The Devil is in The Details (Or Lack Thereof)

"Some of the most lifelike FMV we've ever seen."
-Paraphrased from Gamefan Magazine


That tiny statement, quietly wedged between the preview pages of Gamefan Magazine was the first time I ever read about a then-new survival horror game called Silent Hill.

And yet, that tiny little blurb was enough to catch my interest at the time. As a fairly new Playstation owner, I was quite enraptured by the the system's FMV feature: Full Motion Videos created with outside tools to create movie-like sequences that were far beyond the system's graphical capabilities. Considering that I had just immigrated from the Nintendo 64 (a strong concept ruined by rapidly dwindling technology, namely cartridges), I became quite taken with the quantity and quality of FMV's in games (although ironically, I consider any current use of FMVs in our current generation of hardware to be a sign of laziness; Today's systems should be powerful enough that we should no longer have to 'cheat').

On the small preview box, there's an equally small picture of a woman, used to showcase GameFan's earlier claim while continuing to capture my interest in the title; the FMV character is rendered in exquisite detail. Where previous CG offerings featured simplistic designs (often eschewing an anime style, including large eyes, spikey hair, and overall cartoonish physiques), the woman pictured was intentionally made to resemble an actual human:

Tall, proportionate, with flowing hair strands, long limbs, and a mouth full of teeth, it was if the developers took a flesh and blood actress and overlapped the CG work over her. Which, it turned out, was exactly what they did, but the term 'motion capturing' wasn't in my vocabulary at the time.

The second written term that pursuaded me was the phrase 'Survival Horror', a term officially coined during the Playstation era, but a genre that has existed as far back as the NES days (such as Friday the 13th, along with a Japanese exclusive title called Sweet Home); Regardless, the phrase was made famous with Capcom's Resident Evil series, and having enjoyed RE'sFrankensteinish fusion of gun toting action with oldschool horror movie scares, I was quite interested to see how Konami would handle their own take of the infantile genre.

So at the time, all I had were a line about lifelike cinematics and a genre classification; Oh, and the title name had a nice ring to it as well. The magazine preview was short, but the statements were as sweet as Satan's song. I had no idea what to expect, but some of the greatest horror stories require their viewers to remain as ignorant and unaware as their victims.

Regardless, it wouldn't take long for me to make my first trip into Silent Hill; A playable demo from Sony's official magazine offered my first glimpse of the wild (but beautifully rendered) unknown.

The demo starts, and sure enough an FMV begins to play. So far, The hype from GameFan Magazine seemed justified; A man slowly awakens from a car accident, grabbing his head in pain but quickly jerking his neck toward the passenger seat, horrified to find it empty along with his car door wide open. Without a second thought, he steps out of the car, only to find an endless layer of fog surrounding him, and his passenger nowhere in sight.

As impressive as that may have sounded, the above clip barely lasted thirty seconds. The scene begins and changes as quickly as a ghost in the wind (but don't hold me to that), and the actual game begins, under less impressive standards.

While the opening FMV delivered with stunning detail and animation, the game itself appeared as an unpolished mess by comparison; The protagonist was a stick figured caricature with long arms and a face lacking eyes, almost looking like a ghoul himself; The environment surrounding him was an uneven set of buildings and roads, with a thick sheet of white fog hindering your view. It was a disappointing start, especially after the grotesquely gorgeous Resident Evil 2, but I decided to take control in hand and give the demo a shot anyway, hoping that the state of the graphics was due to the game being incomplete.

Also, the quiet howling in the background was strangely compelling...

After a few minutes of walking blindly, another FMV appears; In the next scene, a little girl with her back turned begins to slowly walk into the ominous fog. The scene ends even faster than the opening FMV, but the game itself continues the story. The girl is identified only as Cheryl, but the odds were good that she was your character's daughter. Despite his pleas, Cheryl disappears instantly in the fog. Now the player has a clear goal, to try and catch up with Cheryl. While your view remains obstructed by the fog, your path becomes more straightforward as you focus your ears to the small tapping of her feet against the road. As you continue to follow the sound, Cheryl gradually becomes visible to you again. But no matter how much you run, she always remains three steps ahead of you. The chase goes on until Cheryl exits past a fence. Once you enter after her, the scene shifts.

The fog pulls back a bit in the next area, giving a somewhat clearer view of the buildings, stairs, and trash around you. My character is desperately catching his breath, which came as a surprise to me considering the seemingly perfect physical shape most video game characters appear to carry. As I idly leave the controller alone, feeling a small bit of sympathy for this fictional father, I also take notice of the sound; What began as an eerily tranquil howl of the wind had subtly increased in tempo, a few extra clangs of instrumentation seeping through the television speakers like a backed-up toilet.

I continue on, but the next few steps prove to be more difficult, as the camera begins to take a life of its own, swooping up and dropping down and moving all around the character like a stalker admires its prey from a distance. The further you move on, the louder and more distorted the background noise grows, taunting you in conjunction with the living camera.

Soon, more and more unmovable elements begin to materialize in front of you; a wheelchair lies smashed and broken on the ground, a trail of blood is plastered on a garage door, a severed dog's head sits underneath a bloody basketball net, and the sky is growing darker. Soon the world around your character is in complete blackness, while blazing sirens hum in the distance, and the falling snow morphs into crashing rain.

It was at this point that I realized that the odd noises and sound effects playing throughout the demo was actually the game's soundtrack; Finally, something resembling music began to materialize, but its presence soon became unwelcome as the beats and drums began a choir of doom and death that grew closer and louder with every step.

Finally the character reaches a dead end; hanging above him in the pitch blackness is a corpse, crucified in what appeared to be barbed wire, his entrails spilling below your feet. It's a grisly scene, but you don't even get a chance to register it, because the first group of flesh and blood enemies finally reveal themselves....right behind you.

Where previous games offered familiar monsters such as zombies, vampires, ghosts and the like, Silent Hill's residents were indescribable in appearance; These misshapen, inhuman husks did not resemble anything you had previously encountered in a video game, but what became a more horrifying revelation was what they did resemble; skinless children with switchblades, howling about in a backwards giggle as they slashed away at your legs and chest.

With no weapon to defend yourself and the only path out blocked out, there was only one viable option left; sit back and die.

It wasn't the first game to implement that option, nor the last; Soon, another FMV appears, as your character wakes up again, only quicker and more startled than he was at his car accident. He finds himself in a Diner, and not alone, as a police woman approaches him with a friendly smile. But after such a horrific dream (or was it?), her visible teeth and low-laying eyes give a sense of uneasiness, just as the buildings and streets in the beginning of the demo.

As the demo reaches a close, everything about Silent Hill became apparent all at once; I understood then what the developers were attempting with this fresh entry into the Survival Horror genre; What the group at Team Silent set out to do was not a successor to Resident Evil, but a completely new manifestation of horror and fear that has never been accomplished in any game before it. The Playstation was a powerful system back in the day, but its limitations were quite apparent. Previous developers would add in as many FMV clips as possible to disguise their games from looking less than realistic, but Silent Hill ended up doing the opposite and gave into its graphical limitations, working with them to create a unique and frightening experience.

The misshaped buildings, twitchy camera, choppy frame rate, and thick layers of fog all added to the surrealistic experience of the game; Whether intentionally or not, the distorted look was but one element to the aesthetics of Silent Hill. The second was the sheer imagination the developers possessed, disturbing as it was. The devil is in the details, or rather the lack thereof.

The game was markedly different from Resident Evil; where Resident Evil featured an homage to zombie movies of the past, with predictable jumps and creatures, Silent Hill was something far more personal; a representation of our everyday fears, both the physical ones we see every day, and the psychological ones deeply rooted in our nightmares.

The former is carried out in unapologetic detail; an abandoned school, a forest with broken sheds, a pitch black sewer, and a hospital with a secret fifth floor (the number five carrying superstitious significance to the Japanese as thirteen does for Americans) all represented real locations that have served as the backdrops for urban legends and childhood ghost stories that every person has been exposed to. But for me, no moment in the game was more unsettling than the moment you stepped into an abandoned house's backyard, a small area with a patch of grass and a surrounding fence, but surrounded in the utter blackness of night, with a nightmarish choir humming throughout the background.

The latter element, the manifestation of nightmares, is apparent whenever the entire area around the character 'shifts' into an 'other' version of the town, where buildings are stripped down to their metal intestines, the floors around you are hollow and slick with blood and grime, and even the creatures themselves are transformed into even uglier monstrosities, as well as increase in number; With so many monsters at once, and your character just an everyday man with little battle prowess, it becomes a better option to flee rather than fight.

So, more often than not, you find yourself running madly to get from one area to another, as an army of creatures chase you mercilessly, your vision is impaired by hollow blackness, and clashing metal and grinding steel play around you as a deafening chorus to your misery.

Also, your character will trip and fall on more than one occasion.

What makes Silent Hill such an engrossing and deeply horrific experience is that there are no Hollywood-level jumps or frights, or moments where you can breath easily; There are no designated 'Safe-Zones', and not all the threats are visible to you. Instead, you are consistently surrounded with a looming unease of dread, where every sudden sound in the distance, or inanimate object lying on the ground is a threat. And when the real threats do come, they don't normally try to sneak up on you, but silently shuffle toward you from several feet away; These creatures don't fear you, and they don't fear making themselves known to you, as if they are aware of your helplessness.

Silent Hill is without any doubts the most terrifying video game series ever conceived, because the team responsible thought beyond mere horror movies or adrenaline-laced video games, and focused on creating a level of horror that is practically sacrilegious and taboo; a psychological vision of your deepest nightmares physically bound to locations recognizable to everyone who plays.

Play this game if you dare; Play it during the summer time, to help chill your bones from the scorching heat, or play it to change your perspective of the world around you, though don't expect that perspective to be pleasant or uplifting. But above all else, only play it at dark; The game loses some of its power under a well lit room or with a group of friends, but if you are truly brave, you'll turn off those lights and send those warm bodies away, and immerse yourself to the looming darkness of the town.

It's a hell of a tourist resort, but are you willing to pay the price?