I’m back! Did you miss me? I really have been missing my weekly blog posts, but sometimes life just makes you pick and choose. And at this current time I have to pick the thing that keeps me from living in a cardboard box, so the blog posts have to wait. But I have time this week! And man do I have a good topic! So as listeners to the podcast have probably already heard, we reviewed the original “Silent Hill” for Justin’s birthday episode. It was my first time I had ever played this game, so I walked into it totally blind. This blog post is going to cover two areas. First, I am going to explain in detail why as a huge fan of survival horror that I have never played a Silent Hill title. And second, I am going to talk about what my hopes for this franchise going forward will be. So let’s dive in shall we?
My first survival horror game was “Resident Evil 4”. I had heard of the Resident Evil franchise, and seeing that bloodred steelbook at Gamestop caught my eye in a way no other game had. My mother, God love her, was easily manipulated into buying both the collector’s edition and the strategy guide for me. Thankfully she never opened the strategy guide and saw the full length poster of Leon getting beheaded! I took the game home and plowed through it. I played that game so many times! I was speedrunning it and creating challenges for myself before I even knew that that was a thing! A friend, let’s call him Tim, knew that I had fallen in love with the game and recommended I try out the other games in the franchise. He let me borrow “Resident Evil 2” and that was it. I was all in on Resident Evil; movies, books, games and all. But there was another franchise I had heard of, that I knew was a similar game but different story. That was Silent Hill. My friend Tim, who had my trust not only because of his guidance to other Resident Evil games, but as one of my closest friends, told me that the games were shit. That he had played the first two and they were pale imitations of the first two Resident Evils. I trusted his judgement, made that my opinion on Silent Hill as a franchise, and stuck to Resident Evil. Tim and I had a falling out in high school (funnily enough he was hooking up with my then-girlfriend, so much for trust) and I haven’t spoken to him since I graduated and left home. But his thoughts on the Silent Hill franchise have stuck with me, and were still with me when I started the game a few Fridays back…
Little background for those who don’t or haven’t listened to the podcast yet. We were supposed to be reviewing “Zombi” for Justin’s birthday. Not only did it fit into the season, but we both had gotten it for free and we wanted to clear it from the backlog. But the game was not fun. It wasn’t bad, but it was definitely not fun. So I message Justin and ask him to hop in voice chat so I can ask him a question. I had just recently picked up the original “Silent Hill” and “Silent Hill 2” at a used game store. Starting the podcast, I knew that we were going to play these games. Justin has told me on several occasions that SH2 was one of his favorite games ever. So after sitting there, staring at my copy of SH, I had a plan. Justin got into voice chat and I made my pitch. I wanted to scrap “Zombi” and play SH. It would give us less than a week to beat it, and we hadn’t given our audience a head’s up so we weren’t going to get any listener feedback, most likely. But at the very least, it should be a better review for the show since we were both not into the zombie game there would be some passion in the review. He agreed, I turned on the PS3 and put in the disc. My journey into Silent Hill had begun!
My first impression was that it WAS a knockoff of Resident Evil! The tank controls, the weird environment, and other things were starting to confirm what I had been told. But it became clear that that was more of a staple of survival horror games, and not anything unique to the RE franchise. Diving into the story was such a treat, and it was so original! The monsters were strange choices, until someone on Reddit made me aware that they were manifestations of Alessa’s fears (should have picked up on that with the nurses!) I also saw how the game influence horror games that came later. We had played “Deadly Premonition” for the show previously and I’ll be damned if the creators of that were not fans of SH!!! Listen to the podcast for my full thoughts on the game and my experience with it, but bottom line is that SH is better than the original RE and I cannot wait to play the second game!!
The biggest thing I want readers of this post to take away is that you shouldn’t let others opinions stop you from trying new things. If not for Justin and this podcast, I may have never played Silent Hill. Sitting here today, I am very mad that that was almost my reality. I think that we allow others to have way too much sway over what we experience, and that we shouldn’t let that be the case. So if there is a game you have wanted to play but haven’t because some podcaster said its shit, screw him and play it! If there is a movie that a reviewer crapped on, but you want to see it, go see it!! And if there is a t.v. show you want to check out but some twitter fool has said not to waste your time on, fuck him and watch the show! Life is too short to not do what you want, so live it to the fullest and experience things that you want to experience!!
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