Overly Positive

 In the midst of all my Gamefly rentals was a set of games I hadn’t really touched in a while, and the other day, just as I was scratching my head about why Resident Evil 5 hadn’t arrived yet, I received Silent Hill 4 in the mail.

Those of you in the know, know that Silent Hill is the quiet, twisted sister to Resident Evil’s violent, outspoken presentation. There are a lot of people that I know who shy away from Silent Hill, mostly for the fact that action isn’t as high or as visceral, or that the puzzles and running around are really more Myst than they are for a game that supposedly involves “survival horror”.

To those people, I have to say, you’re missing something.

Silent Hill is a game that took a hardware limitation and turned it into the kind of fear that you felt before Blair Witch Project was hyped into oblivion and you saw it in the theater. For those who don’t know, the PS1, the original format for the Silent Hill games, had a distance draw limitation that threatened to screw with Silent Hill’s large, expansive town and building maps. To compensate for this, Silent Hill’s designers decided to insert a pervasive fog and/or darkness to the design of the game, forcing the player to only be able to see a short distance in front of them. In addition to this, they gave the player a radio, which, when squawking static, indicated when an enemy was nearby.

The result was a rather fearful experience based upon your own imagination. I remember playing Silent Hill in college, and during the summer when I served as a freshman orientation leader, on off-nights we would gather in the dark lounge and take turns running through Silent Hill’s fog-filled streets. Not knowing what was in front of you, but yet knowing something with some nasty, bloody deformity was out to eat you alive made things a heck of a lot exciting, and I’m not even counting after we had a few drinks and began wondering what noises the empty dorm hall could have been some forgotten, vengeful ghost.

It seems odd that I’d get excited about being scared about a game, but to this day, I play Silent Hill with the lights off in a dark room. This doesn’t seem to be very smart, considering my wife has a penchant for scaring me just for the fun of it, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

All that being said, Silent Hill 4 has neither the fog, nor the radio, which makes the whole experience just a little less scary than it should be. But being forced to fight off an army of demon dogs and patient ghouls wielding knives, with nothing more than a steel pipe, is still exciting, still a bit scary, and definitely a lot of fun.