Games - Silent Hill

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	Games - Silent Hill

Silent Hill (Japanese: サイレントヒル) is the title of a survival horror video game franchise, produced by Konami.

As of 2006, there are five Silent Hill games available (one available only in Japan), all of which were released to strong sales and critical acclaim. What distinguishes the Silent Hill games from other survival horror games (such as Resident Evil) is that Silent Hill focuses on story, character, and atmosphere rather than action and violence. There are plenty of monsters to fight in Silent Hill, and plenty of weapons with which to fight them. But there are also complex puzzles to solve, detailed--and often disturbing--environments to explore, and engaging stories revealed through numerous cinematic cut scenes. Each game unfolds like a movie with several possible endings; the player's choices during the game determine which ending actually occurs.

What is Silent Hill?

Silent Hill is a secluded, lakeside resort town in the United States which--like many such small towns in horror fiction and movies--is permeated by an ancient power. Demonic and disfigured creatures roam the streets and buildings, and the town continually shifts between everyday reality and a decaying "Otherworld." In the first two games, the protagonists are drawn to the seemingly abandoned town; in the third and fourth games, the town reaches out to characters who have some previous connection to it.

Though Silent Hill's streets and buildings remain superficially unchanged from game to game, the horrors each character encounters are specific to him or her, reflecting his or her own psyche. Images and symbols recur throughout each game, providing insight into the character, plot, and underlying themes and creating a tightly interwoven and very personal horror story. This subtle continuity––the strong sense of underlying significance––increases the game’s feeling of dread. The recurring imagery also provides clues to the ultimate mystery underpinning each game and foreshadows the end of the story.

The first game focuses on Harry Mason and his search through Silent Hill for his missing daughter, Cheryl. He finds that the secret of Cheryl’s birth is closely tied to the activities of an ancient cult in Silent Hill. The game liberally mixes Christian religious imagery with hermetic and occult symbolism, as well as including many images related to children, childhood, and corrupted innocence. Images and symbols tend to be benign in the real world but take on a twisted, grotesque malevolence in the Otherworld, a dualism that will continue throughout the series.
Silent Hill 2 follows James Sunderland who comes to Silent Hill searching for his wife. The game is filled with sexual imagery and symbolism, as well as images of torture, torment, and hell. In this game, the town acts as a metaphorical incarnation of a person's troubled psyche––a kind of purgatory in which people punish themselves for––or perhaps revel in––past crimes.
The third game is a direct sequel to the first, this time following Harry’s daughter, Heather Mason, as she’s drawn back into the supernatural machinations of the Silent Hill cult. Silent Hill 3 combines the religious imagery of the first game with the psychological surrealism of the second, notably in the use of mother–child, birth, abortion, and miscarriage imagery, which foreshadow the story’s final revelations.
In Silent Hill 4, the game’s imagery and symbolism reflect the psyche not of the game’s protagonist, but of its antagonist, Walter Sullivan. The player––like the protagonist, Henry Townshend––is drawn into Sullivan’s nightmare world and must slowly piece together his history through the creatures and settings encountered there. This game provides metaphors for birth, mothers, and references to the other Silent Hill games.

Because so many scenes in the Silent Hill games can be interpreted symbolically or metaphorically, it is often unclear whether the town’s grotesque transformations and the creatures and other characters the protagonist encounters are hallucinations, dreams, or reality. The games encourage this sense of altered reality: the main character might experience a dreamlike encounter with a character who died earlier in the game, step through a door and find himself transported to an unknown location, go back into an elevator and find a button for a floor that didn’t exist earlier, or have to make his way through a location called “Nowhere,” a twisted combination of previous locations with no guiding map. One of the possible endings in the first game even reveals that the entire story has been Harry Mason’s dying hallucination.

Where is 'Silent Hill'?

Determining the exact location of Silent Hill is complicated. The games portray Silent Hill as a small, secluded town, smothered in fog, surrounded by large hills, and flanking a lake, but this could be any one of a hundred towns in the United States. The manual to the first game describes Silent Hill as a small New England resort town, and the town's surroundings--particularly the fog--are similar to the region. The town might be located in Northern New England, possibly Maine (the setting for many of Stephen King's horror stories). In the second game, the number plates on all the cars are from Michigan. The fourth game takes place in a town called Ashfield, which resembles Fall River, Massachusetts, home to famous alleged axe-murderer Lizzie Borden (dark American folklore is one of the series' influences).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Silent Hill ]

Games - Silent Hill

What is Silent Hill?

Where is 'Silent Hill'?

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