SILENT HILL
BY ALEX TANAKA
There are not many games that have truly unnerved me while playing them. The original Silent Hill, released in 1999 for the PlayStation 1, remains one of the best survival-horror games ever made. Produced by Team Silent and published by Konami, Silent Hill follows protagonist Harry Mason in his search for his missing daughter Cheryl in the town of Silent Hill. Despite its initial release on the fifth generation of consoles, the game holds an intrinsic, unique experience that could never be replicated on modern hardware.
Silent Hill, a PlayStation 1 title, was heavily limited by the technology available to Team Silent during its production. However, these limitations work not to its detriment but rather enhance its ambiance and dream-like atmosphere. One of the most famous examples is the constant fog that engulfs the town throughout your journey. The fog keeps the player second-guessing themselves, unsure of what dangers lay within it. This contributes to a feeling of constant unease and claustrophobia. Originally, the fog was implemented merely to get around the PlayStation’s limited ability to render draw distance. Draw Distance is defined as the range at which a game engine can render detailed graphics and environments. Due to this limitation, the fog was implemented to obscure game objects and reduce the amount of things that the game needed to render. Apart from just improving the performance of the game, the fog gave Silent Hill its distinct, iconic atmosphere.
The voice direction of Silent Hill is also a large contributing factor to its strange, unnatural atmosphere. Characters speak in a stilted, unnatural way often with long pauses between dialogue - usually because the game needed to load up the audio file. While many deride it as simply bad voice acting, the strange voice direction adds to the mystique and dream-like atmosphere of the game. No one would talk like this in the real world, and that intentional disconnect between the player and the game builds a feeling of unease as if the player is an interloper in the town of Silent Hill.