It was recently confirmed that hotly anticipated survival horror game Silent Hills has been cancelled by Konami. The news has been the source of great disappointment from horror fans as some major talent was attached to the project: Hideo Kojima, designer of the Metal Gear Solid series; Guillermo Del Toro, visionary horror director; Norman Reedus, breakout star of The Walking Dead TV show. A pants-browning demo, P.T. (Playable Teaser), did the rounds in 2014 and prompted a lot of anticipation about the finished game.
With this latest offering being torpedoed, things don’t look good for horror in mainstream gaming. The Silent Hill series was one of the big dogs of the genre and its main rival to the title, Resident Evil, jumped over from horror to “action against gruesome enemies” years ago. With games development becoming a longer, more resource-intensive and more expensive process, it’s a simple matter of sales figures: horror doesn’t sell but action does. At least that’s the conventional wisdom for mass-market, triple-A console and PC games. The indie scene shows strong appetite for horror, with smaller games like the Five Nights at Freddy’s series or Amnesia: The Dark Descent fostering dedicated cult followings.
So, while horror is not dead it certainly seems to be losing its way in the mainstream industry. Let’s take a look back at the Silent Hill franchise to see what made them the behemoth they were and where things began to decline. These overviews of the main games of the series will be very general; if you’d like a more detailed breakdown of everything, including all the spin-offs, by people who have Silent Hill basically written across their front lobes, I highly recommend the Youtube series “The Real Silent Hill Experience” by TwinPerfect.
Silent Hill (1999)
Debuting on the Playstation 1, the first game in the series put players in the polygonal shoes of Harry Mason, a single father. When driving with his daughter Cheryl, Harry swerves to avoid a girl in the road and crashes. He’s knocked out briefly and when he wakes Cheryl is gone. Walking to the nearby lakeside resort town of Silent Hill, Harry finds it plunged into a dark, occult nightmare that he must survive to save his daughter.
The game was designed by Team Silent, a small but dedicated development group within Konami Tokyo. Artist Takayoshi Sato reportedly lived in the development office and would spend his nights rendering 3D models and environments while the others were going home to sleep. Much of the game was spent with the player surrounded by cloying, suffocating darkness; this was initially used to get around the PS1’s limited draw distance while still allowing them to create large 3D environments.
The game’s horror worked heavily on atmosphere and pacing; the contrast of mundane environments and extreme, grotesque monster designs became a staple of series. Limited visibility and tense audio scoring meant you might spend long periods of time hearing monsters but never seeing them. Like most survival horror games, combat was often better to avoid, with limited ammo.
Silent Hill 2 (2001)
The sequel did not directly follow the cult-heavy plot of the first game and instead focuses more on Silent Hill as a location and the mental states of the people within it. James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife Mary inviting him to Silent Hill, where they spent a romantic vacation several years ago. The only thing is that Mary died of a wasting illness three years ago. Exploring the town which has been plunged into a deep fog, James encounters a new batch of monsters but even more dangerous are the other people trapped in the fog with him..
Silent Hill 2 is often cited as the pinnacle of survival horror, one of the best video games ever and one of the best game stories ever written. It’s been highly influential for its use of metaphor, its story tropes and narrative structure. Spoiler warning: if you’ve played a game in the last 20 years that was built around a story of “someone important died, probably because you killed them, and you just forgot”, it’s probably ripping off Silent Hill 2. Double-spoiler warning: the later (non-Japanese) Silent Hill games do exactly that. It ends up with Silent Hill being less a ghost town and more a magical therapy adventure park.
While Silent Hill 1 used overt darkness and supernatural evil, up to and including literal demons, as a source of horror, Silent Hill 2 is much more about banal, mundane horrors in the everyday world. Themes of sexual violence, mental illness, self-loathing and suicide are key to the game’s story and even its monster designs. The “mascot” of Silent Hill 2, Pyramid Head (or The Red Pyramid Thing), originated in Silent Hill 2 as an expression of James’ guilty burdens, his self-destructive desires and his repressed sexuality; James literally cannot defeat Pyramid Head until he comes to terms with these issues and overcomes his amnesia.
Silent Hill 3 (2003)
The second high of the series, Silent Hill 3 carries on the occult plot from the original title after a significant time-skip; players take up the role of Heather Mason, Harry’s now-teenaged daughter. Plagued by horrendous visions and hunted by the cult her father grappled with, Heather returns to the town to face up to her true nature and confront some part of the evil behind the town’s manifestations.
Silent Hill 3 was praised for being a strong continuation of the original plot and the mechanics of the previous game, as well as a doom-heavy atmosphere and great character models. The graphics, audio and production values were better than ever though a few critics pointed out it wasn’t really doing anything new with the base formula.
Silent Hill 3 wrapped up the main elements of the series storyline and mythology; the nameless cult that secretly ran the town had been gutted, its main operatives slain and even their half-born God slain. Many Silent Hill fans consider this the beginning of the series’ slow decline, especially since the atrocious second movie draws on the plot of the third game.
Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)
The last game developed by Team Silent, work on Silent Hill 4 began shortly after Silent Hill 2 was released; it was initially developed under the title Room 302 and incorporated into the Silent Hill series later. The game is about Henry Townshend, who lives in the next town over from Silent Hill; he wakes up to find his apartment sealed, preventing him from escape, and it becomes increasingly haunted. A hole in his apartment wall leads to a strange supernatural world populated by the victims of a serial killer, whose vengeful spirit stalks Henry.
The game was met with some mediocre response; while there were some disturbing scenarios, the level design was uninspired and required lots of backtracking. The story leaned too much on small, insignificant parts of previously-established lore and generally felt a bit like reading fan-fiction.
Silent Hill 4 was the last of the Japanese-developed games in the series. After that point, Team Silent was split up and either placed on other projects within Konami or went independent. From there, development was passed to Climax Studios – developed initially in the US and then work was transferred to the UK.
Silent Hill Origins (2007)
A prequel to the series and developed for the Playstation Portable system, the fifth installment in the series returns to the core cult elements of the series. A trucker named Travis Grady sees a house burning and runs inside to aid the residents. Inside he finds a psychic girl named Alessa who has been burned horribly. After he saves her, he loses consciousness and when he awakes Alessa is gone. He ventures into Silent Hill to find the missing girl, only to find the town succumbing to a nightmare.
Responses to the game were mixed. Some people liked the story, others didn’t. The gameplay was rated as average to slightly above; the ability to use a wide array of everyday objects as weapons was generally praised but the weapon degradation and quick-time events were criticized. Some monsters were seen as being too much like Silent Hill 2’s, including an enemy that’s clearly supposed to be another Pyramid Head.
The game also began the trend of ripping off Silent Hill 2’s amnesia twist; Travis had apparently forgotten his father’s suicide and mother’s attempt to murder him and it required a trip to the psychiatric therapy town to help him come to terms with his repressed childhood memories. TwinPerfect accused the game’s story, which was supposed to answer questions left by the first game, of just adding more confusion to the mix and that the so-called questions were answered in the first game anyway.
Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008)
Often considered the low point of the series, Homecoming was developed by Double Helix games. When soldier Alex Shepherd returns home to the Silent Hill-adjacent town of Shepherd’s Glen, he finds it swallowed by fog and the people going missing. Also, monsters. (Obviously.) In searching for his missing brother Joshua, Alex delves into the secret history of his town and it’s connection to Silent Hill.
The game was generally criticized for uninspired enemy design, bad levels and obvious story. In places, it overtly ripped off the horror movies Saw and Hostel. It even features Pyramid Head, which makes no sense in the game series’ lore. In some versions there were awful technical problems and glitches. During the marketing for the game put focus on a more developed combat and enemy-wound system, reasoning that a soldier would be better at fighting than most survival horror protagonists – which led to some fan criticism that the survival horror genre wasn’t supposed to have “fun” combat.
And we return to the amnesia rip-off train; Alex’s brother Josh, who he spends the whole game searching for, has been dead all along. Alex killed him accidentally while vying for their father’s affection and in doing so doomed the town, as Alex’s father was supposed to sacrifice him and not Josh to the cult’s god. Alex went to a mental hospital and became deluded that he was a soldier, like he believed his father wanted him to be. Meaning the combat system had no justification – Alex wasn’t a soldier, so why was he good at fighting?
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2010)
One of the few Silent Hill games on a Nintendo platform, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is neither sequel nor prequel but a “re-imagining” of the first game. The game alternates between two modes, the first being a psychiatric patient answering a series of psychological tests and the second being Harry Mason exploring the town of Silent Hill to find his missing daughter.
The game was decently received. The graphics were considered some of the best on the Wii – not that the Wii was a graphically powerful system – and the total absence of combat – instead Harry must flee from enemies in chase sequences – was a welcome departure from the previous games relying quite heavily on melee. The story, which returns to Silent Hill 2’s focus on psychological horror, was fairly well received.
As the name suggests, someone forgot about an important death. In a semi-decent variation on the twist, it is revealed that Harry is the one who died. The psychiatric patient is actually Cheryl, Harry’s daughter, in therapy to cope with the trauma of losing her father. Harry himself is something like a hallucination, a symptom of her delusion. All the monsters he was being chased by seem to also have been creations of Cheryl’s mind. All in all, of the modern Silent Hills this was probably the best.
Silent Hill: Downpour (2012)
The last game in the Silent Hill franchise, Downpour’s development moved to Czechoslovakia. Players take on the role of Murphy Pendleton, a prisoner on a bus taking him to a new jail which crashes on the outskirts of Silent Hill. On the run from a police officer who also survived the crash, Murphy heads into the haunted town in the middle of a rainstorm to try and find his freedom.
Downpour has probably been one of the most divisive Silent Hill titles to date. Some felt the atmosphere and story were intriguing and engaging while others thought it was bland and formulaic. Some critics praised the large areas and exploration focus while others felt there was not enough of note to “do” in the area. The way it used multiple endings was seen as messy and causing the characters to be so inconsistent as to be unrelateable.
Downpour’s multiple endings make it unclear whether or not it rips off Silent Hill 2, but in some places it does with a lot of the endings being “it’s all in (someone’s) head”. Murphy may (or may not) have murdered his son, may (or may not) have crippled a kindly and honest prison guard while he was in jail and may (or may not) have murdered a pedophile (who killed Murphy’s son if he didn’t) in the prison showers and didn’t know it until confronted with it. This confusion detracts Downpour’s story, as it makes it unclear whether or not certain characters are meant to be sympathetic or not, and also makes character motivations extremely unclear. Is Murphy a serial murderer or wrongly accused? Is he seeking to escape justice or clear his name?
And we come to the end. Downpour was the last “proper” Silent Hill to date. P.T, the playable teaser, promised something interesting and unexpectedly deep from Silent Hills, but unfortunately this is apparently not going to happen. As it stands, the series ends up almost symmetrical, nearly half bad and half good. Future entries might tip the scales entirely but perhaps it is for the best that the series ends. As Lovecraft and King teach us, fear comes from the unknown and franchises create familiarity. Horror dwindles as a series lengthens because recognizable patterns and rules form.
This is especially true in Silent Hill, a game so strongly rooted in one place. Each game maps out Silent Hill and fleshes out the history of the location a little more; that’s why Homecoming and The Room both felt the need to introduce new areas with new histories to explore. By removing oneself entirely from the Toluca Lake region, setting up a new town and new mythology,
And let’s not even get into the HD Remake..