When Silent Hill 2 Remake was announced, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one asking this question. Say what you want about the current culture of video game remakes and remasters, but at least they tend to do these in order. Bucking trends, Konami seems intent on keeping only the most popular of its most popular in the zeitgeist, opting to remake the more beloved Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 before their predecessors. While I don’t agree with the dramatic sentiments that the existence of these remakes will “erase video game history” (Konami has done plenty of that by themselves before this trend), the fact that these series don’t get a new game in ages, then the “new” game is a remake of a numbered title is egregious. Who retells a story from the middle?
But… many players do go for the popular sequels first, and then go back to earlier ones later (sometimes never). If anything, video game remake culture reflects the incuriosity of casual audiences in general. Really, how many people would actually go back and play these old entries? (And to be very clear, I am greatly in favor of old games getting released on new platforms.) The people who wanted to play the originals would have already sought them out, and many of them don’t even get past the first few minutes. (One of my friends says they tried the original Silent Hill 2 and simply could not deal with the camera angles, so they quit rather than struggle further.) Others watch streamers or video essays instead of playing, if they bother to engage with older titles at all. Konami is following the money. It’s not just video games either. When a new movie in a franchise, or even a remake, comes out, plenty of people watch it without any prior experience!
And yet, I am still hurt. My favorite entries in video game series tend to be the first games – and I do mean first, as in the oldest. In the aforementioned Metal Gear series, my favorite is Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Resident Evil, of course, is Resident Evil for the Playstation. And Silent Hill is, well… Silent Hill. Unburdened by continuity or one-upping or fan expectations, these games may not be the idea fully realized, but they are the idea in its purest form.
In Konami’s defense, most of the discussion around the Silent Hill series centers around Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. Konami themselves encourage this, such as the botched HD Collection containing only these two games, or various merch drops that feature the Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 characters and not much else. Silent Hill 4, at least, got a port on GOG, something the rest of the series is lacking.
The peripheral attention to the first Silent Hill is due to a few factors. Unlike its colleague Resident Evil, a series that arguably peaked on the PlayStation, Silent Hill is the only game on this system. The bulk of Team Silent’s celebrated oeuvre is on the PlayStation 2. Silent Hill, ironically, looks nothing like the Silent Hill that most of the internet has been exposed to. Even those that have played the first Silent Hill degrade it, calling it too simple, too janky, just not as deep as the games that followed it. It’s a cute exploration of greater things to come, but otherwise lesser.
To me, though, all these qualities make Silent Hill the best of the series. Silent Hill 2’s grounded personal conflicts fail to capture me as much as the mystery surrounding the titular small town, and while Silent Hill 3 brings Masahiro Ito’s art to life, the simple graphics of Silent Hill leave more to the imagination.
Despite the criticism that the plot of Silent Hill is too simple, it actually doesn’t explain itself that much. What people want is more detail. The cinematic cutscenes in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. The longer gameplay time and higher graphical fidelity of Silent Hill 2 Remake that allow the player to see minute details in the environment. Timelines that lay out the downfall of the town in a clear, third-person omniscient perspective. (I saw someone rejoice that we now know the games take place in the 80s due to a calendar found in a room in Silent Hill 2 Remake, which I honestly cannot imagine caring about when we are talking about the Silent Hill series.) These details are overrated. They may appease people who view getting into a series as gathering a checklist of factoids, but none of them accurately portray the experience of playing the game.
The true triumph of Silent Hill is in the technical aspects that help build this dread. Silent Hill’s iconic fog effect looks the best in this game; a thick cloud that obscures your vision beyond a few feet, leaving you to decide if it’s worth traversing. Unlike the later games, this fog is extremely opaque, consisting of white chunks of polygons that evaporate within a certain radius of Harry. The game capitalizes on this feeling, and has an optional sidequest that affects which ending you get (full disclosure: I missed this sidequest the first time). If you’re careful enough, you’ll even see the monsters have animations when they’re not engaging with Harry.
Each time the world transforms to the nightmare, the changes in the sound of the location are enough to make you hesitate to pass through the next door. The dirty, rusty walls that almost look like flesh paired with the industrial sound design immerse you in this realm, even with the low-poly graphics. Every creak, crash, and crunch of this game leaves your imagination to picture what you have walked into. Thanks to Akira Yamaoka’s brilliant sound design, we are given a tactile sense of what this world might look like (later fully realized in Silent Hill 3).
The “simple” premise of Harry looking for his daughter allows for the player to get caught in the depravity of the town. James and Heather have more details to their characters revealed through cutscenes, but Harry (along with Henry in Silent Hill 4) is more of a blank slate, reactive to the world around him. Following endless strings of clues that go nowhere, whisperings of a cult that destroyed the community, flashing back and forth between the fog of reality and the rusted, bloodstained underbelly. The women succumb to a disease that makes them bleed profusely, until they look like a charred corpse. The doctors in the hospital try to get them hooked on drugs as part of a sick racket. You try to piece together an explanation for all of it as you meet new characters and read different notes, but nothing truly comprehensible comes together. There’s a sense that Silent Hill was never normal, and that these strange occurrences are punishment for the evil of its inhabitants. Their tragedy is biblical.
Silent Hill‘s comparatively less cinematic approach is what makes it stronger, not weaker. It integrates game design and narrative the best out of all the games, leaving the interpretation up to the player. An achievement on its own merits, separate from the rest of the series, we are able to fully revel in the mystery of the town, unsure of how we got here and how to get out.
