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We don't need no stinkin' Zombies....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: May 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Silent Hill is an exceptional game. It is dark, fun, creative, extremely involving and more than anything, it is downright CREEPY. The story is simple and the main character is easy to relate to. After all, Harry Mason is just a regular Joe wandering around, completely clueless, in search of his missing daughter. He can barely hit the side of a barn with his pistol and only has a tiny weak flashlight which greatly limits his vision. Right before some nasty creature attacks him, he gets a burst of static on his radio. Believe me, that burst of static will get your heart pumping as you get a little too involved in this game. The graphics are a little coarse, but somehow that does not deter from the game itself as the entire game is shrouded in darkness or fog. Controls are tight and simple to learn. This game is beyond cool, even if it does look like someone's bad acid trip (inside out creatures, ghost-children weilding knives, etc). It is challenging, creative and original and makes killing zombies in the Resident Evil series seem trite and simple. The sound effects are great and add considerably to the eerie atmosphere of the game. Replay value is high, as there are several different endings that you can achieve based on gameplay. If you are a fan of the RE series or Dino Crisis or any survival horror video, BUY THIS GAME!! You will not be disappointed.

very good game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: January 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Harry is just a typical normal guys like anyone else. I purchased this game last summer and sure, it took me a while to get a good control on Harry. TRULY, this is a game not for the faint-hearted. It has very disturbing scenarios (like when Nurse Lisa dies) with disturbing pictures. One of my favorite places is the elementary school since it has MANY puzzles to solve. The elementary school is a frightening place especially when you cross on over to the restrooms. Its cool cause you walk into one of the schools restrooms and you hear a little girl/boy crying, but you dont know where its coming from!!! element of surprise...thats what this game has and i recommend this game to any playstation owner who loves adventurous scary type of games.

Fine Survival Horror

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: January 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

While "Resident Evil" was widely popular as a survival horror series, Konami decided to take advantage of this genre and along came "Silent Hill." You played the role of Harry Mason, who was going to take a vacation in the remote town of Silent Hill with his adopted daughter Cheryl, whom he found on the side of the road and no one had knowledge of her. Once entering the town, he loses Cheryl and yearns to find her... only to find the town is covered in fog and strange things are afoot. An extremely enthralling and creepy game... read on if you dare:

THE GOOD
The storyline has more plot twists than a pretzel. You'll get lost in it several times and some of it doesn't really make sense... but it keeps you hooked. Hooked as if your sensitive areas were going to explode if you stopped playing. This game is dated by today because of the second and third Silent Hill's, but I still find this game to be creepy today. To tell you the truth, while I hate comparing games, I do find this game to be scarier than "Resident Evil." While both game series are fun, this one has that series beaten in the "creepy" department; evil nurses and demon children will attack you when you least expect it, even with your radio blaring out static. In fact, you'll hear crazy sounds while you're playing it, and you'll be scared EVEN when your radio is not on (which by the way, the radio tells you if enemies are nearby. If it's not blaring out static, no monsters are near you). The environments, especially in the nightmare world LIKE THE FRIKKEN HOSPITAL, are downright scary and provide an atmosphere that's incredibly attacking your senses. There are three endings and one alternate "funny" ending involving aliens, which makes the game more interesting. The game is reasonably hard with its downright mindboggling puzzles and religious symbolism, but with a strategy guide (or a friend who knows what he/she is doing), this game actually isn't all that difficult. What MAKES it difficult is whether or not you can sit through this terrifying game all the way through it. ;)

My favorite scary bit... funny in a freaky way: When you're in the school, you find a locker with something inside budging it. You open it and a cat runs out. The cat runs out the door and you hear a crunch sound as if it was eaten. When you enter the NIGHTMARE school, you find that same locker, only with NOTHING in it except a pool of blood. Konami was on drugs when they made this game.

THE BAD
Nothing bad I can think of. I was going to order you to consult your physician before playing this game like I normally do... but then again, you might consult a psychiatrist once you start playing because it's just THAT creepy.

OVERALL
If you want a game that'll scare the piss out of you, this is the game for you. With scary environments and monsters, creepy characters, and a storyline that will mess with your brain to no avail, this game hooks your attention like no other game can. You'll want to beat this game and then breathe a sigh of relief once it's over... then you got two more games which are ten times scarier than this one! A must-have for Playstation fans. In fact, one of the reasons to own a Playstation, period.

Scariest Game Ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: April 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

...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.

Amazing

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: December 07, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Those who feel that this is a rip-off of the Resident Evil series fail to see the point. Yes the engine is very similar but the themes are way different. This is an prime example of how story telling can find its way in games. The images are in fact disturbing and are not for anyone who is under the age of 13, but the payoff is wonderful. Instead of a few suprieses, Silent Hill gives you an incredible and horrifying atmosphere to experiance. The puzzle are fun, the exploration is fun, the story is awsome, and the game is great in general.

Guaranteed to Give You the Creeps

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 18, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Comparing this game to Resident Evil is comparing apples to oranges. The RE games are George Romero movies brought to life. Silent Hill plays more like a cross between two 1970s horror films, "Phantasm" and "Suspiria". Both these movies had their share of blood and guts, but they also relied on shadows, atmosphere, and (especially) eerie sound to convey their terror. Ditto for Silent Hill. In this game, you'll spend less time blowing away zombies in brightly lit rooms and more time stalking down darkened corridors while ungodly sounds echo through the halls.

So, on the plus side, "Silent Hill" delivers the scares. If you've been searching for a video game that will give you nightmares and make you sleep with the lights ON, look no further. Also, from a gamer's point of view, there are multiple endings (enhancing the replay value), and each time you replay the game you get a chance to discover new and improved weapons (including a chainsaw and even a laser gun).

On the downside, the story makes no sense whatsover. If you're just playing for atmosphere, fine, but if you hate games (or movies) where strange things happen but are never fully explained, this game is going to annoy the heck out of you. The cinemas (cut scenes) are few and when they do appear they're brief and unmemorable (no G Virus mutant devouring Umbrella SWAT team members here, folks).

Bottom line: if you prefer survival horror games to be wall-to-wall action, with tons of blood and guts and exciting CG scenes, stick to the Resident Evil games. But if you don't mind a survival horror game with more emphasis on atmosphere and puzzle-solving than zombie whacking, give Silent Hill a try.

Just don't play it alone late at night.

I never thought a video game could be scary ...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 07, 2000
Author: Amazon User

... until we popped Silent Hill into our Playstation and we instantly got sucked into an eerie, evil world that's part Stephen King, part Robin Cook, and part Michael Crichton! All I could say afterwards was a big-eyed "Woah!".

The atmosphere in the game is incredibly tense. Your radio crackles, you KNOW there's a monster lurking nearby but you can't seem to find it, the radio pops and hisses louder, and suddenly out of the fog a winged beast swoops down and snatches a bite ... of YOU! Then you have the creepy zombie-like children in the school that'll team up on you and nibble on your knees. There are long-legged scrawny dog-like creatures that attack you in the fog. Shooting the monsters isn't enough. You have to finish off the job manually ... which comes complete with rather disgusting sound effects ("squish" is a major understatement). And then there are the non-tangible black ghost children (?) that can't hurt you (for the most part), but because they blend in with the surroundings, they'll scare the undies right off of you! And we haven't even gotten to the "nurses" in the hospital yet ...

Add the suspense to a horrifically captivating story line, toss in some mysteries that you are somehow compelled to solve, throw in some puzzles that'll force you to use your noggin, add a missing little 7-year-old girl that the whole thing is mysteriously centered around, and you've got the perfect mix for a can't-stop-playing game!

I can honestly say that this is by far the only game that's actually scared me ... and I've played just about everything out there. As a comparison, I actually found Resident Evil boring (in fact, I gave RE to a friend after owning it for just a matter of days).

In Silent Hill, you get so engaged with the story that it's almost as if you were really there! (Yikes!) Days after beating the game, I'm STILL thinking about it ... and wondering ...

A true videogame classic

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

My first experience with the Silent Hill series was with SH2. Mind you, this is right after I played Resident Evil Code: Veronica X (in which case I was very, VERY disappointed). That game left me scared beyond all reason. It was the scariest videogame I've ever played. So, after doing about ten more play-throughs (including getting a 10-star ranking), I decided to buy the original, because I've heard it was even scarier than the second one. This I found hard to believe, but I bought it nonetheless just because I loved the series already. Because I was accustomed to SH2's type of fear-inducing style, I thought I would be prepared for the first game and that I may not be as terrified as a newcomer to the series. I just have to say that NOTHING in Silent Hill 2 could prepare me for the horrors that awaited in SH1. That same old fear of the dark came back in full force.

While the monsters are nowhere near as twisted and sexually disturbing/suggestive as the ones in SH2 (which are some of the most terrifying creatures ever devised), and Pyramid Head was impossible to top by any game, the monsters in SH1 did provide ample scares that fit the mood (especially the zombie children... *shudder*). But the real fright came from the nightmare environments. The "Nightmare" places in SH2 were bad enough, but these were so extreme in their nightmarish appearance that you felt as if you were in one. Five minutes into the game, I was scared out of my mind because of this. Playing this game was truly an experience like none other. Even though the voice acting was hard to take seriously (it was lightyears ahead of the original Resident Evil, though), the plot was still very intriguing, and kept my attention until the very end. While SH2 I think had a bit more of a surreal edge to it, this one was almost as good. And it didn't have an ultra-depressing mood about it like its successor, and didn't have ultra-depressing music either, so I didn't feel like crying during some of the sad scenes (there aren't that many), which is kind of a downer. But make no mistake: keeping true to its form, there is close to no happiness whatsoever in this game. That's why I like this series: it's so dark and so grim, that no mater what ending you get, you will never feel like it's a "and they lived happily ever after" type of conclusion. And that's just the despairing attitude I like in videogames.

As for the graphics, I have said this again and again and I will say it again: I DON'T GIVE A CRAP ABOUT GRAPHICS! So long as I enjoy a game, whether it be for the gameplay, storyline, or fun overall, then graphics mean nothing to me. And besides, the visuals are just enough to create a claustrophobic atmosphere, with dense fog during the day outside to obscure your vision, and pitch black interiors with only your flashlight to give you illuminosity. That's what this game series has that puts it ahead of the Resident Evil series: a true sense of dread and terror that builds and builds from the atmosphere, not occasional cheap scare tactics. Also, the serious lack of music is a blessing as well. There's nothing more creepy than absolute silence, with strange noises happening in the distance. In a back alley, you come across a big, bloody corpse that you can't even identify, with blood spattered on the wall next to it. Rather than having the camera center on it and have a surge of cheesy, b-movie horror music, you can just pass by it, and be disturbed on your own. Another alleyway you go down you find a basketball hoop and a severed dog's head on the ground, with its blood plastered on the hoop. You go into a seemingly abandoned building, where it is pitch black inside, and you turn on your flashlight to see. In the darkness beyond the shine of your flashlight, you hear a child sobbing, and as you proceed slowly to find the source of it, there is nothing at all. Not even monsters. Just nothing. Then, things just go... wrong, and the hallways you used to know are twisted into a sort of hellish parallel of the world you just left. You go down a corridor made of steel grating, and there is a black abyss beyond, and in the distance you can barely make out corpses hangind from their necks, the crimson-stained chains stretching up to the unseen cieling above. That is the type of terror that made me so creeped out. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. Play this game, and find the true extent of the horror. I highly recommend this game to anybody looking for a good fright, but I discourage anyone who is faint of heart from playing this, as you will probably have nightmares for a long time. Don't be afraid to get into the game and be fully entrapped in it; that's what makes the experience satisfying. Are you afraid of the dark? No? You will be.

Don't play this game after midnight.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: November 14, 1999
Author: Amazon User

The first day I got this game, I played it until way after midnight. Paranoia and fear don't begin to describe what this game gave me that night. If you love to be scared, this is your game.

Scary as Hell!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 23, 1999
Author: Amazon User

This game is unbelievable. From start to finish it keeps you on the edge. You feel like you're almost right there having to defend your life from demons and the undead. I don't really know why this game is so scary, I rarely let a video game freak me out. But this one is different. This game is darker and more sinister than any other game I have ever played. This game makes Resident Evil look like a game for babies. If you really want to be scared, pick this one up, you'll definitely get your money's worth. And by the way, I don't recommend buying this for a little kid, unless you want them sleeping in your bed for the next couple of months. Like everyone else has been saying, "Don't play this game with the lights off." Believe them people.

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