Silent Hill (1999)

Predecessor of a whole bunch of survival horror games, Silent Hill is a horror exploration game back when people didn’t know what video games were.

You, Harry, walk backwards in a circle. This is a common occurrence.

Delightfully free of tutorials, it’s filled with satisfying sounds and sight-shortening fog. It’s designed like a movie, with the camera changing angles as you turn down the street or enter an alleyway. This is an open world game with a realistic map – haha no wait, the streets are cracked open so you can’t pass. You can try approaching the school from a lot of directions, but there’s only one path for you to take. Everything is pleasingly intentional.

While you’re searching for your lost kid at night, you find a corpse and crawling bodies attack you. But you wake up at a police station with a normal, alive, human police officer talking to you. This is Cybil. She gives you a gun and tells you to not shoot her by accident, and leaves.

But before you can leave, you should get the radio from on the table.

The window bursts in, and a skinless flying bird attacks you.

You survive (or don’t a few times, because the controls are janky as fuck), and you start looking for your kid again. You find her sketchbook, but not her, and it says to go to the school on the other corner of the map…

The school has a clock tower that’s big enough to enter. There are slots in it for objects to be inserted, and at the front of the school there’s cryptic hints written in blood. And also there are children walking around with knives who attack you that you beat to death with a rusty pipe to save bullets.

There’s a room full of lockers in it and a rattling sound, like something is banging on one of the cabinet doors from the inside… you open it, and a cat leaps out and runs off.

10:00
“Alchemy laboratory”
Gold in an old man’s palm.
The future hidden in his fist.
Exchange for sage’s water.

The chemistry lab has a statue of an old man’s fist. If you pour acid on it, the medallion is revealed. When you put the medallion in the clock tower, the time changes to 12:00.

12:00
“A place with songs and sound”
A silver guidepost is
untapped in lost tongues.
Awakening at the ordained order.

There is a piano in the music room, and a short story.

“A Tale of Birds Without a Voice”

Some of the keys on the piano don’t work. Harry sees blood on the keys and asks if that matters (it doesn’t).

First flew the greedy Pelican,
Eager for the reward,
White wings flailing.

Then came a silent Dove,
Flying beyond the Pelican,
As far as he could.

A Raven flies in,
Flying higher than the Dove,
Just to show that he can.

A Swan glides in,
To find a peaceful spot,
Next to another bird.

Finally out comes a Crow,
Coming quickly to a stop,
Yawning and then napping.

Who will show the way,
Who will be the key,
Who will lead to
The silver reward.

A white pelican, a white dove, a black raven, a white (or black?) swan, and a black crow correspond to the sequence of keys to press to cause the silver medallion from a previously-unnoticed painting to fall.

Putting it in the clock tower changes the time again.

5:00
“Darkness that brings the choking heat.”
Flames render the silence,
awakening the hungry beast.
Open time’s door to beckon prey.

Actually, you get to enter the clock tower. There’s a passageway inside of it that leads… back into the courtyard.

It looks different. There’s a ritual circle drawn on the ground. The walls and floor are made of dingy grates, with rusty gates blocking off areas. It looks abandoned. The layout of the rooms remain the same as the school, and the map is invaluably useful. Harry marks off doors with jammed locks, as well as openable doors after you try them.

There’s a shotgun in the boy’s bathroom. There are telephones on a table, and as you try to leave the room, one of them starts ringing, and picking it up has your kid talking to you, asking for help. Keep going.

There’s a room full of lockers in it and a rattling sound, like something is banging on one of the cabinet doors from the inside… you open it, and there’s nothing there. The inside of the cabinet is red.

Then you walk two steps and a tall locker opens, a corpse falling out of it.

It has a key.

It takes a while to get to the boiler room at the bottom of the school, but you keep going until you’re there. If you lose your way and don’t know what to do next, you can only backtrack through the uncomfortable building to find the pink rubber ball. The key slips down through the grates all the way back down to the courtyard. You need it to access the empty library, and to go downstairs.

There is a short story about a hunter luring in a lizard, and then shooting it in the mouth with a bow and arrow. Harry finds it familiar, remembering it as a fairy tale he heard when he was a child.

Guess what’s in the boiler room!

An ampoule, of course. You can take it to restore health, and to not lose any of it for a short period of time.

There’s also a big fire, surrounded by spikes, like a pyre. That’s where the heat was coming from, behind the boiler room.

And a lizard!

After surviving the encounter, the fog turns a calm white. The school is peaceful and back to normal, and church bells have started ringing.

You walk out of it and go to the church.

There’s a woman there. Her name is Dahlia Gillespie. She shows you the Flauros.

The Flauros.

You pick it up when she leaves. There’s a key to drawbridge on the west side of town, and the hospital…

You search the hospital. Eventually, you find the generator that powers the elevator, and press the key to take you to the fourth floor.

And there is rust, and grates, and a dingy world that returns…

No, the elevator doesn’t have a button that goes to the fourth floor… what are you talking about?

The hospital prowled by patients with growths coming out of back of their necks. They attack you with knives.

All around, you find some plates that fit into a puzzle door. There are eight slots for the door, arranged in a square, and four of them are filled.

Clouds flowing over a hill.
Sky on a sunny day.
Tangerines that are bitter.
Lucky four-leaf-clover.
Violets in the garden.
Dandelions alnog a path.
Unavoidable sleeping time.
Liquid flowing from a slashed wrist.

There is (empty space) white plate (empty space) orange plate (empty space) purple plate (empty space) black plate. Perhaps you can figure out where the blue, green, yellow, and red plates go?

But you don’t have a green plate.

You find the tentacles that guard the green plate. They enter through a hole in the floor. You distract them with a blood pack. The tentacles have fun eating it!

The door gives access to the rest of the building. In the basement, there’s a storage room, with a grate on the floor. Vines entangle it, but after burning them away after saturating them with alcohol, there’s a secret underground hallway with more hospital patients.

And a room, with a picture of Alessa, and a woman hiding under the table. This is Lisa.

Harry gets a really bad headache and passes out.

When you wake up, you’re in a hospital bed, with white fog. It’s back to normal. The woman from the church, Dahlia, gives you a key to the antique store across town.

The key to Green Lion antiques.

You of course go to the antique store, where after going down a creepy set of stairs, you push aside a red-stained cabinet to find a hole in the wall.

From behind you, Cybil greets you.

From then on is the most frustrating and hilarious conversation so far. Cybil tells you she saw your kid at the lake, before she ran on thin air. Weird things have been happening and all the exits to the town are blocked off. Cybil says that the police were searching for someone distributing drugs. She doesn’t know anyone named Dahlia Gillespie. Maybe the drugs the darkness covering the town that she was referring to.

A weird dream other world has been happening. What has been going on there? Oh no, Harry, you’re tired. She should investigate, since she’s a police officer. Harry says no, and enters the hole, and finds a shrine with a chalice with some strange powder inside of it.

Maybe these are the drugs…

Naturally, the chalice lights on fire.

Waking up again in the hospital, you’re greeted by Lisa, who tells you that you were unconscious and having a strange dream.

It’s time to go to the town center! The other world begins to claim everything, like the previous uncertainty of dreaming was a patient’s final dying breaths. This is the world now. The floor crashes underneath you, sending you tumbling into a sandpit with the sandworm. Luckily, there’s a hunting rifle nearby… and a lot of things happen that I forgot to write down.

At the hospital, Lisa tells you the secret route to the lake. There’s a lot more manuevering through a tower, some sewers, and then you get to the luxury resort area!

In the boat-on-the-water, you find Cybil again. She believes you now! Especially with Dahlia Gillespie’s sudden appearance and explanation of how it’s the demon Samael’s fault. The way Cybil decides to handle this is to have Harry go to the lighthouse, and she’ll go to the amusement park.

You hurry there! It’s too late. The mark is already there. Time to get to the amusement park and see how Cybil is doing.

Hi Cybil! Cybil has red eyes now and is slowly walking over to you to kill you. Hello hottest game writing decision ever. She will raise her pistol, aim at you, click-bang! and you’re on the ground with a bullet in your body. If you’re too close too her, she’ll pistol-whip you. If you lose sight of her, the merry-go-round will stat running with a quiet lively tune as Cybil rides a horse, and which trips you up when it stops. The roundness is only broken up by the wheelchair.

She has a limited number of bullets, though, and she’ll toss away the pistol when she’s out of them, preferring to walk continuously towards Harry and strangle him if she gets close. There’s a dark red stain on the back of her shirt, between the shoulderblades.

She kills you.