*So, hey, guys, remember this little project where I played through like ten or eleven games from the seventies and did these write-ups about them? And then I just quit? Well, I’m not starting back up exactly, but I do want to resurrect the series, which I do plan to get back to eventually, for a quick one-off.
*As you may recall, I’m using the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die as a guide on this journey. And I recently picked up a game that is listed in that book. I do typically review games that I play in this thread, just not in this special format I’m using for this History of Video Games project. So, I was a bit stymied. Should I review this game in the regular format? Should I review it in the History of Video Games format, but hold the review until I get to the game in the project?
*I mean, not that last one because it would be a decade probably. Because I had gotten up into 1980 when I stopped this project. And the game I’m about to review is from, uh, heh heh, 1999. So, yeah.
*So, anyway, here’s what I’m doing. When I play a game from that book, even if its out of order, I’m going to do a FLASHFORWARD EDITION! review.
*So, welcome to the first one of those, I guess. I hope you’ll be excited to see what game I’ll be talking about here. I was excited to play it and, no spoilers, I had a very positive experience, so join me, won’t you!?
Silent Hill (1999) – Konami
This may sound really off the wall, but listen to me. You’ve got to believe me. I’ve not gone crazy and I’m not fooling around. At first I thought I was losing my mind. But now I know I’m not. It’s not me.
*So, here we go. In 1996, Konami appoints Keiichiro Toyama as the director on a new project. He’s a first time game director and he’s given a team made up almost entirely of people who had failed on their most recent project. Perhaps because Konami didn’t expect much of them, they were given a fair amount of freedom to work on this new horror game and, after christening themselves Team Silent, they got to work.
*1996, of course, was the year Resident Evil came out and that’s a complete coincidence I’m sure.
*Anyway, Team Silent had a lot of hiccups and felt like they were being somewhat isolated within Konami. They decided to create a game that would be more focused on psychological horror and a game with a more literary story. The degree to which they succeeded on that last one might be in question, or it might not, but they decided to pepper the game with a ton of literary references which we’ll talk about a bit.
*My favorite literary reference in the game is that the main character’s name was originally Humbert Mason, after Humbert from Lolita. Which is kind of apt because this character will spend the entirety of the game trying to catch a young girl. I guess that’s the joke? I don’t know for sure.
*Anyway, when the game was localized for release outside of Japan, the name was changed to Harry by the team doing that because they rightly thought that Humbert was just too rare of a name.
*The game supposedly was also underbudgeted at least until a 1998 demo showed off some of the cutscenes and Konami decided they might actually have something here.
*The team got more resources and by the time the game came out in early 1999, the team was basically satisfied and apparently just about everyone else was too because the game was a hit and before you knew it, there were seven sequels, a remake and two movies testifying to the franchise’s enduring popularity. But more on all that later.
*Anyway, Silent Hill 2 is pretty universally considered the masterpiece in the franchise and I actually intended to just pick up Silent Hill 2 without playing this one. But then I thought, well, why not? So I started with this game and I’m glad I did, because I enjoyed it a lot.
*So, as Silent Hill begins, Harry Mason and his young daughter, Cheryl, are on their way to the lovely vacation town of Silent Hill. Harry’s hoping he and his daughter can get some quality bonding time in; they’ve been having a hard time since the wife/mother in this family died.
*As they approach the town, Harry spins his car off the road when a mysterious figure looms out of the fog ahead of him. When he wakes up, he finds the neighborhood he’s in completely blanketed in fog and Cheryl is nowhere to be found. And gameplay!
*So, I hope you like the name Cheryl because you’re going to be hearing it a lot over the next six hours or so. Mostly said in a completely flat monotone by Harry Mason, the most bored protagonist of a horror game ever.
*The voice acting is not good. I mean, it’s a PS1 game, so the graphics are not great and the voice acting is bad. I mean, what a shock.
*Anyway, a quick word about the graphics. It’s a pretty well-known story that the reason the fog was developed in this game was because the hardware the developers were working with wasn’t good enough to process long distances and since you spend most of your time outside wandering around neighborhoods and shopping districts, you’re basically dealing with flat planes in every direction. So, there was really no way they were going to make that work with what they had. So they decided to just slap a thick fog over the entire town so that the player can only see a small distance in any direction.
*And this is a huge reason this game works as well as it does. I guess I could kind of talk about this franchise in comparison with Resident Evil, the other big horror game franchise. I guess I shouldn’t go too deep right now. I’ll just say that the thing Silent Hill has that Resident Evil really doesn’t in my opinion is just an atmosphere. Like that’s the thing that keeps people coming back to Silent Hill: it’s the [i]feel[/i] of the game. And that’s why it can still work in a game this old because that atmosphere isn’t entirely dependent on the graphics being super flashy or the mechanics being super smooth. It’s that creepy, Twilight-Zone-esque feeling of unease that really IS Silent Hill to me.
*And this fog just gives the game a totally unique look, basically all in greyscale when you’re outside. It’s a muted look, but it’s instantly iconic and kind of slaps the game down in a line of “spooky fog” that goes from the very first silent movies up through film noir. It gives the game a flavor and you can always recognize that Silent Hill fog the second you see it. It’s a really serendipitous addition to this game. Like I can’t imagine this game if it was just an open world and you could see the environment around you. It just doesn’t work that way.
*Anyway, Harry decides to go look for his daughter (Cheryl, in case you forgot) and why wouldn’t the first place you look be behind a bunch of garbage cans in an alley and so Harry is immediately stabbed by some lumbering, um, monsters.
*Harry awakens in a diner. He was found in the alley and brought to the diner by Cybil Bennett, a police officer from a nearby town. She was sent to investigate when the police force in her town tried to contact the Silent Hill police force and couldn’t get an answer. So, she’s also puzzled by the fact that it seems like the whole town is just empty and her radio won’t transmit back to her own city.
*So, anyway, she’s like, “Let’s head back to Brahms, my town, and get some help or something,” but Harry’s like, “My daughter Cheryl.” And so Cybil’s like, “you’re probably expecting me to stay and help you look since I’m a cop but lol no way dude peace by the way here’s a pistol.”
*At least she doesn’t call him the “master of pistoling.”
*Anyway, she’s out and she says she’ll be back, but honestly would you be?
*Before Harry leaves the diner, he picks up a map, a knife and a radio, which helpfully emits static when monsters are nearby. You also learn the save mechanic which is that you can save when you find notebooks at various locations throughout the world.
*I really loved the whole map thing. There’s something really satisfying to me about having a map of an area and navigating through that area, exploring the different streets.
*Streets, it should be noted, named Bachman, Bloch, Bradbury, Matheson . . .
*So, can I talk about one of my pet peeves?
*So, I’m going down this street and I check out a doghouse. There are two monster dogs hanging out around it and that usually means something, right? So I kill them and then go to the doghouse and sure enough, there’s an option to investigate inside it. Hmm, nothing. Well, that’s odd. Seems like a pointless thing to put in here.
*As I continue exploring this neighborhood, what should I find by a note scrawled in blood that says “doghouse.” I already know what’s coming here.
*Sure enough, I go back to the doghouse and look in it again and this time, there’s a key inside.
*Yes, I’m talking about the item that isn’t placed until you trigger it by finding something else. I absolutely hate this mechanic, particularly in a game like this where you’re just kind of free-roaming an environment. It really breaks immersion to me, because it’s like, “Well, who put the key there in the five minutes since I just looked?”
*And what harm would there be if I came across an item like this early? I’m still exploring the rest of the area; I don’t know what door the key opens. It just gets put in my inventory and then I have it when I need it and if I find the note that says “dog house,” I get a nice moment of like, “Oh, I found that already, that’s cool.” I mean WHAT IS SO BAD ABOUT THAT?
*I think one of the most annoying examples of this that I personally have come across was in The Walking Dead: Season One, a game I absolutely adore. But in episode one, there’s a bit where you need to find a bandage because Clem has cut her hand. And the room you’re in has a first aid kit in it. So I go and open the first aid kit and there’s no bandage. Like, Lee just literally says, “Hmm, nothing here,” or something like that.
*So, I’m like, okay, that probably would have been too easy, so there’s more to this. And I absolutely demolish that room. I am looking every. where. And not a bandage to be found. I eventually go and look up the solution because I’m so desperate. And all the walkthroughs say, “The bandage is in the first aid kit.”
*They’re also all kind of condescending about it: “You can find the bandage in the first aid kid. I mean, obviously. Where else would it be, moron?”
*So, I end up watching a playthrough and here’s the thing.
*Brace yourself, because this is INCREDIBLY stupid.
*So, in TWD, when you select an item that you can interact with, it usually brings up your list of options: you can examine it, open it, etc. The twist is that I needed Lee to look at the first aid kit before he opened it. If you selected to have him look at it, he would then muse something like, “Probably a bandage in there.” And then when you opened it, the bandage would be there.
* . . .
*FOR WHAT POSSIBLE REASON WOULD YOU MAKE THAT HOW IT WORKED
*It’s like Schroedinger’s First Aid Kit. “Is the bandage in the kit or isn’t it?” “It is . . . until you open it.”
*So, that was a fun hour of gaming. Guess it’s about time to go to bed furious.
*I suspect my total playthrough of TWD was at least two hours longer than it needed to be because, after this happened, I “looked” at everything before I interacted with it.
*There is nothing as great as stopping dead in your tracks as twelve zombies are chasing you in order to thoughtfully murmur, “That door probably leads outside.”
*I’m like, yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you, but if I don’t pause to thoughtfully rub my chin it probably wouldn’t and I’d open the door and fall DIRECTLY INTO THE GAME CODE
*TWD is a game I love by the way. Absolutely adore.
*Anyway, this concludes my review of The Walking Dead: Season One: Episode One: Scene Twelve.
*No, wait, Silent Hill.
*Oh my God, three-and-a-half pages and we’re about thirty minutes into this thing.
*What do you guys think? Should I post this in sections? If I’m doing an essay style review, I like to post that in one post, you know. But when I do these longer walkthroughs, maybe I should break them up if they get past a certain length. Somebody told me once that they didn’t mind these walkthrough posts being really long because the bullet point format made them faster and easier to read than an essay style post. I don’t know, if I was on YouTube, I’d say let me know in the comments, but I’m not so, for real, if you’re reading this post, respond and let me know if you think breaking it up is a good idea or if you’d rather have the whole game in one post.
*I think I will break this one up and post at least a part one, once I clear this section of the game, that way you guys can tell me.
*I suppose I could just PM the people who actually read my reviews, you know, all four of you.
*Okay, well, let’s wrap this section up by getting to the next bit.
*Anyway, you find a clue indicating that Cheryl might just be at the local elementary school, Midwich, so you find your way there on the map and we enter, picking up a handy map of the school, which has three stories! In we go and we’ll take a break here.
*So, yeah, let me know if you think breaking up these long walkthrough reviews is a good idea or if you think I should just post each game walkthrough as a single post. Or if you don’t care which way.
*If you think I shouldn’t post them at all, keep that to yourself.
*Anyway, we’ll move on into the school next time. See you then!