There’s a Reason Why Horror Games Can’t Forget Silent Hill After 25 Years

Out of the countless indie ecosystems that have flourished since game distribution went digital, one of my favorites is the lo-fi horror scene, a space that channels the pixelated nightmares of a bygone era. While this movement is diverse, many of these titles specifically build on PSX aesthetics because they understand that while this particular look was often motivated by technical limitations, the ambiguity this style utilizes can still be deeply unsettling – defined enough to offer the vague shape of terrors, but abstract in a way that makes the player complicit in dreaming up their spine-tingling details.

However, the best of these don’t only emulate the visual sensibilities of the time with chunky polygonal graphics and low-res textures but also the pioneering spirit of early 3D console games. Itch.io is a haven for these weirdo projects, from the aptly named Haunted PS1 Demo Discs, which contain a wide selection of curiosities, to Kitty Horrorshow’s oeuvre, including Anatomy, a uniquely upsetting look at how scary homes can be. On Steam, there have been breakout successes like Iron Lung, an oppressive experience about piloting a submarine being crushed by an ocean of blood, or Signalis, a survival horror game with such unforgettable presentation that a significant cluster of my neurons are now dedicated to obsessing over it.

There’s also Paratopic, How Fish is Made, Fatum Betula, Dread Delusion, and numerous other strange creations, which have innovated on this seemingly hyper-specific slice of gaming history, interrogating a particular genre as it was over the span of a few years. Across many of these works, one game from the PS1 era is almost always close at hand, mentioned in developer interviews, alluded to on store pages, referenced in design structure, audio landscapes, and sometimes even narrative subject matter. Of course, I’m referring to Silent Hill.

While viewed as singular now, when it was originally released in 1999, Team Silent’s debut was immediately and routinely framed in relation to Resident Evil. Virtually every review at the time mentioned Capcom’s series, which had codified the conventions of survival horror and spawned a wave of copycats. But despite Silent Hill’s resemblance to the mega-hit, with its tank controls, inventory scarcity, and occasional fixed camera angles, most critics also noted that something was different here. In her review for IGN, Francesca Reyes described how instead of mimicking Resident Evil by having players “blast their way through a zombie-filled town with a super grenade-launcher,” it took a decidedly more “cerebral approach to the horror genre.”

Years later, having played through the games that followed in Silent Hill’s footsteps, including its direct sequel, there’s still a unique resonance here, a grimy, nasty, idiosyncratic harmony found in its look and tone, which makes its scares still connect as well as they did decades ago. “The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh,” its first words read, as warbling strings serenade an intro that plays like a feverish, garbled soap opera, full of sights that only make sense after poring over every stray plot thread in an attempt to piece together what it all meant. This sequence keys us into its sensibilities, a mishmash of influences, most obviously Twin Peaks, going in a decidedly more avant-garde direction than many of its peers at the time.

But an even more succinct vertical slice of what the game is doing comes minutes later as Harry Mason, the everyman protagonist, stumbles down an alley in search of his seven-year-old daughter Cheryl. There, you’re greeted by the first explicit acknowledgment that something is very wrong in this place: a pile of viscera that is difficult to identify due to the combination of low poly graphics and uncertainty about what this heap of meat was made from. Still, you press on. While the fixed camera angles initially feel cold and calm, as you go deeper, these shots lurch with each step, as queasy, voyeuristic cinematography imparts the feeling you’re being watched by something horrible.

Then, a siren wails, gray fog giving way to pitch-black as the world inexplicably changes. “That’s strange, it’s getting darker,” Harry milquetoastly states, his naivety contrasted against encroaching terror. You can’t see anything beyond the dim glow of your match, the camera continues to tilt, a rusty wheelchair squeaks, there’s a bloody body in a stretcher. For the first time, the soundtrack shows its true colors, an uneven, violent, metallic clang rising in concert with your own crescendoing dread. It builds, and there are more layers of noise, and the camera is completely off-axis. Chain-link fences are drenched in blood. At the end of the trail, you see a body. It’s wrapped in bandages and mangled, and the details are both apparent and obscured. Harry gives the most wooden line delivery imaginable about the grisly sight, his awkward words and inflection only adding to the surreal din.

Suddenly, small faceless monsters with knives are on you, and I literally screamed, struggling against the cumbersome controls as I crashed back through these corridors. I ran and ran, but the gate is closed. Cornered, they grabbed me, or Harry, I suppose, and stabbed him to death. He wakes up with a start. It was all a dream, it seems. But he’s still in this uncanny town, and his daughter is still missing, waking from one nightmare into the next.

The scene is a perfect snapshot of nearly everything the game does right. This alley’s corridors are defined enough to be legible but obfuscated by a low poly haze. Fog, darkness, and a persistent dithering effect make picking out details like trying to discern what lies in the black of a chiaroscuro painting, and when your eyes finally adjust to what’s lurking, it’s never pleasant. Deeper in, there are moments where figures slowly approach from the distance, their nearly illegible forms entering the frame like half-remembered horrors from a night terror. Your imagination always fills in what’s blurred or out of sight, which, more often than not, is a world of rust and iron. Because similar to the chain-link fences that hem you in during the introduction, this game’s aesthetic oscillates between depicting a mundane, sleepy town and a hellish one made of metal.

This grunginess is fully brought to life through Akira Yamaoka’s soundtrack. Some songs are haunting and melodic, such as the barn-burner main theme, but most are industrial music that very intensely hates you. Steel drums bang, cranks spin, indiscernible machines grind, and piano keys are smashed with what sounds like a hammer, all coming together in an inhuman cacophony. Perhaps even worse, these tracks will seemingly kick in at random. Sometimes, they pick up when you would expect, such as when you first see a body in the alley, but at other moments, they’ll blare while approaching a door or when you’re halfway through a room. And it’s not just the score that’s unpredictable, but other sounds, too. A bird’s chirps will resonate from an empty cage, or you’ll hear a bang from an adjoining room, only to find nothing there upon further inspection.

It speaks to how the game keeps you off-balance, constantly throwing in strange, unexplainable happenings and novel sequences that subvert expectations and dramatically ratchet up its scares, making almost every moment feel crafted to instill discomfort. Unlike many modern horror games that rely on the blunt force of high-fidelity viscera and explosively violent foes, this one uses its presentation to exude a deeper wrongness, and it’s hard not to let its jerky, initially unexplainable turns get under your skin.

But one of its more interesting qualities, and where it feels particularly influential to horror games like Signalis, is how much of its obtuse imagery can eventually be pieced together. Silent Hill’s story is told in an intentionally disjointed manner, which, similar to its hazy visuals, invites curiosity. Most deviously, you have to comb over the corners of this world to get the “Good” ending, taking on the role of detective as you solve obscure optional tasks that offer important context into the history of this place.

Without giving anything away, you eventually find that nearly everything, including seemingly incidental objects that appear in the opening segment, the designs of the creatures, and the pained nature of this setting itself tie into what happened here seven years ago. It’s easy to see why a generation of indie devs have internalized this experience so deeply, as it’s unusual for a game to feel this cohesive, both in its hostility and how every element strains you to pick up on its details.

This isn’t to imply that it’s some perfect object. Although I’d argue that the clunky controls dovetail nicely with its general antagonism, I’m less willing to defend the gauntlet of tedious puzzles during its final stretch, which undermines its tension. It’s also undeniably frustrating to hit credits and most likely receive the disastrous “Bad” ending, which leaves the story only half-told.

But unlike some cases of approaching a seminal work years later and finding little that remained novel, this one had me in its clutches from the jump. Like the fog that makes this town difficult to parse, there is a general air of uncertainty here, forcing us to become collaborators in filling out the specifics. There’s a reason Silent Hill has lived on in countless low poly Itch.io demos, unexpected indie chart toppers on Steam, or even in big-budget horror, and it can be summed up by how a horrible trek down an alleyway invites us to imagine what lies just out of sight in the dark.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves videogames, film, and creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.