Series : Silent Hill
Developer : Team Silent
Music : Akira Yamaoka
Features : Ambience
Themes : Horror
Bio-horror
Other Tags : ghosts
multiverse
Greatest Music
Achievements : retroachievements.orgCOMPLETED
Silent Hill is similar to Capcom's Resident Evil games from the same era, but opted for fully realtime graphics instead of prerendered backgrounds. The result is a world that feels more open due to the camera moving, and the relatively low polygon rendering capabilities of the PlayStation is offset by clever use of fog and darkness. The game seems to have been designed with this in mind, as fog and darkness plays into narrative and gameplay alike, while helping to render an open world on limited 3D hardware.
The combat is difficult and can get frustrating - often because your weapons feel inadequate. This is supposedly intentional, making the option of running away from monsters seem like a better choice than standing your ground. This design goal can very hard to get right, but Silent Hill mostly gets away with it.
The artwork is very effective, making the most of very few polygons to evoke monstrous creatures and the beautifully bleak locations in the town of Silent Hill. Akira Yamaoka's music is very unique, he forewent the traditional orchestral horror music to go with a mix of melancholic instrumental guitar tracks and nightmarish sounding industrial sample collages.
