Yeah having already played D a couple years earlier, when Silent Hill came out it didn't look like anything revolutionary to me, and replaying D had already shown me that cinematic horror only works the first time through anyway. Still don't get the appeal.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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you have to keep the time in mind, when it was published.
i played it with a friend on a weekend. prepared with lots of microwave popcorn.
it was not so much about the jump scears, but more the atmosphere. the sound of the radio, when a zombie was nearby, was nerve wrecking at times. then the other dimension (forgot the name)
and that was published on the playstation 1. for me it is like mgs, they tried to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the hardware.
i haven't played it since. so i don't know how it aged. but when it came out, there was bothing like that.
Yea that seems great
I love that the iconic fog of the series was just a workaround to avoid loading times
I just liked the atmosphere of the game and enjoyed it despite it's flaws. I also remember having to beat cybil with only melee because I had no ammo.
It still has an extremely charming aesthetic that's still hard to find anywhere else.
Like with most games hailed as masterpieces of their time, you'd have to have experienced it when it was new and novel to really appreciate what it offered at the time. It wouldn't seem new and novel years later when a ton of games took inspiration from it and duplicated much of what made the OG great.
there definitely was a lot of annoying jank tbf, like i remember i pretty much got softlocked at the end of the game cause I was a little too trigger happy with my bullets and didn't have enough to kill the boss lmaoo
i feel like the original SH games are just on some different vibes and you're there mainly for the atmosphere. like yeah, you can play SH2 remake but it doesn't have that same weird claustrophobic vibe as the original, you know??
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
You have to remember that it was competing with tense-but-goofy Capcom fare like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, and then... Japan-exclusive Lovecraft patchworks like Iru! / They're Here! Earlier and more-grounded horror titles like the Clock Tower remake were nowhere near as visually or mechanically immersive.
And for whatever reason, horror doesn't age as well in games as it does on film. It took ages for The Exorcist to decay from being superlative and important to a historical relic you vaguely understand as frightening. Evil Dead, The Thing, Terminator 2... there's some old-ass movies that stand up and skeeze you out. Shit, I'd still hesitate to rewatch The Ring. But interactivity demands some shock value, and that shit has a shelf life.
I only recently started playing older titles with the original half life and i guess that put my bar for masterpiece a little too high. I still consider it a good game, probably i would have appreciated it more when it came out.
Half-Life arguably suffers from success more than any horror game. Everybody ripped it off, to the point its innovations can feel cliche. Like Aliens. Fortunately it's put together well enough to remain viscerally engaging, and the ridiculous aspects are mostly deliberate. And, bitrates aside, it still sounds incredible. Sound design is more than half of what conveys atmosphere.
As far as I'm aware (I only played one Silent Hill, Shattered Memories) the series really took off with Silent Hill 2.