her daughter, who turns out to be the key to the whole mystery.

My one criticism of the first Silent Hill game would be that I don’t see how a player could be expected to work out how to get all the endings without consulting a walkthrough; there are two optional things you can do which determine which of the four endings you ultimately get, and not only is it very easy to miss them, but their significance is at best a little unclear and in one case utterly oblique. I don’t know how someone who finished the game and got the worst possible ending could work out where they went wrong. Even then, Silent Hill is the best survival horror game of the PS1 generation by miles.

Silent Hill 2

The first PS2-generation entry in the series is sheer gold – probably the best game in the series, a strong candidate the best survival horror game of all time, and maybe even the best survival horror game it’s possible to make. Rather than laying a long pre-game intro sequence on you, the game action starts abruptly, with James Sunderland – the protagonist – contemplating life whilst staring into a toilet mirror. At this point we know literally nothing about him. Then we stroll him outside the toilet and he starts reflecting on a letter he received and we learn the first and most important lesson about James: he’s cracked, to the extent where he’s willing to go on a road trip to this decaying lakeside town on the strength of a note that purports to be from someone he knows to be dead.

And yet, the letter is – so far as we can tell – there in his inventory, and he has made the trip. Even though Mary died of a terminal illness, he is convinced that the letter is genuine, and that somewhere in Silent Hill he can find her. Instead, he finds the town abandoned, with great yawning gulfs and massive barricades forcing him to move deeper and deeper into the labyrinth the town has become in search of her. He finds a range of monsters, of whom the most terrifying is the iconic Pyramid Head, a humanoid figure in a grotesquely huge metal mask who spends his time tormenting anyone and anything that moves. He finds other people searching for something in Silent Hill: Angela, a melancholy woman who’s searching for her mother; Eddie, who at first is a buffoonish figure but eventually seems more sinister with his evasiveness about how he came to Silent Hill and his apparent disregard for other people; and Laura, an orphaned child who befriended Mary in the hospital, and seems completely oblivious to the creatures stalking the town.

And then when he gets to the lake James meets Maria, an erotic dancer from the local Heaven’s Night club who convinces him to protect her from the town’s creatures – and who appears almost exactly like Mary, or rather how Mary would appear if she were alive, healthy, and much more overtly sexual in her demeanour. After that, things get really strange. Evidently, the dark forces of the town have taken an interest in James’ plight and, through Maria, are offering him a mild compensation for the death of Mary – but what would James be compromising if he accepts the deal? And can he find a reason to live if he does reject it?

Silent Hill 2 has almost no connection to the plot of the first game, and the story that unfolds over its course offers ample room for interpretation. It is evident that more or less all the human characters perceive Silent Hill differently – in two particularly memorable scenes, James gets an insight into both Eddie’s view of the town (cold and icy) and Angela’s outlook (ruined opulent surroundings consumed in an inferno). James himself seems outright obsessed with water; the fog is omnipresent, damp is everywhere, flooded areas and bodies of water are a recurring motif, the action of James’ story revolves around the lake. Laura seems to be able to rush around the town perfectly happy without any danger, to the point where it seems that the monsters don’t even exist for her; this doesn’t come across as an irritating fetishisation of the wide-eyed innocence and essential goodness of children (she does play some mean pranks on James – often completely oblivious to the danger she puts him in) so much as a consequence of Laura simply being at a stage in her life where she’s not yet done anything or experienced anything traumatising enough for the town to work with. James, Eddie and Angela all seem to have more the average amount of baggage, both from things which have happened to them and from things they have done, and that nudges the player into examining what James is seeing and experiencing for clues as to his inner life.

If you do that, it’s evident that despite his subdued (you could even say sedated) exterior James is a sick puppy. Many of the monsters he encounters are highly sexualised, but in a way which seems to mock sexuality as opposed to being titillating. The nurses this time around, for instance, wear skimpy fancy dress nurse’s uniforms as opposed to proper uniforms, but the effect is mildly ruined by the featureless ruin of their faces. One monster consists of the lower halves of two women’s bodies joined at their waists. Other creatures are suggestive of sickness, confinement, cancer, out of control flesh. Players willing to do a little armchair psychology will rapidly realised that James is not at all processing the death of his wife, has a particular revulsion for sickness and ill people, and seriously needs to get his rocks off. Pyramid Head’s abuse of the other monsters – at one point witnessed by James in a sequence which must have been inspired by the closet sequences in Blue Velvet – confronts James with what he doesn’t want to admit to himself: that on some level, the thing which bugged him the most about his wife’s illness was the fact that they didn’t fuck like they used to any more. In this context the offer represented by Maria couldn’t be more blatant.

The psychological emphasis of the plot suggests that the whole game may simply be a delusion or dream experienced by James, or shared by James, Angela and Eddie; alternately, if you want the game to represent real events that actually happen you can take a Faustian view, since the dark powers of the town seem to be offering something to each visitor (except Laura, in whom they show no interest). The deeply personal nature of the monsters and manifestations you encounter this time even suggest how the game might tie into the first Silent Hill: with the mind that gave the horrors of the town shape and form the first time around gone, the genius loci of the place is casting about for a new psyche to mould itself around, and James, Eddie and Angela are the three most likely candidates.

I realise I’ve banged on a lot about the story so far here, and that’s because it genuinely stands out and probably represents the best artistic accomplishment of the game. (Note that this is artistry accomplished without any deliberate attempt to craft something which would be embraced by any sort of highbrow artistic establishment as part of the canon, and instead focused mainly on producing an enjoyable followup to a thoroughly commercial predecessor; think long and hard about that, art game advocates.) In particular, as with Spec Ops: The Line the game does a really crafty job of alienating you from James. Aside from a few musings about his present situation, James seems to actively avoid sharing anything of his inner life with the player, and because James keeps us locked out and occasionally says and does mildly irrational things we’re prompted to question what his deal is. His occasional interactions with other characters underscore this point, like his willingness to bring Maria along and the way Angela seems to have a deep distrust of him. Like Spec Ops you end up with the impression that you are accompanying James deeper and deeper into an investigation into matters he might be better off letting go, and all you can do is shepherd him through it the best you can.

Akira Yamaoka turns in an even better job with the music this time around which coincides with the development of the plot brilliantly. In the opening phases of the game he tends more towards tranquil ambient pieces, which give way more and more to harsh industrial tracks in the style of the first game as you get closer and closer to the truth and the comforting lies James has told himself about himself begin to unravel. The graphics guys have done a superb job too, not only making superb use of the increased capabilities of the PS2 but also coming up with suitable modifications to the aesthetic to suit the different emphasis of the game.

In particular, the transitions between the foggy world and the dark world are much more subtle this time around; there’s some points where it really isn’t clear when the changeover happens, and even the more blatant shifts aren’t as sledgehammer-like as the sudden descents of the Darkness in the first game. Also, whereas the dark world in the first game felt very active and hostile, here it seems to be almost as sad and abandoned as the foggy world is. Yes, there’s still monsters there, but they appear to be very reactive a lot of the time (to the point where some stand frozen in place until they cotton to your presence), and the impression given is of a forgotten place in total disrepair, with only a very few beasts (like Pyramid Head and the Abstract Daddy who seems to be Angela’s personal demon) taking an active part in keeping the grand old traditions of the place alive.

This is particularly the case once you reach the local Historical Society and begin a House of Leaves-exploration of the impossible architecture which lies beneath it: an entirely buried Civil War-era prison, complete with execution grounds and subject to horrendous geometric scrambling, which in turn eventually gives way to an extensive, nonsensical labyrinth at the centre of which lies what I can only describe as Pyramid Head’s workshop. It’s particularly interesting that the labyrinth section is the only place where you encounter both Eddie and Angela, as though both of them were drawn there too, the Abstract Daddy you encounter there which seems to arise from Angela’s trauma soon infects James’ experiences, and when James finally wins through he discovers he has a clear run to the hotel he expects to find some answers at, a shaken faith in his own interpretation of events which prompts him to question himself more, and (optionally) the knife of the devilish one himself. All this adds up to suggest a peeling back of both the characters’ delusions and the surface appearance of the town to offer progressively clearer glimpses of the reality underpinning everything; the Civil War prison suggests a place of punishment set in a context of murderous bloodshed which shatters formerly unbreakable ties (James and Mary, Angela and her family, Eddie and society), whereas the labyrinth finds the agent of execution and torture toiling away at the heart of Chaos.

In terms of gameplay, the game is more or less a clone of its predecessor. Despite some escort sections with her, Maria is generally quite good at staying out of the way when there is danger and the only times I’ve actually seen her die have been when I deliberately shot her in the face to see what would happen. (Answer: not as much as you’d expect. You don’t get to solve that conundrum that easily.) The monsters fall into two categories, by and large: pathetic mutants who are disturbingly easy to kill once you get the knack of it, and Pyramid Head, who is literally invincible; in all your encounters with him you are either mercifully separated from each other, or you are meant to run the fuck away, or you end up in a boss fight with him which literally ends when he gets bored with it.

The biggest game-changer here, in fact, is how the endings work, which generally infer from the player’s behaviour what their priority is and using that to infer James’ mental state at the end of the game. To specify exactly what is tracked would give too much away, but things tracked include how protective the player is of James and Mary respectively, how much time the player had James spend musing on morbid and melancholy subjects, and so on. (To twist the knife a little more – or to add a bittersweet tone, depending on what flavour of ending you get – the final cutscene plays out over a reading of Mary’s full letter, which never fails to evoke a tear from me.) I’m not sure this method of ending allocation completely works – in particular, some of the behaviours it tracks might have nothing to do with your response to the story and more to do with your general approach to playing this stuff, or sheer accident or forgetfulness on your part – but it does at least mean the first ending you get will most likely be a genuine surprise, and not the result of you missing out some sidequest somewhere.

It’s a classic of the medium, a brilliant use of a game’s aesthetic to reinforce its plot, offers endless fodder for interpretation and is quite fun to blast away at too. Plus it’s creepy as all fuck and maximises the horrific potential of toilets. What more could you want? If I were reviewing this on its own it’d be my Axis of Awesome pick for sure.

Warning: DO NOT BY ANY MEANS buy the PS3/XBox 360 version of this game (or Silent Hill 3) which came on the Silent Hill HD Collection. When Konami produced this they utterly, irreversibly botched it – they used unfinished pre-final drafts of the code to make the games and the job done in amplifying the graphics to HD quality ranges from patchy to outright horrendous. (In particular, the fog in Silent Hill 2 is completely gone, which means that the various short-cuts the original designers took with the graphics which the fog would have more than adequately covered up are grotesquely, immersion-shatteringly evident.) A patch for the PS3 seems to have somewhat alleviated the issues on that platform, but not completely, whilst the 360 version has proved unpatchable. Even with the patch, you won’t be able to hear the original English voice acting cast on the game, because they rerecorded all the dialogue rather than pay out any royalties to the original actors. In short, if you care about playing the game the way it was meant to be experienced, go for a non-HD version; ample copies are available second hand.

Silent Hill 3

The big problem with creating an oddity like Silent Hill 2 is that it doesn’t exactly suggest what you do for a sequel. There’s basically three ways you can jump. The first way is to try to bring back the mythos established in the first game and essentially create a game that just embellishes and expands on that game’s story and strings it out for a bit longer, which is going to feel rather unambitious after Silent Hill 2 expanded the bounds of what it meant to be a Silent Hill game so successfully. The second way is to just repeat the formula of Silent Hill 2, with an unreliable protagonist and lots of psychological gubbins, which is tricky because it’s not going to feel as fresh as when Silent Hill 2 did it and you still need to find a new spin if it’s not going to feel formulaic. The third is to follow Silent Hill 2‘s example in terms of conceptualisation as opposed to format, going off on a weird tangent that isn’t too closely connected plot-wise to what came before in order, which is of course is the most difficult and riskiest option: you essentially have to cook up a whole new angle from scratch, and even if you manage to make a good game it might not necessarily feel like a satisfying addition to the series.

There’s ways to make all these different options work, of course, just as there’s way to botch them. Silent Hill 3 is an example of the first strategy, botched terribly by the series’ own creators.

The game begins 17 years after the end of Silent Hill 1, and your protagonist is Heather Mason, Harry Mason’s 17-year-old daughter. Well, actually her age is a bit more complex than that; unknown to her, she’s a reincarnation of Alessa, the tortured soul at the heart of the mystery within the first game. We join Heather in the midst of a disturbing dream, at the end of which she wakes up suddenly to find that she’s dozed off in a burger restaurant in the local shopping mall. Trying to get home turns out to be unusually difficult; as well as encountering a private detective, Douglas, who seems to be stalking her, Heather also runs into the mysterious Claudia, who seems to know things about Heather even Heather herself doesn’t. Oh, and there’s the odd way everyone disappears from the mall and it ends up full of monsters and darkness, that’s kind of a downer.

So, blah blah turns out the cult from the first game isn’t quite extinct and Claudia is trying to fulfil the plan they had in Silent Hill 1 through Heather and Heather has to go to Silent Hill to put a stop to all this. The basic problem with a scenario like this is that it’s a bit too much like a repeat of the first game when you get down to it; you have the crazy woman who wants to bring about the destruction of the old world for the sake of a twisted vision of paradise, you have a co-religionist of hers who surprisingly turns out to be opposing her plans but gets killed in a cut scene before the final boss fight, you have a lot of the story leaning heavily on the mythos developed in the first game. People who have played the preceding games in the series are going to be rather underwhelmed: fans of the first game will feel like they’re going over old ground without really getting much new out of it, whilst fans of Silent Hill 2 will tend to see this reversion to a comparatively straightforward story about cults and whatnot as something of a creative retreat from the genuinely interesting territory the series seemed to be venturing into.

If you haven’t played the preceding games in the series, you are likely to find the game’s plot profoundly confusing up until the point where you get the plot dump that explains everything, at which point it seems rather daft. There’s a cut scene about halfway through where Douglas is giving Cheryl a lift to Silent Hill and she gives him a potted summary of the first game’s plot (which helpfully is replicated in a notebook written for her by Harry before his demise, which you can read if you want a refresher on what went down), and that’s, well, pretty much it. Once you’ve grasped what happened in game 1 there really isn’t very much puzzling about what’s going on this time around, which mildly robs the game of the air of mystery and confusion which kind of defined the series so far.

Of course, the advantage of recycling an old plot is that it gives you an opportunity to recycle a whole lot of other stuff, which saves time and money which must be quite handy when your team is split making two games at once, as Team Silent was at this point in time (significant segments of manpower having gone off to make the game which would eventually become Silent Hill 4: The Room whilst this was being worked on). Of course, the game transparently runs on a reskinned version of the Silent Hill 2 engine, but that’s just plain sensible design if you are making a followup to a game you previously developed on the same platform and you don’t intend to radically retool the gameplay or interface. On top of that, the occasional updates of rooms from the first game towards the end of the game work quite well – they not only make sense in the context of Heather’s growing recollection of her past life, but also provide a nice little insight into what a PS2-generation update of the first game might have looked like.

Of course, that’s only going to be interesting to you if you have played the first game and have fond memories of it. Likewise, whilst the resurrection for many of the dark world segments of the blood-soaked, rusting concentration camp aesthetic makes sense considering that the demons here are essentially conjured from the same mind as in the first game, for a lot of the time they just don’t feel as interesting or as inventive as the dark world segments in the previous two games were. The illucid, dreamlike atmosphere which defined the previous games is almost entirely absent, except for a few places here and there; whilst there is the occasional good scare (there’s a sequence with a mirror which is particularly freaky) a lot of the time the game seems to be trying a little too hard to go for the easy scares and gross-out stuff rather than going for the creepy-crawly dread the previous games were able to attain. (The exception is Valtiel, an entity which makes a range of cameo appearances throughout the game and seems to have some sort of influence behind the scenes. Interestingly, though Valtiel is clearly following you and watching your every move, he never actually interacts with you unless you get killed…)

It’s where the game borrows from Silent Hill 2 that it becomes transparently and embarrassingly obvious that this game is a rush job made on the cheap. For starters, the obligatory hospital section uses the hospital James visits in Silent Hill 2, right down to the foggy world version of the hospital being exactly the same. (The dark world version has its aesthetic changed but this isn’t quite enough to save it from feeling like a repeat.) This is strange from a thematic point of view because this isn’t actually the same hospital that Alessa was kept in during the backstory – that was the hospital from the first Silent Hill, which is in a completely different part of town. Ah, but the first game was developed for the PS1, whereas this way the designers can literally copy-paste material over from Silent Hill 2 and make the appropriate tweaks (like reverting the nurses to look more like the ones from the original game).

The recycling of the hospital is associated with the sole foray into the actual streets of Silent Hill the game offers, a miserable token effort at one of the aspects of gameplay which had been a distinctive and iconic part of the series so far. In the first game, stumbling about in the fog/dark-shrouded streets was a major part of the process of playing the thing. In the second game, the segment of town you got to explore was somewhat simpler and less expansive, but exploring it was still a regular and important part of the game. Here, the street exploration angle is completely desultory; not only does it recycle a tiny portion of the Silent Hill 2 map (seriously, you get the exact same map graphic and the streets look absolutely the same), but there’s none of the malevolent playfulness the streets exhibited in the first two games. There’s no howling chasms between you and your goal forcing you to take a roundabout route to your destination, which happens to be almost right next to your starting point. Returning to your start point after you have looked over the hospital is a simple matter of retracing your steps, and the streets haven’t rearranged their holes in defiance of all logic to confound you at all. The maddening thing about it is that before and after this section of the game the designers seem perfectly happy to shift the player from key location to key location without any street exploration breaking the levels up, so Team Silent could have happily gotten away with ditching the street exploration bit entirely – of course, it would have meant an overt break from the previous games, but at least it wouldn’t be taking a big crap on their legacy.

Of course, there’s points where the all-original levels seem to suffer from Team Silent cutting corners. The fairground level is a nightmare to get around at least in part because no map is ever provided for it – I suspect because whilst individual areas in it are irritatingly cluttered, the level itself is actually incredibly linear, and the map would make this obvious. Likewise, the writing itself seems rough and unpolished, to the extent where you end up wondering whether the voice actors were reading from a first draft from the script. The subtle characterisation which made Silent Hill 2 such a treat is more or less absent, the script relies on meaningless platitudes and nonsensical babble to an extent that the original game never did, and the actual voice acting performances are completely dreadful. You could just about grin and bear it for the first two games because the dreamlike atmosphere of those two meant that stilted, unnatural dialogue actually helped rather than hurt the mood, but that atmosphere is absent here and so, too, is the excuse that comes with it. (Furthermore: this game came out in 2003, which unless I am drastically misremembering things is well past the point where we accepted that videogame voice acting would necessarily be shit.)

Even the gameplay has stagnated; regularly, the developers make radical departures from accepted best practice in game design (as well as from the principles they followed in the design of the previous games) for no real reason and to no actual benefit. For example, there’s at least one point where you can arbitrarily and unexpectedly get insta-killed unless you perform a set of actions it makes absolutely no sense for Heather to perform unless she has foreknowledge of what’s going to happen. This is a cardinal sin in any game where it’s important to immerse the player in the player character’s experiences, or at least come to think of said character as a person rather than a well-animated playing piece – and horror games absolutely rely on this if they are going to be effective at all – because there is no way to reconcile the character’s knowledge with their actions. Suddenly, the plot makes no internal sense and you are roughly reminded that Heather is nothing more than your pawn.

Another example of a poor gameplay decision is the in media res opening, in which we play Heather during her precognitive dream of the amusement park. This throws the player into using all the features of the system – combat, running around, using the flashlight and the radio, managing health items and the map and so on – right from the start, rather than introducing you to these things bit by bit as the previous games did. When you combine this with the way the plot depends so heavily on continuity on the one hand and yet does such a miserable job of helping you catch up with the continuity on the other hand, you start getting a picture of a development team who simply do not give a single fuck about players for whom Silent Hill 3 is their first exposure to the series.

I guess it could be worse. Certain aspects of the plot – the rather penile aspect of some of the monsters, for instance, plus the way Heather purges the God growing inside her by using a cosmic morning after pill in one of the final cut scenes (causing her to cough up the God, which looks a lot like a bloody fetus), makes me wonder whether there wasn’t some sort of teen pregnancy theme going on here which was radically trimmed back at the last minute, which might have been interesting in competent hands but which isn’t something I really trust this iteration of Team Silent to handle. Silent Hill 3 is a game whose only accomplishment is to show why The Room was necessary: because Team Silent clearly weren’t interested in or competent to produce a classic-style Silent Hill game at this point.

Silent Hill 4: The Room

Silent Hill 4 begins with a really solid premise – you’re stuck in your apartment through supernatural means, you discover holes that take you into strange otherworlds, you need to work out why this is happening to you, what the deal with your apartment is, and how you get out of this terror. Much criticism has been directed at the game – it’s easily the most divisive one in the series – but I’m going to slap down a few thoughts here from the perspective of someone who’s tackled (but not actually finished) the PS2 version of the game by way of contrast.

First off, it’s fairly clear that this game was developed in parallel with Silent Hill 3 and then grafted into the Silent Hill mythos from an early stage. For instance, throughout 3 there’s regular references to an orphanage that the main cultists used to live at but it never really becomes relevant; you don’t learn much about the cult leaders beyond their differing attitudes to the whole “summon God, end the world, bleed from every hole for eternity” deal, you never really explore their childhood in the orphanage beyond oblique references to it being fucked up, and you never really visit the place. There’s a reason for that: it’s actually a level here, and in fact some of the in-game texts you get giving you backstory on the place appear verbatim in 3.

At the same time, it’s also clear that the team just plain spent more time and effort on this one. The levels are more varied, the stuff where you’re exploring your own room and observing weird stuff happening through the peepholes or outside the window and so on shows a lot of thought. The work done on the graphics is excellent, the textures look gorgeous, and the game makes excellent use of the PS2’s capabilities to make realistic-looking white noise and film grain effects. On top of that, the recycled plot in 3 looks even worse next to the originality on display in The Room. The absolutely demented “apartment 302 is my spiritual mother and I am going to invest my spirit in it” concept actually works really well both as a novel twist on the standard “haunted place” story and also has some nice synergy with the rest of the series, making the transplant of the story into the Silent Hill mythos make a lot more sense. Essentially, in the original trilogy Silent Hill is an evil place which derives its direction from a particular human mind in the first game and third game and is looking for a candidate for new genius loci in the second game; here, Walter’s effectively trying to deliberately create a similar nexus of evil centred on Apartment 302, with himself as its guiding spirit. When you realise that Walter is effectively trying to deliberately put himself into the sort of position that Alessa was forced into his agenda seems especially fucked up.

Although I wouldn’t call the controls on the PS2 unplayable – certainly not to the extent Al reports the PC version being – the innovations the game makes to Silent Hill gameplay are really quite mixed. As well of the limited inventory size being a royal pain, the actual process of managing your inventory during actual gameplay is also substantially more difficult and fiddly than it ought to be. It only gets more irritating once you get to the hours-long escort mission which makes up the final act of the game, where you can collect weapons for Eileen (crappy, sexist ones like handbags and riding crops because nooooo we can’t have a woman use a gun or anything), and you can give them to her to use, but THEY STILL TAKE UP SPACE IN YOUR INVENTORY WHEN YOU GIVE THEM TO HER. Especially at a point in the game where inventory space is seriously at a premium that’s absolutely unforgivable. I stopped playing when I hit that part of the escort mission and I realised I just couldn’t be arsed to replay a bunch of old levels with this constant inventory juggling. Another thing which gave me problems is the way the use of Room 302 itself becomes a stumbling block for the game at around this point.

The role of the room itself was always going to create problems for the designers because it has a gameplay function and a storytelling/atmosphere-establishing function, and there comes a point where unless it were handled especially deftly those two functions would undermine each other. From a gameplay point of view, the room is a sanctuary, pure and simple: it’s where you do your inventory management, it’s where you heal up, it’s where you save your game, it’s where you get to have a breather between forays into the twisted dreamworlds Walter stalks his victims through in his quest to become god of his own universe. You don’t get attacked in there or face any specific danger in there because that would get in the way of all those other functions.

The problem is that from the point of view of advancing the plot and maintaining the atmosphere the designers can’t permit the room to stay static. If the player could sit back and calm down whenever they liked by popping back to the room, then that would be fatal, because horror relies on carefully managing the ramping-up of tension and giving the player the ability to defuse that at any stage (short of ceasing to play the game for a while) would wreck it. The previous Silent Hill games, by integrating the save spots into the world, didn’t have this problem but here you’re effectively allowed to suspend your explorations whenever you happen to find a hole to crawl through.

For the earlier stages of the game, the designers actually do really well at this – through the various peepholes and the window and the radio messages you ended up with a pretty good impression of the way things are getting really, really odd outside – provided you can even trust what you’re seeing and hearing, that is – and the slow degeneration of the room is creepy enough in itself. I suppose the designers decided that unless they escalated to a physical threat they couldn’t maintain that, but all it does is make the process of saving your game and managing your inventory more of a chore than it needs to be; in my view, once you’ve found one of the save points in the world (and the holes to the room are basically glorified save/inventory management points), you ought to be able to get the job done in the room without obstacles.

In my view, the designers should have stuck with their original approach rather than changing horses partway through the process. Had they continued to ramp up the slow decay of the room, the weird stuff you occasionally see going on outside, and the messages obtained through the radio, and perhaps added mysterious visions on the TV screen and the occasional bit of disturbing but not directly harmful poltergeist activity, the designers could have made the room a thoroughly unpleasant and disturbing place to be in, which could have helped encourage players to make it snappy when they revisit the place. On top of that, if the whole “Henry is meant to be a strange shut-in” interpretation is actually something the designers intended rather than a mere consequence of the creepy nature of your voyeurism from inside the room combined with Henry’s weirdly diminished reaction to things and his voice actor’s absolute refusal to even pretend to emote, having the room be a place of sanctuary makes sense – and if it continues to be a place of protection against the beastly outside no matter how nasty it gets, that offers a parallel between Henry and Walter which might begin the process of making Henry an interesting character. This would be particularly nice since the designers seem to be completely disinterested in giving Henry any coherent personality, motivations, background or character development in this game, which from the creators of Silent Hill 2 is particularly disappointing.

On the whole, I tend to agree with Al on this one: it’s an experiment which arguably needed to happen, but definitely didn’t work out.

The Terrible Fate of Team Silent

In retrospect, I think the fatal mistake Team Silent made was in splitting their efforts between Silent Hill 3 and The Room. After Silent Hill 2 they did need to make a decision to either simply provide more of the same or go for a radical departure for their next game (whether or not it was a Silent Hill release); the splitting of the team seems to me to have been an attempt to hedge their bets by going in both directions at once. As it is, however, it seems to have diluted their efforts, producing two half-assed games rather than one really solidly full-assed one. And although subsequent developers seem entirely unable to come up with a really convincing new direction to take the series in, it’s clear that after 2 Team Silent didn’t either.