two games that changed the world – review addiction

In the heading “In plain text” the authors express exclusively their own opinion, which may not coincide with the opinion of the editorial board (or may coincide). They are free to do it as they please and in any format convenient for them. Everything is possible here.

In this issue we will talk about the first two parts, which laid the canons of the series and made the series famous throughout the world.

Born from desire

Which is quite natural, because it was the success of Resident Evil in the West that prompted the leadership Konami give the green light to your own game of a similar kind. Times were dense, the transition to three-dimensional worlds was given to everyone with great difficulty, and the team responsible for the project consisted exclusively of young people with zero experience, but burning eyes. It’s good that talent was also attached to enthusiasm.

In their conquest of the West, young developers relied on an extremely indirect idea of ​​foreign realities. Although their game was set in an American city, none of the team had been to the United States until the very announcement of the game: they had to draw inspiration from numerous books and films, the references to which are easily recognizable. Silent Hill is a potpourri of King, Crichton, Bradbury, Bloch, Kunz, Lynch, Cronenberg, Argento, Line, and many more. This is a test of the pen: in an attempt to find their own handwriting, the Japanese pulled everything and everywhere, mixing seemingly incongruous things. In a quiet American town, a typically Japanese story about the magical fragmentation of the soul and its reassembly unfolded, and the revived monsters from fairy tales and adventure novels coexisted with references to metaphysical entities from Kabbalah and medieval grimoires.

Among the developers, four people should be noted whose contribution is most noticeable. The first is Keiichiro Toyama, director, screenwriter and set designer. He is followed by monster designer Masahiro Ito, composer Akira Yamaoka, and character designer Takayoshi Sato, who also single-handedly created all the CG videos for the game. The result of their labors achieved the desired effect: in the West, the game was received quite warmly. Thanks to this, the developers received the green light to create a new part for PS2, devoid of the technical limitations of its predecessor.

Success factors

In case of Tomb raider all the most important elements for the series appeared in the first part; with Silent Hill about the same story, but it was in the second that they found the much needed development. Of these, three main ones can be distinguished.

You will probably remember the examples easily, even if you played both games for a very long time. A monster from a children’s book that turns out to be a boss; the fourth elevator button in a three-story building; an invisible monster in a prison whispering something; a corpse in front of the TV, like two drops of water similar to the main character … All this not only scares, but also creates a feeling of unreality of what is happening.

The second most important element of the series is aesthetics. Thanks to Toyama’s ingenious solutions, thick fog or rusty metal has been associated with Silent Hill for two decades by many gamers. And after Toyama left, Masahiro Ito, responsible for the design of monsters in SH2 and SH3, took over the baton – Pyramid Head deservedly became the mascot of the series.

The third and perhaps most important factor in the success of Silent Hill is its emphasis on psychology. No matter how strange and beautiful the local world may be, without a worthy plot background the series would not deserve such popularity. And it would not have been the same spectacular horror. After all, it is one thing to admire the nightmarish landscapes, and it is another thing to understand that someone has a whole life in such a hell.

In this regard, the first part is fundamentally different from the second character, into whose subconscious we dive. In SH1, she is a tortured child, a seven-year-old girl with a plight of fate. Naturally, there is no question of any rich inner world here: the low duration of the game seemed to follow from the fact that there were few pages in the biography of Alessa.

Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, talked about the problems, trauma and emotional baggage of adults from a different perspective. If in SH1 we dived into strangers nightmares, then the second part showed the personal hell of the protagonist himself and allowed the player to finish his story. This approach is difficult to overestimate: here both the use of the player as a co-author and the disclosure of the character’s biography through visual metaphors are brilliant and revolutionary ideas.

Narratively, Silent Hill 2 has become a paragon of psychological horror in games. The human subconscious is an endless horizon for symbolism and a wide variety of stories. In the end, there may not be many reasons for the appearance of monsters in reality, and psychological trauma and their fictional incarnations are a wide and uncultivated field in which Silent Hill was a pioneer.

Alas, in the future the series did not go as far into this field as we would like.

The Born from a Wish script was the first step in the wrong direction. Maria originally existed thanks to James, for James and around James, and this excessive independence of her in a house that did not belong to James in any way did not fit with the theme of the main game.

Achilles’ heel

From the beginning, there was a huge problem with the plot of Silent Hill that can be summed up in one word – cult. Alas, if you do not take into account the progressive idea of ​​plunging into the world of other people’s nightmares, the plot of the first part boiled down to a rather shameful set of cliches.

The evil cult longed for the birth of its god, for which he burned a magic girl in a ceremony. But she cut herself in half, and the cult only had one part of the soul of God, and the other half became the daughter of the protagonist. And then, seven years later, she returned and reunited with the original. And then the already united girl used the magic Seal of Metatron to draw a super-pentagram on the city and plunge it into darkness. And then she was stopped by a magical artifact. And then the magic liquid expelled the demon from the girl. For a game with a claim to psychology, this is a shame, not a plot: it should have been taken as a test of the pen and never again brought the cult to the fore.

Silent Hill 2 almost coped with this problem, refusing to directly continue the plot of the first part, but did not go to the end. The same city, the same devilry. The developers wanted to make “Crime and Punishment”, but in the end they made “Crime and Punishment in a sinister Indian cemetery”, noticeably vulgarized their idea.

In the first part, the monsters were real, and in the second they existed only in the imaginations of broken people. For this reason, SH2 should have dropped all association with the first part, renounced the occult, cut all ties with the past and declared that Silent Hill is an anthology, like Final Fantasy. Each game in the series has its own setting and plot, but they still have common features. But in fact, there was a half-measure, because of which the fans of the first part began to beg for a real sequel.

Deadly copy-paste

In addition to the supernatural dope with cults and rituals, Silent Hill had another colossal rudiment – gameplay written off from Resident Evil. In the first two parts, the players and the press more or less accepted him, but began to grumble when it became clear that he did not plan to evolve. For many, the gameplay of the first games became part of the Silent Hill identity altogether – and this was one of the reasons for the end of the series. Because psychological horror doesn’t need a survival horror gameplay.

The first SH made a lot of the right decisions regarding mechanics: the difficulty became lower compared to Resident Evil, the inventory limitation disappeared, fast monsters lived in open spaces, and slow, but more dangerous ones in the premises. A convenient melee weapon has appeared, which eliminated the need to count cartridges. Fog and darkness hid enemies, and the radio warned of danger.

Resident Evil was frightening with small chances of survival: the player’s resources were always in short supply. It was necessary to worry about what the next creaky door conceals, first of all, because of the high complexity and the lack of cartridges / first-aid kits. By removing the word “survival” from the equation, Silent Hill is left with form but no content. Clearing rooms of monsters has become more of a routine than a cause for fear.

To keep the player on their toes, the game had to scare him with the unknown – which she tried to do with the fog. But to maintain this fear, something frightening must periodically emerge from the fog – at least hints that danger awaits in the darkness. But the SH bestiary is, alas, extremely limited. There are only children with knives in the school, only nurses in the hospital, only stupid green cranks in the sewers. Each type of opponent was repeated dozens of times, making the game predictable. And predictability is the main enemy of horror.

The second part in this regard became even worse: there were, in principle, no fast enemies in open spaces. The same humanoid invalids walked or crawled along the streets that wandered around the rooms inside the buildings. Even from their appearance, it was clear that at best they were literally incapacitated (unlike the wild animals from SH1), and at worst they were simply ridiculous.

Enemies in SH2 not only suffered from monotony, but also clearly demonstrated the artificiality of the game logic. Until a scripted and prolonged meeting with the first monster, the streets of the city are empty – and then, as if by magic, invalids come out on them. We got acquainted with mannequins – mannequins come out. We saw the nurses – now they are walking along the sidewalks. Clashes with ordinary enemies eat up a significant part of the timekeeping, but do not give vivid emotions.

Towards the middle of SH2, running around town, I prayed for something threatening to emerge from the darkness.

This is especially noticeable in contrast to the Pyramid Head – an immortal adversary who suddenly appears out of nowhere and makes a very strong impression. Each meeting with him is an event that engraves in memory. It was from such events, in an amicable way, that the game should have consisted: more different opponents and just threats, more unexpected, incomprehensible, unknowable.

City of broken doors

In addition to fighting, Silent Hill also took away puzzles from Resident Evil – even more pointless and irrelevant than repetitive monsters. Theoretically, they could become one of the main elements of the atmosphere, but here’s the bad luck – they did not fit into the theme of the series in any way, did not overlap with the narrative. Often, the player was required to completely ordinary things, not particularly suitable for horror, where the main thing is surrealism and psychology.

Even Silent Hill 2 is full of completely unnecessary elements. For example, the first level is two residential buildings, which the hero must climb from top to bottom, just to go through them. Boring filler!

The most obvious example of excess is tightly closed doors. It has been this way since the first part, and almost all successors copied this terrible element of level design. All “levels” in SH are rooms from long corridors with dozens of doors. Half of them do not lead anywhere and, in principle, do not open, but the player still needs to knock on each one. What if there is something important behind them? You won’t know until you check! So it turns out that a significant part of the gameplay takes place behind the dull feeling of dozens of doors – first in the normal version of the location, and then in the alternative, where the map is the same, but the content of the rooms changes.

Silent Hill has simplified many of the gameplay elements of Resident Evil, so that the player does not get bored with backtracking and focus on going forward, getting a vivid experience. But at the same time, the game itself littered with endless corridors. It’s understandable why SH1 was a corridor: it was simply impossible to do anything more in full 3D on the PS1. But in the subsequent parts, the authors could – no, they had to do something about it.

Did not do.

All this I do not want to say that for their time these two games were so-so. Silent Hill took a big step forward from other horror movies of the 90s, and Silent Hill 2 is widely regarded as the first great psychological horror game. They both left a huge mark on history and inspired many projects – and not only horror films.

But at the same time, a number of critical flaws were laid in the first two parts that needed to be corrected in the sequels. About them – in the next part of the material.