The original Silent Hill on the original PlayStation is a game that I adore, but it took me a while to get there! Actually, at the time of writing I’ve just embarked upon Silent Hill 2 on PlayStation 2 for the first time, having finished the first game for the very first time about six weeks ago… And then it took me six weeks of patiently bidding then dropping out of eBay auctions to get my hands on the sequel at a reasonable price! And four hours in I’m pretty much adoring that too, but that’s another story.
I started Silent Hill on launch day sometime in 1999, and judging by my fairly meagre games library (hacked PlayStation Classic notwithstanding!), I reckon it was one of the last games I bought for the original system. And yes, it took until the 20th July 2020 to get to the end! If I took a run at it now, I reckon I could get as far as I ever did originally in about 15 minutes, but much like Resident Evil, which suffered a very similar fate give or take a year, if you’d asked me in the intervening 21 years, I’d have definitely said I was a fan all the same!
And I can now back that claim up, having properly finished both, and in the case of Silent Hill, properly rinsed it too, getting one of the better endings simply because I didn’t want to leave! Whilst some of the original PlayStation experiences can feel a little tired nowadays, something there finally clicked for me, and I just couldn’t get enough of that wonderfully atmospheric fog-ridden (and not forgetting blood-ridden) remnant of a town and all of its mysteries.
Anyway, my love for Silent Hill isn’t why we’re here today. I’m sure I’ll go into more depth at some other time soon, but for the time being I wanted to focus on the aforementioned opening few minutes. Having finished it, I wanted to get a few screenshots of some of the more evocative areas while they were fresh in my memory in anticipation of writing something about it later, so I started the game again. I was especially interested in the start, because the very claustrophobic alleyway you are quickly running through really left an impression with me.
And after reviewing the product of the first 10 minutes of gameplay, I came to a terrible realisation that by complete chance, I might have just outed the main character as some kind of infantile moron that I’d completely missed first time around! What do you think?
At risk of ruining my feelings about Silent Hill, I am really curious about how many more irritating questions he’s going to ask in the next 10 minutes and then the rest of the game!
Retro Arcadia 