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How is the first Silent Hill game?

At first I thought it was some dumb Resident Evil clone - then the first 3 minutes made me turn off my console. Easily the most terrifying game experience a I've played in all my life and there has been nothing to date that has replicated that dread/scare aside from Silent Hill 2.
 
I never played silent hill back in the days.
It was resident evil, parasite eve, dino crysis etc so not sure why I never pkayed silent hill 1.
Bought it on psn 2 years ago and thought it was a old classic.
The fog due to limited graphics in the days works in favour to add atmosphere instead of annoying like in n64 games.

Take it for what it is and you will like it.
It was only like $4 so just try it.
 
freeofgreed said:
Never played a Silent Hill game before so thinking about buying the first one off of PSN.

I'm curious as to how well it's received since I almost never hear anybody talk about it. Whenever people talk about Silent Hill they always talk about 2 or 3, hell even the non team Silent Hill games seem to get more attention than the first one. So is the first one bad, or just underrated?
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As someone who also came to the series late but played the crap out of the old PS1 RE games and the like I found SH1 to really be a challenge to get into. While the sound design (that's not including VO) and the plot of the game hold up, not much else does in my opinion. I think you'll be better off watching a playthrough.
 
A fantastic piece of horror media that still holds up to this day. And I say that as someone who only played it for the first time this year. The controls take some getting used to and the path to the better endings is pretty easy to miss, but it has some of the best atmosphere out of any horror game I've played and is definitely one of the scariest. Required playing for any horror fan.
 
Replaying it again in my phone with this before getting sleep.

01_GCM10_Game_Control_Mount_Studio.jpg
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It still scares me even in a 5 inch screen.
 
Very rough around edges but still a great game.

I think it's one of the scariest games of all time. Really atmospheric with great sound design and some really great locations.
 
I thought the opening was extremely atmospheric and used a rising tension and different camera angles to freak the player out. However, after the opening, you wander a town in the fog and dark, easily run past enemies that are chasing you, stockpile ammo for boss fights or for when you get bored of running from enemies, and have those annoying eye-spy puzzles that involve shoving a ruby up a statues butt to unlock hidden passages in a school yard. People champion the story of the original Silent Hill and praise the symbolism, but I didn't find any symbolism, most of the monsters come from literal fears of the child who is making them; Alyssa is afraid of Lizards so you fight a giant Lizard; Alyssa saw pterodactyls in a book so they appear in town.

If someone would like to enlighten me on the symbolic meaning of the original game please do so because the game was a bunch of corny PSX era we need a boss fight so lets make giant animals monsters decisions.

I just felt bored playing the game. It's a similar feeling I felt with Silent Hill 2, but I could at least go on to agree with the praise of the symbolism in the game.
 
The first silent hill has one of, if not THE, best intros in any horror game ever. Walking down the alley seeing bloody wheelchairs and stuff is insane, and blew my mind when it was released.
 
Imho it's the best entry in the franchise. The atmosphere is downright amazing and it's not as confusing as the second one (or open to interpretation or whatever). Mind you I played it back then. I would assume that playing it nowadays is a lot less satisfying because It probably looks and plays very dated.
 
Just picked up Shattered Memories for PS2 the other day (I had it for Wii once) and I still say it's really good and unique.

But yes every SH game is "good" though some have flaws.

You can't go wrong with SH 1-3 and should be a must play for any horror game fan.
 
animlboogy said:
That alleyway you stumble into early on is the greatest "shit just got real" moment in horror games.

And the elementary school is probably up there as one of the scariest areas in the genre.
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That scene was on a PSX demo disc and I immediately shut it off because it was so freaky. Wouldn't play the real game until many years later
 
Minishdriveby said:
I thought the opening was extremely atmospheric and used a rising tension and different camera angles to freak the player out. However, after the opening, you wander a town in the fog and dark, easily run past enemies that are chasing you, stockpile ammo for boss fights or for when you get bored of running from enemies, and have those annoying eye-spy puzzles that involve shoving a ruby up a statues butt to unlock hidden passages in a school yard. People champion the story of the original Silent Hill and praise the symbolism, but I didn't find any symbolism, most of the monsters come from literal fears of the child who is making them; Alyssa is afraid of Lizards so you fight a giant Lizard; Alyssa saw pterodactyls in a book so they appear in town.

If someone would like to enlighten me on the symbolic meaning of the original game please do so because the game was a bunch of corny PSX era we need a boss fight so lets make giant animals monsters decisions.

I just felt bored playing the game. It's a similar feeling I felt with Silent Hill 2, but I could at least go on to agree with the praise of the symbolism in the game.
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For SH1 I was mostly into the story of a father lost in a mysterious/dangerous town looking for his daughter.

As for SH2, I think playing on the hardest difficulty is basically required, otherwise that game is stupid easy to the point of boredom.
 
I played this a couple of times when I was younger but only finished it this year's Halloween with my girlfriend, we enjoyed it a lot. It controls a lot like classic RE but with combat less tight (probably on purpose? You're not really supposed to fight much unless you're against bosses), old graphics benefit it, and atmosphere is really good.

The high school and the hospital are pretty damn nerve wracking. It does has its problem tho, like the almost hilarious dialogue and the game forcing you to run from too many monsters too often with controls that don't help near the end of the game, but that aside, it's pretty worth it!

Played the PSN version myself and had no issues, by the way.
 
Glad too hear the game is excellent. Graphics don't bother me, 5th gen was probably my favorite gen and I regularly play games from that era.
 
First time you enter the night had me in complete shook as a kid. Well everything about this game had me in shook. I had nightmares for weeks...
 
I sometimes feel like it's even better than SH2. It aged gracefully, as its rough graphics heighten the terror.
 
Still a masterpiece. If you want more definitely play 2 and 3. And if you still want even more, skip 4, play Origins and Shattered Memories. The rest range from trash to bad.
 
Is still as good as it was in its strengths but weaker in the areas it had on initial release. Great atmosphere, soundtrack and story but the gameplay and visual is dated but personally think it adds charm to how messed up silent hill is.
 
Honestly, anyone that tells you it completely holds up is probably a big fan of the series. I'm a big fan of the series as well, but if you have difficulty playing old games- particularly since that era of gaming is incredibly hit and miss to go back to if you didn't play things when they came out at that time- it's going to be a bit of a challenge.

Still, and contradicting my opening statement, it does mostly hold up and it's worth playing.

I would also say overall 1, 2, 3 Shattered Memories are excellent and worth playing. 2 and 3 are genuine classics, but 3 needs the context of 1 imo.

If nothing else definitely play 2 at some point.

4 and Downpour are also good (Downpour is kind of a technical mess but really underrated for modern SH).
 
It's excellent. I played it for the first time a few weeks ago and I think it's the best game in the series, although Silent Hill 2 has a better story.

It's well-paced, the puzzles are good, the music is good, and the combat is fine once you get into the rhythm of it. The only real complaint I have with it is that the controls to turn seem a bit unresponsive compared to later games in the series. I found the monsters a bit frustrating at the start while trying to melee to conserve ammo. For the most part you can shoot everything in the fog without worrying about running out of ammo, although there are some enemies where using melee weapons is the better option.
 
I think the reason that Silent Hill 'holds up' is mainly people saying that a lot of design decisions works in the game's favor even in this day and age. It obviously as a PS1 title shows its age, its controls aren't modernized (though it isn't a full on tank control game like the earlier RE titles), while it has better voice acting than most any other game from that era it still has slanted voice acting (which does give a weird mood).

but it holds up I think mainly to four different reasons:

01.) The game's utilization of the software it was working with is still ace, it's a game that at the time maximized on the limits of its hardware, and that still is apparent today. The 'fog' adding to the atmosphere is the most famous example, but there are a variety of other instances of Team Silent working within the console limitations and utilizing them creatively to not make them a weakness, but a strength.

02.) The PS1-styled models that many would view as a weakness in most titles works incredibly in SH1's favor. It achieves the whole effect where you can't tell exactly what you'e looking at with many of the monsters at first because of their surreal designs and old style graphics, and that works to the game's benefit because these sort of things are scarier when you can't fully process what you're looking at but can tell it's something bad.

03.) The sound design is still top notch, out of all the SH games I think it has the 'scariest' soundtrack, dark and menacing industrial sounding stuff, and the sound helps the experience immensely.

04.) The scenarios the game creates are both interesting and ominous, making it a mostly engaging experience.

---

But this game does have its flaws. Its pacing isn't the best, the build-up for the first two locations is quite good slowburn horror but it notably feels like the team got low on time after this and the pacing gets a lot weirder after the second main location in the game (not bad, just weirder), minor quibbles do lead to certain combat scenarios being more frustrating than they would be otherwise (not to any extreme, but it's there), sometimes the camera angles the game picks for you aren't optimal for play... But honestly, I say give it a try.

Do know despite SH1-4 being recommended by me, something kind of interesting about the SH series is each entry is surprisingly different to each other. Even SH1-4 all being made by many of the same team members have vast differences in each entry, so what ends up being people's favorite changes a lot from person to person.
 
It was janky even when it came out.
But it was really scary.

Haven't played it a second time since that playthrough, but it was grand and I remember it very well.
 
It's great. The fact that stuff is hard to visually decipher actually works in its favor. Harry walks like he has a stick up his ass so that's pretty funny.

First game that ever made me have to turn it off because I was getting too unsettled. I was 14 and the stellar audio design was really messing with me at 1 in the morning with all the lights off.
 
It's creepy as fuck. First time I beat it I was in the dark on magic mushrooms. Not gonna say that's the way to play but hooooo-boy that was a good way to play
 
I think Silent Hill 2 is more of a "masterpiece" because it is conceptually and thematically unparalleled, even up to today. The graphics have also barely dated.

However Silent Hill 1 is a better game in several ways and is a more consistent experience, especially once you get past the graphics.

Play it, OP.
 
It's probably a lot better without having experienced the PS2 games. Graphics and dialogue aside, it's still a great game. The tank controls are in all of them (SH4 to a lesser extent).
 
It's a masterpiece alongside SH2 and SH3. I played it a little bit only a couple days ago and it still holds up great. One of the best looking PS1 games too.
 
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