Silent Hill / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Is any of the stuff Harry sees in Silent Hill even real, or is he just insane? The Mind Screw levels of the game make it look like that the player might have been intended to consider that, though later games seem indicate that everything was real. Repeated mentions of a drug which causes vivid hallucinations serve to muddle up things further.
- Lisa. Is she a ghost or just another fragment of Alessa's imagination? Was she really dead from the beginning or did she get damned from what happened to the town? What would've happened if Harry didn't push her away, would she be saved from mutation? And what if Harry didn't run out and lock her inside the room? Would she still keep control of her actions and not try to choke him to death? Her subsequent crying and desperate banging for Harry to come back, along with her attempt to keep Kauffman from escaping the town seem to indicate that, to a degree, she did. Interviews with the developers suggest that Lisa is actually a ghost and that her soul is trapped in Silent Hill.
- Is Dahlia an abusive mother towards Alessa out of malice, or does she just have a warped view of love towards her?
Complete Monster (includes 0rigins):
- Dahlia Gillespie is the High Priestess of the sinister Order's Sect of the Holy Woman. To make her followers more malleable to her apocalyptic goals, Dahlia has the hallucinogenic drug PTV distributed amongst them, uncaring for its dangerous side effects, and has any officials investigating her killed. Intent on summoning the God worshipped by the Order to empower herself in the new world even as it devastates the planet, Dahlia has a series of girls kidnapped and impregnated by the supernatural being, with each attempt leading to the young children dying. Deciding to attempt the ritual with her own psychic daughter Alessa, Dahlia's violation leads to Alessa nearly burning to death, only kept alive by her powers. When Alessa splits her own soul to allow part of herself a happy life, Dahlia keeps Alessa's physical body in immobile agony within Silent Hill's hospital for seven years. Upon Alessa's other half Cheryl Mason being drawn back to the town, Dahlia manipulates protagonist Harry, Cheryl's loving adoptive father, into helping her perform the ritual to usher the Order's God into reality. With no interest in the salvation some Order members desire and cruel beyond measure, Dahlia proves to be far more evil force than any of the monsters lurking within the cursed town.
- Dr. Michael Kaufmann produces and supplies PTV for the Order, while keeping much of it to sell elsewhere. Uncaring of the drug's intense effects and painful withdrawal symptoms, Kaufmann greedily lines his pocket, giving the dangerous psychedelic to tourists looking to get high. Preying on his own nurse Lisa Garland, Kaufmann hooks the young woman for years, threatening to cut her off lest she yield to his demands both sexually and for his illegal operations and eventually deciding to flee the town for fear of his own safety, abandoning Lisa to the Order's apocalyptic plot.
Cult Classic: Relative to the rest of the series; while extremely well-received when it was new and cutting-edge, it was massively overshadowed by later games (Silent Hill 2 in particular) and is looked back on with scorn by some people for how poorly it has aged by comparison. Many others disagree, arguing that even with its jagged, low-res graphics, Narmtastic voice acting, clunkier controls and comparatively simplistic plot, the game is still as scary as balls and a superbly well-designed Survival Horror game (and, if anything, the low-res graphics add to the horror by making everything look more nightmarish and unknowable).
- Along with its rival, Resident Evil, the first Silent Hill game continues to be a point of reference within the retro art and indie dev communities seeking emulating the Playstation/Nintendo 64 aesthetic. There also exist a fan-made level viewer allowing fans to analyze and marvel at the detail and work Team Silent put into the game.
Demonic Spiders: In the hub during the first half of the game, the player only deals with slow and generally inaccurate Groaners and Air Screamers, which are pretty easy to handle assuming Harry just stays out of their way. Then comes the second half with the Rompers, those... things... that can outrun and pinpointly strike Harry down to the floor before the player even starts thinking about pulling up a weapon for self-defense, making it highly impractical to engage them head on. They're also incredibly persistent and can easily pursue Harry through an entire area due to their superior speed, possibly even leading him into another group of enemies (including more Rompers). It's no coincidence that the game undergoes a noticeable Difficulty Spike in the Shopping District, their debut location, and then a massive one in the Resort Area, where even more of the bastards are skulking around.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Lisa is quite popular in the fandom for her general Nice Girl personality and tragic story. There's many fanfics dedicated to giving her a happy ending.
Fan-Preferred Cut Content: While the enemies in the final game are plenty disturbing, many of the unused monster designs are even more frightening, and have many fans lamenting that they were never implemented in the finished product.
First Installment Wins: Zig-zagged — It's largely been overshadowed by Silent Hill 2 and to a lesser extent Silent Hill 3, has never seen any port or Updated Re-release since (not counting Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which is more a "re-imagining" than a remake), and is considered to be the least polished game in the classic trilogy. However, fans also largely regard this as the most viscerally nightmarish and frightening entry in the entire series.
Genius Bonus:
- Dahlia hands Harry the Flauros, a "cage of peace." Flauros is actually the duke of Hell.
- Instead of "Virgin" records, Silent Hill boasts the "Vestal" brand.
Genre Turning Point: Silent Hill marked a shift in the Survival Horror genre from the schlocky B-movie monster-blasting action of then-genre leader Resident Evil towards its brand of sinister, surreal, Mind Screw-laden Psychological Horror that aimed to unsettle, disturb and genuinely horrify the player rather than merely startle them or gross them out. It's arguably this game we have to thank for not only the rest of its franchise, but Eternal Darkness, Fatal Frame, every game ever made by Frictional Games and many more.
Good Bad Bugs: Using the bottle of aglaophotis on one of the Larval Stalkers in the Lake Side Amusement Park allows one to skip straight to the (graphically glitched but otherwise unimpaired) cutscene after the confrontation with Cybil, allowing one to bypass the confrontation completely. Very handy for ten-star ranks and speed runs.
Goddamned Bats:
- The Creepers are rather weak, but they're often numerous and will catch up to Harry's position as soon as he enters a room inhabited by them, likely dealing chip damage that may add up if not killed fast.
- Air Screamers have all the annoyances expected of your typical Airborne Mook, with the added bonus of oftentimes flying off and despawning when they're close to death if you can't kill them fast enough. Their stronger counterpart, the Night Flutters, are even worse and could be considered outright Demonic Spiders because of their tendency to patrol narrow pathways.
- The Puppet Doctors and Nurses are not particularly hard to deal with due to being slow and having short reach, but they're often placed in formations that block your way through corridors and can take a lot of punishment before dying, so getting cornered by a bunch of them at once will easily deplete your ammo in no time.
Harsher in Hindsight: It's hard not to get attached to Harry as a character and sympathize with this motive of braving the horrors of Silent Hill to find and rescue his daughter Cheryl, who isn't even biologically his child, all of which happened just by him being the Right Man in the Wrong Place. Silent Hill 3 would expand on that with the mother of all Gut Punches by having the circumstances of his story, fueled by the love he had for Cheryl, lead directly to Harry's brutal murder 17 years later.
Memetic Mutation:
- Among the fandom, Harry's "Have you seen my daughter" line, and asking it to anyone he lays eyes on.
  Have you seen a little girl? Just turned seven last month. Short, black hair? My daughter.
- "Probably a doghouse, though I'm not sure since there's no dog around."^Explanation
Moral Event Horizon: Let's just say Dahlia won't be winning a Mother of the Year award anytime soon. See entry for Complete Monster above.
Narm Charm: The game is infamous for its stilted voice acting, although some fans find this to be part of the appeal. It's honestly not that bad for the most part, aside from the unnaturally long and awkward pauses between almost every sentence.
Nightmare Retardant: Roahm's Let's Play of this game. He even makes the Jump Scare of CORPSE IN A LOCKER humorous. How? He thinks it looks like Buster.
- The snarkier (and steely-nerved) player likely made their own all-too-easy "stuffed in a locker" joke here, too.
- The Event-Obscuring Camera means that if the camera is positioned properly, the entirety of the final boss fight has you seeing Harry all the time instead of the final boss. There's also the trick of emptying all your ammo before the final boss fight, so it's instantly skipped.
Nintendo Hard: Compared to later games in the series, most parts of the Otherworld are extremely hazardous, with the volume of enemies pumped up to ridiculous levels. This is particularly true of the city streets, where darting from building to building is your only viable way to stay uneaten. Decidedly not the case with puzzles, as aside from one tricky music-based riddle, most are fairly straightforward and simple compared to the hair-pullers later games would feature.
- Part of the reason for this too is the rather unintuitive nature of the health gauge, which shows Harry's portrait and a colored moving line effect behind it. Granted, while you can USUALLY tell if you're in danger of dying as it goes from a slow-moving green (healthy) to a fast-moving deep red (near death), it's not a particularly good indication otherwise of just how damaged Harry is, which can sometimes lead to either wasting supplies when Harry isn't as injured as the player thinks, or he may be even more damaged than the player thinks and dies to another hit simply cause the player couldn't easily gauge his health. The trick is to monitor Harry's breathing. While he might have exerted himself after running around and getting into a drawn out battle with a melee weapon, if he's breathing hard and not settling down, you need to heal quick. Thankfully later games are a bit more intuitive with their health indicators.
Self-Imposed Challenge: It's possible to invert the default camera view in the Extra settings. Combining this with the New Game Plus "Self View" option lets you play pretty much the entire game in a pseudo first-person perspective, which is pretty cool in itself, and it also adds a whole new layer of heightened difficulty and tension by creating far more blind spots in your field of vision, forcing Harry to keep his head on a swivel to look out for danger. It also has a habit of locking the camera onto the enemy nearest to you, which can be outright panic-inducing when you're surrounded by several of them.
Signature Scene:
- Entering the Otherworld and being assaulted by Grey Children/Claw Fingers is how most players remember being welcomed into Silent Hill.
- The UFO ending started a long string of hilarious joke endings that the series is partially known for.
So Bad, It Was Better: The graphics of Silent Hill have been called by some to have not aged well in the slightest compared to the much-improved visuals of the later entries; while cutting-edge at the time and having pushed the PlayStation to its absolute limit, it's regarded by these people in the present as very dated and clunky-looking. However, many also say it's precisely for this reason that the first game is such a Cult Classic; the 64-bit, polygonal graphics give a lot of ambiguity to the appearances of monsters, and the distorted-blurry visuals and downright nightmarish tone had some people considering it the scariest entry in the series, as it perfectly fit the surreal vibes of the game and made everything seem like a bad dream. In that, the game's weak graphics have become a hallmark of a lot of "PSX" Retraux indie horror titles, all of which are very effective at scaring the player because it's so polygonal.
That One Attack: The Final Boss has only one attack, a blast of lightning, but holy hell does it hurt. It can one-shot you even at full health if you don't pause to heal mid-attack, and is hard to reliably dodge.
That One Level:
- The Resort Area is likely the hardest area in the game. The whole area is completely infested with Groaners, Air Screamers, and Rompers who will absolutely not stop chasing you, making actually taking your time to explore a risky prospect unless you want to use up a ton of bullets and health drinks. The first area's not so bad exploration-wise, consisting mainly of wide streets and just a few buildings, but it's dense with packs of monsters and small enough that running from one will drive you into several more. Furthermore, it's home to an important sidequest that's fairly easy to miss while you're running for your life and essential to getting the Good ending of the game. Furthermore, there's a Point of No Return on the bridge where it transitions into the Otherworld, making it impossible to go back and get anything you missed. It's pretty likely on your first run through the game that you'll end up running across the bridge in a blind panic and completely miss everything in the first area. The second half is a series of narrow docks that are infested with Wormheads and Night Flutters. The docks are so thin that you barely have space to maneuver around enemies, and the tank controls mean you'll likely end up running into invisible walls and left vulnerable to attack. Making it worse, it's very easy to miss the map at the beginning of the level, leaving you to run blind through one of the most labyrinthine parts of the game.
- As expected of your typical Down the Drain level, the sewers of Silent Hill are overall very unfun to traverse through, no thanks to its confusing layout, low visibility, cramped walkways and the radio interference that deprives you of knowing where your enemies are.
That One Puzzle:
- The infamous piano song puzzle at the school, involving something about birds and shit. Players with a basic understanding of how to read sheet music can easily figure it out, while everyone else gets to brute-force it with the black/white plumage of the birds being their only obvious clue.
- One that is usually overlooked but may be even worse than the music puzzle is the revolving turnstiles leading to the Otherworld school's boss. The pair of valve wheels on either side determine which direction the gates turn and the degree of rotation, but it's very hard to visually determine and then mentally keep track of which valve directions affect which rotational patterns. This is the kind of puzzle you either solve in 30 seconds through dumb luck or —more likely— you waste 30 minutes screwing around with before you finally, randomly spin them into the correct place with no idea how you did it. Oh, and the puzzle also remembers your moves, so don't think you can just leave the room and reset everything. ^note
Ugly Cute: Larval Stalkers, toddler-sized translucent monsters with little stumpy arms and legs that don't try to fight Harry; they just try to run away while stumbling and making little squeaky-toy noises.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Harry when Lisa tells him she was the same as the monster nurses in the hospital. In shock/fear, Harry pushes Lisa to the wall and triggers her "death." Now, this wouldn't be so bad for Harry if he didn't push Lisa right after she said she was way too scared, didn't want to be one of them and spread her arms begging for comfort, all the while being obviously the same sane, caring and loving person he met earlier. And right after she drops her diary and you begin to understand her backstory, the whole scene makes Harry seem like one big douchebag.
The Woobie:
- Lisa, who was really a nice person caught up in a horrible situation. Made worse by Silent Hill: Origins, where it's more or less revealed that Michael Kaufmann is raping her. As if even that is not enough, the Word of God on Silent Hill 3 revealed that she ended up eternally tortured in Otherworld, a fate she did absolutely nothing to deserve.
- Everything about Alessa's painful and miserable life. Being abused by her fanatical mother mentally and physically at home along with bullied by her classmates at school, and that's before she got immolated by her own mother. Unlike her movie counterpart where Dahlia got Adaptational Heroism so at least she has someone who cares about her, here she has nowhere and nobody to escape her suffering, except death (something which she even denied to).
- Harry is an Iron Woobie. He's your stereotypical Everyman forced to endure literal hell in Silent Hill to find and rescue his adopted daughter, Cheryl. His wife died before the events of the game, so Cheryl is all he has left, and the hope of finding her is what drives him forward. In the end, his nightmarish journey is for naught, as the Cheryl he knew is lost to him, even as a reincarnated form. Even then, he still grew to love Heather as his own. His death in the third game makes his struggle in the first entry all the more tragic.

YMMV / Silent Hill

Edit Locked