We’re probably all in agreement that Silent Hill 2 has a fantastic story, but looking at the original game I can’t really say the same. But before I get to that let me say that Silent Hill 1 has always had 1 major advantage: mood. The mood in that game is terrifically horrifying. I’ve almost wet myself just waiting for the monsters to pop out, even when they never do. And yes, mood can sell a game. Anything in the survival horror genre has to feel oppressive and helpless which is why I feel like the daylight zombie kill-em-up of RE5 make it less of a horror game than Condemned’s angry hobos. One fits the mood, the other doesn’t…at all.
So we can usually forgive survival horror for having clunky controls, lousy camera angles, and a crap story because it still manages to scare the hell out of us (in fact, those problems can sometimes aid the “scaring the hell out of”). A game with virtually no story like Condemned can add to the scary by simply not letting us know why the homeless are trying to kill us. But Silent Hill 1 does have a story, and it works while you’re still piecing it together. It just fails towards the end.
Silent Hill 1 is about a guy who takes his adopted daughter to a resort town and on the way there she disappears, he crashes his car, and you spend the rest of the game trying to find her with the aid of a nurse and a police officer while psychotic monsters and bird-things try to rip you to shreds as the village is shifting dangerously in between foggy and pitch black. All good so far.
***REALLY OLD SPOILERS FOLLOW***
Once you’ve barely figured out that your daughter is connected to the ghost girl and the old lady is trying to sacrifice her to summon some kind of demon, you still wouldn’t guess that you have fight the demon at the end, which you do. This takes all the slow building mood and sets it on fire. Then you escape with the police woman as fire rains down from the sky and you manage to save a new baby. Happy ending. But no! What the hell? I didn’t save my daughter and I’m already over it. Here we have a peaceful moment of “everything’s gonna be alright” but there’s probably a bird-thing seconds away that wants to rip me to shreds. And I just fought Lucifer, what kind of ending is this?
Needless to say, I didn’t like the ending to Silent Hill. The story doesn’t manage to wrap things up in a dark or believable way… at all. It comes off as silly. So, I consider Silent Hill 1 a bright red rash on the Silent Hill series’ body of great storytelling.
I agree in the sense that they made a short ending of the game, but bear in mind that there were three different endings, and all of which were entertaining nonetheless.