WHAT I MISS ABOUT SILENT HILL IS A WORLD WARPED BY THE CHARACTER’S PSYCHE.
If Konami won’t, then someone else should fill the genre vacuum left by Silent Hill
Silent Hills’ cancellation was disappointing for several reasons. Chief among them that its teaser, PT, was one of the most effective slices of videogame horror that there’s ever been. Then there was the fact we’d never see what a collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro looked like.
But the biggest shame is that Silent Hills was the promise of a return to more psychological-themed horror in games, and with it gone nothing fills the vacuum. Great horror games have come along in the past few years. Resident Evil 7 and Alien Isolation unsettled in terrific ways, but by and large they dealt with more physical threats. What I miss about Silent Hill is a world is warped by the character’s psyche, something abstract.
SOMA manages to tap into some of that. Its physical monsters aside (rendered harmless in a patched-in mode) the game really taps into some existential ideas with its storyline of human consciousness trapped in machines. Yet its world is still constrained by reality and it doesn’t quite get under the skin the way Silent Hill does.
MIST OPPORTUNITY
The Evil Within and its sequel also attempt something in this vein and get closer than most, but they still take the easy way out, leaning on action with plots that explain away all of the imagery.
Those foggy streets and dank rooms. There is a familiar reality beneath it all, but Silent Hill is corrupted by layers of human distress. It’s twisted but there’s always something recognisable in it. I haven’t found anything like that in horror games in years, even as the genre has enjoyed a great revival recently. Tremendous feats of world building and attention to detail in these big-budget horror games just makes me wonder what that could be if the resources were put towards something stranger.
Hopefully Konami comes to its senses and resurrects Silent Hills. If it doesn’t, though, there’s a huge opportunity for someone to fill that space. To release something new but still psychological. Something that tells us just how monstrous we ourselves can be.