Silent Hill: Fear grows in the fog

With Silent Hill our weekly column continues # fridaynostalgia dedicated to retrogaming.

If you missed the previous articles dedicated to retrogaming you can easily find them all at this link. You will find Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Silent Hill and many other goodies collected just for you!

SILENT HILL: FEAR COMES FROM THE FOG

Horror and video games have always been a winning combination. The particular mechanism of the latter, in fact, goes perfectly with the times and gimmicks of this type. The mere fact of experiencing certain stories or settings firsthand increases the degree of involvement of the user, giving back emotions and much stronger sensations than with any other media. The only means that can compete in this battle (and possibly win) is the book. The degree of involvement between the two is in fact almost identical, being able to identify with the protagonist's thoughts and fears in the same way. The video game however offers us the opportunity to to interpret the situation in our own way, leaving a certain freedom which makes it all the more scary. We could read a good example in the article dedicated to the myth of Slenderman.

This brief introduction was necessary to be able to fully understand the success of a masterpiece released in 1999 for Playstation One. A scary and fascinating story made of fog, creepy monsters, nightmares and crumbling walls before our eyes. A world that could only be born from the brilliant and twisted minds of a group of Japanese developers led by a man called Keiichiro Toyama and destined to teach. This world would have slowly and maliciously canceled and rewritten the rules of the genre, dictated over time by the Capcom giant "resident evil“, Projecting us into the gloomy world of Silent Hill.

THE STORY OF HARRY AND CHERYL

It all begins with the adoption of a baby girl found on the street by a married couple, Harry e Jodie. This little girl, called Cheryl, it will become the focus of all our future wanderings. After many years, the now widower Harry is convinced by her daughter to visit the mysterious city of with her Silent HillHowever, due to a car accident, the man finds himself alone and lost in the fog. Attacked and killed and by strange creatures, he will wake up inside a bar, along with the police officer Cybil. From here on, we will be taking control of Harry in a desperate search for him.

In a mysterious city, where fog hangs over all our horizons, between escape routes collapse, roads with very particular names (all real horror writers), our journey will take us to visit a series of places linked by a terrible secret. The game mechanism is quite simple, there are exploration phases and combat phases, interspersed with the presence of puzzles and puzzles to be solved to move forward in the story. All designed with a view in third person semi-free, in contrast to the cinematic cut with fixed framing of resident evil. The choice was to change the approach based on the environment in which one would be. L'shot, in fact, although appearing from some fixed points, she was always free to move together with the protogonist, especially in open spaces. In closed and confined spaces, however, it was not uncommon to have directorial “cuts” more similar to the direct competitor.

THE PARALLEL DIMENSIONS AND THE TRICK OF THE FOG

One of the most successful elements of Silent Hill is the presence of two realities well distinct. Every place in which we will go in fact, which is the disturbing city hospital Alchemilla, elementary school, church or playground Lakeside, will have a normal version and a demonic version, belonging to the other reality. This mechanism, evident from a certain point on in the game, at the beginning has the power to confuse and disorient the player. Being in the exact same environments, but completely ruined, yellowed, rotting and full of hideous creatures was one of the keys to Silent Hill's success.

The other characterizing element of this title is the presence of one thick fog looming over all environments of the game. Every street, every place is engulfed by this white blanket, from which danger can emerge at any moment, creating a constant sense of danger and isolation. The lack of horizon, like the protagonist's lack of hope, was perhaps the most important element of the whole narrative. To think that this was more of a technical expedient, to reduce the depth of field to be loaded into the console and thus make the game less heavy on the Playstation 1. When you say “kill two birds with one stone”.

As if fog and darkness weren't enough to give us moments of pure panic, the developers introduced two other elements with a notable impact. The flashlight and the radio. The first, of course, allowed us to partially illuminate dark areas, while the second emitted a particular noise in the presence of enemies. This noise, in addition to filling us with anguish, attracted other creatures in the vicinity, becoming a true double-edged knife. Elements capable of undermining all our certainties, plunging us into a world of constant tension.

THE SILENT HILL FINALS

Another special feature of Silent Hill is the ability to finish the game in various ways, depending on how the game progressed. We will therefore have five endings: very bad, bad, good, very good and "bonus". The endings depend on our ability to save or not two key characters for the plot: Kaufmann and Cybil. The first is the chief physician of Silent Hill hospital, heavily embroiled in the facts that have made the town the little hell it is. When we find him under attack by a Mumbler, we will be able to decide whether to save him or let him die, thus influencing the ending. Same goes for police officer Cybil, who gets infected near the amusement park.

As for the history and the time line of Silent Hill, the canonical ending will only be the one in which we end the game by saving only the doctor. In this ending Harry will find himself in the arms of one Baby, generated at the end of the game, while the same doctor will be forever dragged into the other reality. The other endings are more or less tragic or interesting, and the developers, as great jokers they are, also wanted to insert a conclusion worthy of Giacobbo with his Travel.

LA VERA SILENT HILL

Video games often draw inspiration from legends, myths, real events. Silent Hill also finds a singular point of contact with reality. There is in fact a city, in the United States of America, in Pennsylvania, which has many points in common with the video game city. This place is named after centralia. The city of Centralia, built on land sold by Native Americans to settlers in 1749, is built on some massive anthracite deposits. For causes that have never been fully ascertained, an immense fire has developed below the city itself. The inhabitants themselves did not realize the gravity of the situation until 1979, the year in which one of the gas station attendants in the area realized that the temperature of his tanks was 80 degrees centigrade.

Over time, various ways have been tried to put out the fire, but none have ever been successful. The city was thus evacuated, passing by almost three thousand inhabitants of 1890, to only seven of 2013. The perennial fire has ruined roads and buildings, creating puffs of smoke from the subsoil. According to some estimates, there is so much flammable material underground to warrant others 250 years of uninterrupted fire. Today Centralia has become a tourist destination, and the writers have used it as the centerpiece for the cinematic fit of Silent Hill itself.

SILENT HILL QUOTES

In Silent Hill the quotations follow one another all the time. If, as far as the dense fog is concerned, it is easy to think of the 1980 film “The fog” by John Carpenter, the more subtle the other quotes. All the streets of the town of Silent hill have the names of authors of mystery or horror books, would you ever have thought you were in Crichton street? When we are in the room of Alessa (character tied hand in glove to the little girl Cheryl), in the other dimension, at the foot of the bed there are some puppets that look tremendously like the aliens of the bonus ending. Alessa herself, originally, had to be called Asia, in homage to the daughter of Dario Argento. Then the production considered the name too uncommon (instead Alessa ...)

When in the Silent Hill hospital, we first pass into the other dimension, the fourth floor. If this does not scare us, it is only because we are Europeans, in fact in Japan the number four is considered a nefarious number, linked to death. The word four in fact translates "shi"As" death ". It is not uncommon, in the land of the Rising Sun, to come across hotels and hospitals without the fourth floor button in the control panel. Another gem is the service station, which bears the logo of the famous chain Shell, but without the S, in a macabre pun with "hell" inferno.

Once you get to the end of the game, even after the credits are over, the programmers have inserted interludes in which the protagonists behave as if they had made mistakes on the set: the so-called "bloopers". Alongside these scenes appears what appears to be some kind of casting. After nearly twenty years, Silent Hill still continues to amaze with its depth and how it has rewritten the rules of the survival horror genre.