Silent Hill 2 is considered the series' crowning achievement for both its fantastic story and unnerving horror. Sadly, the franchise is currently in limbo following disappointing titles like 's Silent Hill: Downpour , which was the most recent entry.
To the heartbreak of many, this was later scrapped following a bitter fallout between Kojima and Konami. There's been little sign of the series continuing since then, though reports suggest two more Silent Hill games might be in development. Like most major video games franchises, Silent Hill also received a couple of movie adaptations.
Silent Hill from is considered one of the better adaptations and draws heavily from the first game's story while cherrypicking elements from later games. The film follows Rose as she brings her adopted daughter Sharon to the abandoned town of Silent Hill. Here are the movie's three layers of reality broken down.
The Real World town of Silent Hill in the film was abandoned years before due to a raging coal fire burning beneath it. Even early on as a fantastical horror, the games have utilized specific elements and techniques to ensure their notoriety and effect as horror games that also suggest the importance of lore, context, psychology, design, and other facets that have continued to frighten players and inspire works today.
PT , directed by Hideo Kojima, was created as a demo for Silent Hills as it was released oh-so quietly and mysteriously on the PlayStation Store all the way back in Its release was sneaky and its gameplay even sneakier as it forced players to question everything about the game, what it meant, and how to play it to make any progress. The entire history of the game stands as an incredible event that caused players to connect to beat one of the scariest virtual experiences they would ever lead, which is why Silent Hills was heartbreakingly canceled.
The demo inspired many indie games afterward to try and evoke even a little bit of the terror that it ensued. Konami and the Silent Hill team always took the liberty to give the player multiple endings based on certain choices they made in-game. These endings always ranged from "bad" to "good," often numbering around different endings involving new cutscenes.
While this isn't necessarily a new mechanic amongst fellow games such as Indigo Prophecy , this continued to inspire horror and non-horror games to play with the idea of letting the player's actions have more weighty consequences.
They also are notorious for their "joke" endings, usually involving aliens and a Shiba Inu. Silent Hill is unabashedly cinematic and inspired by cinematic works. Most notably, the games take a lot of inspiration from David Lynch and Twin Peaks. One of the elements that they take inspiration in is the use of sound design to insight horror and make the atmosphere eerier. The calls of oncoming monsters to strange sounds surrounding the playable character that go unexplained make the experience all the more immersive.
Much like The Black Lodge in Twin Peaks , Silent Hill uses its duality to its advantage as it forces players to seek out more about the lore and try to dig up more details.
The mystery behind the Otherworld also leaves players to see the monstrosities as coming from another realm, a device and mechanic that would continue to influence horror games and even film. The Medium is an example of playing with dual realms to stay in tune with the character's reality and ground the horror. Silent Hill 4 does feature an alternative world that was probably created by the mind of a psychopath and is now home to a variety of monsters, but the appearance and function of this world is completely different than the Otherworld in other Silent Hill games.
The fourth game in this series finds the protagonist, Henry, trapped in his apartment. Unable to leave through the door or windows, Henry eventually manages to escape though a large hole that appears in his bathroom.
However, the hole deposits him in a place far more sinister than his apartment. In Silent Hill 4, the apartment itself is its own little world. Though Henry can see through the windows and the peephole in his door, the entire apartment has been separated from reality. Notes passed under his door come out completely different, no amount of pounding on his door can be heard by people outside, and occasionally he is able to see things through his windows that other people cannot see.
Eventually the environment of the apartment begins to degrade, and the facade of normalcy slides away. The apartment in Silent Hill 4 serves first as a traversal puzzle hub and safe room, and then later as a centralized location for plot progression and cut scenes.
The Otherworld in Silent Hill 4 is a twilight world. While this is an interesting game mechanic and used very well in the Resident Evil series , it damages the Otherworld dramatically because the feeling of oppression and claustrophobia is lost.
The game loses its ability to stage transitions to and from the Otherworld to build tension, and as a result the title feels like it meanders along without any real build-up or payoff. There are elements added to the mix to try to increase this feeling of danger while in the Otherworlds unkillable ghosts, escort missions, an unstoppable antagonist , but since the player understands that he can leave at will, the feeling of tension induced by the Otherworld is dramatically reduced.
Silent Hill: 0rigins Though Silent Hill: 0rigins is in many ways a dyed-in-the-wool Silent Hill game, its use of the Otherworld is different and interesting. Though the game follows the look and feel of the Fog World and Otherworld familiar to the series, the way it transitions between the two changes the utility of the Otherworld considerably. In 0rigins, the player can switch between the Fog World and the Otherworld any time he happens across a mirror, and there is no penalty or cost to perform the switch.
This allows the designers of 0rigins to use the Otherworld as a traversal puzzle: a path that is blocked in the Fog World will often be open in the Otherworld, so players must find a mirror to switch, cross the area that is blocked, and then find another mirror to switch back.
Mirrors make the Otherworld part of the traversal puzzle in 0rigins. That said, there is a section of 0rigins that I though made excellent use of the Otherworld. At one point Travis, the protagonist, finds himself in a theater. When the switch to the Otherworld occurs, these set pieces become physical components of a new space that mimics the appearance of the set. This is a really cool mechanic because it allows the player to construct different scenes using these set pieces three possible scenes in all and then switch to the Otherworld to find out what kind of things such a place would contain if it actually existed.
In its mirroring of the theater set, the Otherworld creates new, twisted locations that previously did not exist. This sort of hints at the idea that the Otherworld is a constantly changing mirror of the real world or at least, of the Fog World , rather than some static locale, which is an idea touched upon by previous Silent Hill games but never reenforced as strongly as in 0rigins.
The Otherworld is one of the many original ideas that sets the Silent Hill series apart from its competitors. The concept has everything you could want in a game mechanic: it fits the aesthetic and narrative goals of the series, it provides a method for pacing the player and steadily increasing the tension invoked by the plot, and it is mutable enough to serve very different purposes across a number of games.
The existence of the Otherworld, and the rules by which the characters in the Silent Hill series transition to and from it, is one of the defining elements of the series, even though it changes dramatically from game to game. Very nice article. I really liked the analysis. I thought the mirror mechanic in 0rigins would make the otherworld less scary, and maybe it did somewhat, but I did find that the act of choosing to go to the otherworld turned out to be fairly tense. Makes sense I like the way you went through each part and form of the worlds within Silent Hill.
But can you do more things on Siren 2? I am about half way through and would like to know what you think of the game. I know I got here late, but I just got Origins a few days ago and I want to put my two cents in. I think the reason that the mirrors are the gateway to the otherworld in Origins is because…. Once the power was greater, then the otherworld could manifest more readily and noticeably. Er, can i disagree with u there, BigFattyPlus? While the apartment does allow you to cut the tension a bit in the early stages of the game, it eventually becomes the opposite with the random hauntings that start to show up.
I thought it was a nice tension builder personally. After reading this article, I can see some validity in the idea that the otherworld was intentionally used in different ways in each game. Well, writing from the depths of an Argentinian cyber-cafe i must say that the otherworld is not so scary hahaha. Keep writing man, your style improves everyday. Yeah, I always thought of the Otherworld as a sort of Bros. Quay film come to life. Also, with SH:O the Otherworld transformations still felt like punctuation or rising and falling actions.
A few parts in the hospital come to mind, especially that last stretch where you run through the Otherworld streets. Red and other cool colors get the heart rate up, while cool colors actually calm you.
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