There's something far more sinister about this game than any other survival
horror title I've ever played. The atmosphere created is amazingly frightening,
for the entire game, you cannot see more than 5 feet in front of your character,
be it because of snow and fog, or pitch blackness.
I've seen this game make grown men shake with fear. I lent my copy of it
to a friend, a fairly large individual who has a certain air of strength about
him. He plays on a rugby team and on a football team so he isn't some wuss.
He couldn't play it for longer than the first 15 minutes. After that he couldn't
take it.
The way you are set up to believe something is going to happen at all times
is what really gets you. At one point, say, you are walking through a pitch
black school, the walls and floors are a combination of rusted steel plates and
chain-link fence. You hear the faint sound of an ominous siren off in the
distance. All of a sudden out of the near complete silence, the sound of radio
static starts up. Louder and louder, as you continue to enter the locker room
of the school. Danger is approaching. You hear a loud banging noise coming
from one of the lockers and it is noticeably moving, as if something is trying
to get out. You also notice the blood running out from the locker onto the
floor.
Reluctantly you open the locker... nothing. The locker is empty but the inside
is drenched in blood. The sound of the radio static begins to fade and you begin
to settle down. Thinking to yourself the words of the ever wise Bart Simpson
'you know what would have been scarier than nothing? ANYTHING'. You turn
around to leave and all of a sudden. BAM! an eviscerated corpse falls to your
feet from a locker at the moment you turn around.
The beauty of this setup is often lost on people, I know I really didn't care
while I was playing the game. I was too damn scared to get up, and whenever
I did get up the nerve to move it was either to check and see if there was something
behind me or to run out into an open field and sit there with a katana in my
hands shuddering waiting for my radio to start emitting static and an air-raid
siren to go off.
Beware silent hill. It is by far the most disturbing game ever created, in
my opinion.