Silent Hill 1 was the beginning of a new generation of horror games; Between Hell And Dream
The Silent Hill series, first released for the PlayStation 1 console in 1999, has a tremendous impact not only on the horror and survival genre, but also He has also played video games throughout the industry. Remarkable visual effects, bold storytelling with deep themes and extremely scary atmosphere have been the background of many of the scariest video games released in recent years.
The development team that worked on this collection, aptly dubbed the "Silent Team," created an American city with a mysterious, foggy history that not only shone brightly in the first version. , But also became more influential in the sequels and became a favorite destination for horror fans. While the Silent Hill series is in many ways a great example of making a terrific horror game, the various versions of the series also offer in-depth philosophical and subtle analyzes of the darker parts of the human mind. It's commendable to have the courage to deal with something as difficult as depression, but the first games in the Silent Hill series took them to a whole new level, addressing issues such as guilt, trauma, and how you perceived yourself. Your past can literally change your understanding of the world around you. They are best implemented in video games.
Virtually every modern horror game that deals with such heavy themes as SOMA and countless Others are largely indebted to the Silent team. People who took horror games to a whole new level. Even today, most Silent Hill fans agree that after the separation of this team after the release of the fourth version of the series, fundamental changes occurred in the tone and quality of the collection. In this article, we are going to deal with the first version of this series and examine its different parts; Where did this legend begin!
to Silent Welcome Hill!
Story
While the themes explored through the game's narrative are very
complex, the plot of Silent Hill is relatively
simple. This does not mean that the story of the game is
unambiguous. In any case, we are discussing a work in which a mad
and demonic cult seeks to bring its unholy God into our world by
imposing unlimited amounts of physical pain on a small child.
However, perhaps it is better to say that Silent Hill
1 is about a father's love for his daughter and how he literally
fights with Hell to find and protect her.
Enter Silent Hill
The game begins with the game's main character, Harry Mason,
with his daughter Cheryl, who travels long distances through heavy
snow and thick fog. He is driving. With the recent death of his
wife Judy, Harry takes his grieving daughter to their favorite
resort town, Silent Hill, to relive the past and escape the
recent tragedy as a family. As Harry turns his attention to the
road, he is confused and loses control of the car when he sees a
young girl who looks amazingly like his daughter and wanders in the
middle of the road. After waking up from the accident, he realizes
that his daughter is not in the car with him. In panic, he leaves
the unusable car and drives through the fog to Silent
Hill to find his daughter.
The atmosphere of Silent Hill is undoubtedly one of the best in the horror genre.
It seems that the closer Harry gets to the city center, the thicker the fog. Meanwhile, he realizes that no one can be found in the city. The only sound that can be heard is the sound of footsteps on the snow, and the only sign that someone is around is the various cars parked along the streets. As Harry continues to explore, he enters an alley where nothing but a lighter is available to see the rest of the path.
He walks to the end of the alley and finally reaches a fence
that looks like a child. It is terribly attached to it and somehow
crucified. As an old siren sounds in the distance, Harry is
terrified when he encounters a group of strange children who come
at him with knives in their hands. Harry tries to escape, but they
outnumber him and eventually succumb to their onslaught.
Dream or Reality?
Harry wakes up in a diner and it seems that those weird kids seem to be just a dream. However, he does not quite remember seeing this place before. Before he could control his thoughts Slowly, he is greeted by an officer named Sibyl Bennett from the town near Brahms. Sibyl explains that on one of her patrols, she was passing Silent Hill when she saw Harry's car and started exploring the city. He eventually states that he found Harry unconscious and brought him to this place so that he could interrogate him a little after he woke up.
After Harry tells Sibyl that he is trying to get the missing girl Finds what he's done, he agrees to help, and gives Harry a handgun. Whether or not this is the standard police procedure in Brahms is not a question that comes to Harry's mind and he takes up arms immediately after encountering the evil children in the alley. Their path separates, and as Harry continues to explore Silent Hill, now full of monsters, he encounters a strange old woman named Dalia Gillespie, who tells him that the little girl in the middle of the road Seeing and causing him an accident is actually a terrible devil.
He finally asks Harry to use the beautiful pyramid boxes called
Flares to arrest him. Harry agrees, perhaps because he believes
stopping demons is a good thing, but mostly because Dalia told him
that if he did not stop the creature, his daughter would not be
well in the end.
summoning the devil
After capturing the devil with Flares, Dalia reveals that the
devil girl In fact, his daughter is Elsa, who is imbued with the
spirit of an evil and terrible god. The god that Dalia and her
friends Dr. Michael Kaufman and Lisa Garland, along with a number
of townspeople, want to summon to Silent Hill for a
reason. The problem with demonic cults is that they know everything
until the demons are summoned, but they do not give you information
about what happens next, and sometimes they even know it. It is
worth mentioning that seven years before the events of the game,
Dalia and her companions burned Elsa in the hope that her severe
and immense pain would create a way for their god to enter our
world. What happens next is a little confusing.
Elsa was terribly burned, but she did not die because she was a kind of mold and vessel for the existence of this evil god. While this feature practically immortalized him, he was still able to feel the real pain of burning alive. This pain, along with the torment she endured under the close supervision of Dr. Kaufman and her nurse, Lisa Garland, formed a hatred in Elsa that manifested itself in the city and manifested itself in the form of various monsters and demons that she had lived with throughout her life. You face, he showed.
The Otherworld
A worn, violent, bloody world you enter when sirens sound is the deepest part of Elsa's tortured mind; Where his worst fears and demons can appear due to the influence of the evil god.
Cheryl and Elsa
You may be wondering what Hriel and Cheryl have to do with these issues and what is their fault? Unfortunately, it seems that when Dalia and her friends burned her daughter alive to give birth to an evil god in our world, Elsa resisted so much that her soul was split in two. One of them was Elsa, who was always tortured and kept alive in Silent Hill. The other is Cheryl, who was adopted by Harry and Judy Mason and spent seven years of her life well until she and her father were returned to the city through the spell that Dalia had placed on Elsa's burnt body over the years.
At the good end of the game (there are 5 possible endings), Elsa
is allowed to give birth to an evil god inside her. Harry destroys
it, and Elsa and Cheryl become a single baby as Silent
Hill collapses around them. Harry grabs the child and leaves
the city.
Parental Love and Sacrifice
The story may suffer a little from the futile complexity of
sectarian interference, but as before That said, the main story is
about a father who desperately wants to protect his daughter. This
feature remains intact in all the craziness that the Silent
Hill plotter is heading towards you. In fact, the most
important issue of this game is the love and sacrifice of parents
and how raising a child can affect the world around it. We meet
Harry Mason, a simple man on a mission to protect his daughter, who
is then confronted by a weak and crazy woman named Dalia Gillespie,
who thinks of her daughter as nothing more than a
slaughter.
Hell of a Child
Each version of Silent Hill examines a different type of hell. Hell is the first game of Hell for a child who grows up with parents who pay no attention to him and cause a painful life. The real horror of Silent Hill can be seen here in the investigation of child abuse, and the scariest thing about it is that it sometimes happened for no reason.
Characters
Silent Hill 1 from Relatively small group It
consists of characters, but each of them provides a valuable piece
of the game's storytelling puzzle. The authors of this game have a
clear understanding of the important themes and themes of the
story, and thus each of the characters has a key role in addressing
issues such as abuse and harassment.
Lisa Garland
Let's start with Lisa Garland. A nurse who only took orders and kept Elsa alive in the torment she suffered. We meet Lisa many times throughout the story of the game, and we can see through her actions and behavior that, unlike her surroundings, she is in fact a lovable and compassionate person. So it makes sense for us to see her as a representative of her job, which is nursing. She works directly with Dr. Michael Kaufman, the director of Alcemilla Hospital, and has had a close relationship with Elsa since she was admitted to the hospital.
However, there is always something annoying about Lisa Garland,
and that is that she knows Elsa's truth. Somewhere in his mind, he
knows that he is helping to perpetuate the abuse inflicted on this
young child, and if it were not for the medications he usually
takes to calm his nerves, he probably would not have been able to
endure this suffering. We understand her better when we find out
that she was actually forced by Dr. Kaufman to continue Elsa's
treatment. He continues to use violence against a child for fear of
resigning and that he constantly wants to please Kaufman. Lisa
Garland is actually a very common member of the gang. A person who
does not want to get involved and is so weak that he can not do
anything.
Michael Kaufman
Dr. Kaufman after Dalia Gillespie Perhaps the most disgusting character in the entire Silent Hill series. Kaufman is one of those people who acts solely for selfish reasons. He is not the only one who orders Elsa to be kept alive and tortured, but he is the one who produced and distributed the drug that many of the city's residents, including Lisa, are addicted to. He is a deceitful man and has used his medical talents since burning Elsa in inappropriate ways. The humiliation of those close to him is just a small drop in the ocean of his post and represents people who do horrible deeds solely for personal gain. 2203/18064-10.jpg ">
Despite a mother like Dalia Gillespie, it is no surprise that Elsa's mind is a perpetual infernal scene. Dalia is a human being, or rather a monster, who wants to sacrifice his child completely for his own selfish purposes. Despite the fact that the game is full of scary music and demonic creatures, there is a more terrifying scene than all the scary atmosphere of the city and monsters.
This is a scene where we see a cold and determined dahlia crying. Pulls him out of his room before burning him alive. Elsa cries and begs her mother not to do this to her. However, the only thing Dalia can say is how lucky her daughter is to be part of the ceremony.
While Elsa is looking for motherly love, Dalia uses her daughter only for her own desires.
Harry Mason
Harry Mason is in stark contrast to Dalia Gillespie. A devoted
man who literally goes through Hell to get his daughter
back. Neither the various parts of Hell nor the
horror horrors of the game stop him from trying to find his
little girl and make sure she is not harmed. Considering the game
antagonists and all their horrible tendencies, it is not surprising
that Harry could not even raise his hand to his child, let alone
put him in the mental and physical pain that the people of
Silent Hill Elsa put him in.
Harry's character type is extraordinary for two reasons:
Gameplay
Now that the story and characters of the game and how they all
relate to Having looked at the general issue of harassment, let's
take a look at how the game aligns itself with this theme.
Silent Hill, along with Resident Evil before that,
essentially established the genre we know today as fear and
survival. A game in the style of fear and survival, the effect of
which you are in A scary world with limited resources and
abilities. In the case of Silent Hill, limited vision is
added to the elements mentioned.
As we mentioned, Harry Mason is what you call a normal character. This means that we expect him to react to a terrible situation like ours. Unlike other video game heroes, he is not an expert in weapons or a fighter, and he has no hidden powers that make the game's enemies vulnerable. On the contrary, it's his inexperience in fighting, weapons, and the stressful situations of video games in general that make him and you a weak person. Thus, Silent Hill gameplay leads you more to exploration and less to combat.
Harry can certainly attack monsters with his cold weapon or
shoot blindly into the dark, but his shooting skills Along with the
power and evil of monsters, he often makes fleeing a more prudent
choice. Although this may sound silly, it is an essential component
of making a successful horror game. However, a game in the
horror and survival genre promises to scare you, and one way
to do that is to scare you into encountering monsters. The way to
create this fear is to tell the player that it will not be easy to
destroy all the monsters.
Thus, the main components of the gameplay are puzzle solving and
exploration. During the game, you wander around the city trying to
find the next intricate piece to solve a puzzling puzzle, hoping to
pass through a previously locked door or gate and discover the
larger Cheryl and secrets of the city. This often leads to finding
clues behind clues, marking maps, going to specific areas, and
dealing with demonic creatures. Between Harry's weakness and
the confusing nature of the city, Silent Hill does a
great job of instilling a sense of fear in the player and his
empathy with Harry.
Visual effects
When it comes to Visual effects, it must be said that most
models of characters, monsters and even backgrounds are simply weak
by modern standards. However, acting in cinematic scenes still
looks good. Oddly enough, however, this type of graphics makes the
game look scarier. In any other genre, these characters are not
attractive with block-like designs, but the strange designs of
humans have made them look like monsters, and evil creatures have
become scarier than before.
It is interesting to know that these technical limitations were useful in developing the game to build the atmosphere of Silent Hill. In fact, it was these limitations that gave the game its foggy appearance, which has since become a major component of the series. The fog that covered the city came into play because PlayStation 1 was only able to render a part of the city. To solve this problem, the geniuses of the Silent team decided to put a thick fog on the city so that the player could see only a large amount of what was in front of Harry's face at any given moment. This made us always think about what was hidden in the fog and made exploring Silent Hill more difficult than before.
Monster Design
One of the lesser-known aspects of the game is its monster design. The monsters that occupy the city are all born directly from Elsa's tortured mind and are somehow related to her past injuries. Remember the weird kids at the beginning of the game, for example. These were in fact an embodiment of Elsa's friends who refused to help her. On the other hand, the flying monsters, unlike the children, who were the dark reflections of the people Elsa knew in her life, were in fact paintings that she had drawn during various treatment sessions with Dr. Kaufman. In fact, Elsa can bring her creations to life and leave them in the city. The difference Between Silent Hill and other games and movies is that it puts you in a world where monsters are made up of deep, personal fears, and confronting them alone is a concept that is scary.
Music h2>
The game's soundtrack, composed by renowned composer Akira Yamaoka, transforms the game from a brilliant work to an unparalleled masterpiece. The music played as they pass through the city, from whispers to loud noises, give the player the feeling that the city itself wants to attack him from within. In general, the different music that is played in different parts of the game, from the Spanish guitar sound of the main game to the piano sound that we hear in different songs, play their role in fully expressing the sadness of the story.
Starting a Successful Collection Silent Hill was a great launching pad for a collection. Since the game's characters are all well paid and their themes are brilliantly explored, making a sequel to it with the continuation of the story of Elsa and Dalia is very interesting and logical. You did not seem to. That's why the Silent team realized that this is the city itself that is worth exploring in later episodes. Thus, unlike the Resident Evil series, in which the characters appeared in various versions and were of great importance, the Silent Hill sequels focused more on the city itself and the meaning of getting caught up in the nightmares you create with your own mind.>
Read more:
- Silent Hill from zero to one hundred; World and Concepts
Source: With A Terrible Fate
