Konami’s Silent Hill franchise has always been a blind spot in my gaming history. This is something I’ve wanted to rectify for over a decade, but for one reason or another, I just never got around to it. With Halloween rapidly approaching this year, though, I finally decided to dive in to the series with the original Silent Hill and I came away surprised by how well it holds up despite being 25 years old.
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What stands out about Silent Hill so much in 2024 is its general aesthetic and tone. This has always been the game’s main selling point even going back to its launch in 1999, but the vibes that the game gives off now are much different. Rather than being rooted in horror, there’s a strange sense of comfort that it exudes. Running through the foggy streets of Silent Hill with the limited graphics that the PS1 can muster combined with the game’s ambient music was something that I started to enjoy rather than find eerie the more I played.
This is the truly fascinating aspect of playing Silent Hill now. Its visuals are hardly scary by modern standards, which results in the game going full circle to become a comfort. Even with monsters chasing you down and cult members trying to perform demonic rituals, Silent Hill is still littered with environments that put me more at ease than raised my blood pressure.
Part of this comfort that I found in Silent Hill I think stems purely from nostalgia. Games from the late 1990s are ones that I grew up playing, so I naturally feel all warm and fuzzy when revisiting games from this era. Still, there’s something with Silent Hill and the atmosphere that it creates that is far more than nostalgia alone.
This sentiment is one that has started to become more widespread on the internet in recent years as “relaxing” Silent Hill videos have started to be littered across YouTube. These videos tend to pair up the music from various Silent Hill entries alongside certain backdrops from the game. Despite some of these images featuring grotesque or horrific imagery, the general peace that I found Silent Hill to emit is captured well in these compilations. They make for fantastic playlists to throw on while working or simply trying to wind down.
The influence of this Silent Hill aesthetic is also impacting spaces far beyond YouTube. Horror games like Signailis, Crow Country, and Fear the Spotlight have started to pop up all over the place over the past few years. While not all of them are trying to mimic Silent Hill in a one-to-one fashion, it’s clear that these PS1-era visuals are coming back in a major way in part because of Konami‘s classic series. Still, few other games that I have played in this vein have been able to tap into the same unique sort of ambiance that Silent Hill crafted before the turn of the century.
All of this is to say, if you’ve never played Silent Hill before, I really think it’s still worth going back to experience today. Even at a time when Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 is just releasing, there’s still more than enough originality and influence oozing out of the first Silent Hill that feels more relevant today than perhaps ever before. Like myself, you might find that getting lost in a foggy, unknown little town can be far more relaxing than it can be unnerving.
