Customer Reviews

Silent Hill

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

No other brand of suvival horror will ever come close.

This game makes Resident Evil look like the 7th Heaven Christmas Special. RE relies on the "boo, something jumped out of nowhere" scare. It's not bad, but it's more James Cameron than Clive Barker.

Silent Hill's kind of horror is the kind that slithers slowly up your back and hisses in your ear as you gawk in horror at the twisted travesties that lie before you. You can't tear your eyes away, and the images follow you into your sleep. In terms of story and atmosphere, Silent Hill is heavily influenced by the filmmakers Clive Barker and, in my opinion, David Lynch. Rather than explaining the horror away with some tiresome nonsense about a corrupt corporation's biological creation, SH unashamedly dives full-bore into the realms of dark psychology, the occult, and the border between the most wretched of nightmares and Hell itself.

Leave it to Konami to put out another killer game soundtrack. We'd expect no less from the great folks who brought us Castlevania and Metal Gear. Silent Hill's soundtrack alone is enough to gray the hairs on your head. It's eerie, experimental, and deliciously twisted. Just LET me find the soundtrack on CD...

Two gripes: bad voice acting and lame, poorly-translated dialogue. In this case, all is forgiven, as Silent Hill is still scarier and darker than any survival horror game out there. (...)

This game, no matter what anyone says, is the scariest game ever. People complain that it doesn't have the 'surprise' factor that Resident Evil had. But that isn't scary, it just gives you a little shock that's over in two seconds. Silent Hill has constant, disturbing images and sounds that unceaselessly barrage your senses. A little girl crying in the distance, creaking doors, panting doctors and moaning nurses, all with their skin ripped off. A terrifying soundtrack that seems to rise in volume as the world around you melts into a bloody hell. Bloody bodies hang on the wall, giggling demon-children, invisible enemies you could have sworn were there a second ago. All combined to scare the living day lights out of you. The game adds more disturbing images by lowering the visibility. You stumble through the dark as SOMETHING creeps toward you, your radio blares white noise as you run down a hallway with only a small flashlight to light your way, and the ever constant fog that blocks your view, even though you know something is nearby. To complete the detail of the game, strange symbols appear, and disturbingly psychotic poems are found on gory desks, things out of Lewis Carrol. Throughout the whole game, day and night interchange as you go through Hell and Silent Hill. Until the sun stops rising, and you must complete the game with only your flashlight to save you. The game, in short, is fantastic, and has great replay value due to secrets and hidden weapons.

Back in 2002, I had never really played any kind of survival horror game ever in my life. A friend of mine came over to my house and brought Silent Hill and the Playstation. I was just watching and I really liked how it had snow falling out in the town in the summer nonetheless, it looked like a really scary game. Then, months later, I borrowed this game from my friend and played from the beginning and didn't get really far because I really didn't know what to do. Finally, one night, when my friend was back over at my house, I was playing and he was sitting there watching and we were playing with surround sound, the lights off and no one else was in the house. From the very beginning alley, I was very scared! So I get to the school, Midwich Elementary School, and everything looks normal. My friend who was watching kept telling me that once I go through the Clock Tower, I will be back at Midwich Elementary and that it will be the same school but at the same time, it wouldn't be the same school and at that point, I was really starting to freak out. I had no idea what horrors were waiting for me!

I go through the Clock Tower and I hear these really creepy sirens, I'm to the point where I want to turn the game off but my friend was with me and kept telling me to move on. So I start to go into the school and once I'm in, I'm freaking out! All the floors were replaced by metal grates with nothing below them, the walls were like chained fences, everything covered in blood, pure horror and terror!! I was really scared by the visuals and the music. Something really creepy in the Alternate school is when you go into one of the bathroom's on the first floor, you end up on the second floor, creepy!!! Just everything that I saw and heard in every room and corridor scared me to death!!

I turned the game off after I was done in the school and couldn't sleep with the light off!! I did eventually play through the whole game and beat it but I have never been so scared playing a video game in my entire life!!! The really scary music and sound effects play a big part. But what's really scary isn't just the atmosphere, the music or visuals. It freaks me out thinking about why the town of Silent Hill is deserted and how Samael came along. If I think about this stuff before I go to sleep, a lot of times, I can't sleep. The Alternate Hospital, Alchemilla Hospital is another really scary place in the game that really scared me too but not as bad as the school. To be honest, when I first was going through the Alternate school, the way it looked, that's what I thought hell would look like, it was so scary. To this day, it scares me! Sometimes even with the light on, it's scary!! Even though the graphics aren't the best, this Silent Hill game scares me more than Silent Hill's 2, 3 or 4 and they have better graphics!!! I would not recommend this game to anyone who scares easily!

...This is the scariest game i've ever played and I love horror/survival games. I highly enjoyed the resident evil games, but they only made me jump. Silent Hill manages to scare me on a deeper pshycological level. It's very unnerving to be thrown into a situation where it suddenly goes dark for no apparent reason, and the small light in front of you is all you have, then you come upon a horribly mutilated body that's strapped to a wall will blood all over and you think, maybe when I try to leave it will come back to life... I also enjoyed the puzzles in the course of the game. They're mostly cryptic messages that need to be decoded in order to be solved, not just "gather the items and put them in one spot" I liked the combat, especially the existence of non-gun weapons that are actually effective. I found the plot to be very captivating, I actually had a deep drive to find out what was going on in the town. The graphics were a little blocky, but I didn't feel that it subtracted from the gameplay or atmosphere at all.

I love the Resident Evil series. I currently have RE2, RE3, RE:CVX, and RE:4. Before I got into survival horror, I heard really good things about RE:2 so I got it for PS1(and this is in 2004) All the reviews said "Oh my gosh it's so scary" and I never played a survival horror game before so I was prepared to be scared. Well, I played it and it was a fantastic game, but not really that scary. It had its share of jumps and scares but more fun in gameplay than in scares. Now that I had a lot of the RE's I wanted to try a different horror series, so I just looked on the internet for similar games and found Silent Hill. Again, the reviews were like "You won't sleep for days!" so I tried thinking it would be like RE. Boy was I wrong.

Like you've probably already read the game relies on growing tension and fear, than on BOO!'s. I won't go over the story because you've already read it enough.

Don't judge this game until you get to the school. I thought the game was boring and stupid until I got to the school. You have to scan the whole area for 3 keys. There's the occasional zombie dog or flying thing, but really boring. And the fog is just an excuse for the ps1's poor memory. But when I got to the school, different story...

(There's a few spoilers ahead) The zombie kids freaked me out, they just like made me shudder. Then theres that growing tension like in the locker room you hear clanking and more clanking, but you don't want to open the locker. Oh, did I say it was dark, and you can only see 10 feet in front of you. The alternate school gave me the heebee jeebees. The rooms are all different, theres metal grates, tortured people. One thing that made me go whoa, was that in the regualar school, there was a picture of a door with 2 tortured people hanging next to it, but in the alternate school, it was 2 people and a real door there!

The riddles are challenging and fun too.

I don't think this game is scary enough to lose sleep over, but it definitely is the scariest. Graphics mean nothing, in case you're wondering.

It took me a long, long time to recover from this game. Sounds silly, since it's old, and for the PS1 with cluncky graphics, and it's just a game anyway, right?

Right?

Hey, I know that. But when I turned this thing on, it did not matter. I'd never played a survival horror game before; I bought this one on word of mouth. What I was in for, I had no idea. The plot seems simple enough: Harry is driving down the highway with his daughter Cheryl, when he nearly runs into a woman in the road and swerves to avoid her, crashing the car off the road. When he comes to, his daughter is just disappearing in the fog which you will come to find covers everything in sight. Harry, now controlled by you, follows her to a back alley, where something strange is waiting for him... There starts his quest to find his daughter... and eventually to find out who, or what, she really is.

What really makes the game unique above other fright games is the innovative way it uses the player's mind to scare. A staple of the game is Harry's radio: it makes a static noise when an enemy is approaching, getting louder the closer it gets. We don't know where the enemy is coming from, or how fast, or whether it is by air or land. We just know something is about to jump out and try to kill Harry. There goes your blood pressure. We can add to that the atmosphere of the town: we see signs everywhere of ordinary people and their lives. It seems wherever they went, they left recently, without signs of their departure. Then there are sudden crying noises, corpses, strange sounds, and messages from Cheryl pleading with Harry to help her. Except... not all of them seem to be from this time and place...

The music is superb. Volume rising at just the right moments, it's a mix of atmospheric noise and industrial crunching. Sometimes, noises in the music suggest noises of possible enemies nearby, increacing the possible fear.

The game is not perfect. It's not for those with attention deficits looking for a lot of showy "boo!" effects. The gameplay can be a little difficult at times (but then again, this is the PS1) and the dialogue is awfully stilted. But that does not hinder the game because so much of it relies on the things it gets right.

The storyline takes a bit of work. But if you search around the net or talk it over with other players, you'll probably get it. It's a little real, a little supernatural; it continues in SH3. It scared the pants off me when I played it with a friend, in daylight. It still scares me. Definitely worth a play.

My goodness. The first trip to the town of Silent Hill. This is the first in a series of 3. This will always stand as THE scariest game of all time. This game is truly difficult to play. It is difficult not because the game itself is hard, it is difficult because merely playing this game will test your ability to cope with fear. I had to put this game down several times because I was simply getting too frightened. The gameplay is a great improvement over RE. The game is fully 3D. There is plenty of ammo. There are plenty of healing items. The enemies dont plod toward you (they run and fly). There are four different endings. One thing I was amazed at was the amount of weapons. There are three guns: pistol, shotgun, and hunting rifle. Then there are the melee weapons: kitchen knife, lead pipe, axe, hammer, katana, rock drill, and chainsaw. This is quite a take on the genre. Melee weapons that aren't worthless. The game is great considering al these things. I wont speak of the story. You will have to find out on your own. I can only say that this is one of the greatest PS1 games ever.

I just rented this game about two days ago, and with a little company from one of my friends, I was able to beat it quickly and still get amazingly scared. The graphics are decent, the cut scenes are amazing for it's release date. I don't know if I'd buy it, since I could rent it for five days, beat it in one, play it over the next day, and get my fill out of it before even returning it.
The only reason I gave it four stars instead of the five was for the story. I had no idea what the heck happened in Silent Hill, even after I beat it. I rented all three, and I have yet to beat them. This one was amazingly scary, and worth checking out, the second is even more horrifying from what I've seen.
All in all, this game is highly worth it for fans of horror games, and in my opinion, better than resident evil.

I played Silent Hill about 3 months after it first came out. Since the movie, this game has been IMPOSSIBLE to find! It really is worth it to go back and play these games again. I had forgotten how scary it is. There are many alternate endings (some goofy), many horrible creatures, and many things that will creep you out. If you like this one, play the other games as well. They have to do a lot with this town... specially Silent Hill 3.

Defiantly worth your time.

Different things scare different people, but this one got to me. I think Silent Hill is by far the scariest video game ever. The creators of this game did an excellent job of setting an extremely creepy mood through disturbing visuals and fear-inducing music and sound. Some of the sound effects are really terrible, and by that I mean scary and effective.

This is not a beautiful game. The graphics are clearly dated, and the fog effects aren't great. If you are someone who needs excellent graphics to enjoy a game, then you are probably better off with RE0 or the soon-to-be-released Silent Hill 3. For those of you who don't care about appearances that much, check out this classic.

The story is engaging at times, but unravels in the end, as is common in video games. There are a couple of different endings, and the one I got when I completed the game didn't make any sense, or resolve any issues. But the game was very fun overall, and I liked it a lot.

Overall: 9/10