Why Silent Hill Origins is underrated and must be revisited
Silent Hill Origins, the prequel to the classic Silent Hill series, may not be regarded as much today, or even when it released 13 years back.
It was the first game in the series to be developed by a non-Japanese maker, Climax Action. Partly because of this, and some other reasons, it wasn’t appreciated by fans of the series as much as the first four, all developed by Team Silent.
However, playing it now in 2020 shows how well the game stands up today, not because it lives up to the standards of storytelling or graphics, but because of how much this brand of horror is missed in today’s video game industry.
The game puts you in the boots of loner Travis Grady, a trucker who yearns for company as he travels cross country in a multi-axle. On one of the nights of an all-night journey, he decides to take a shortcut through “a town called Silent Hill”. However, as he is tearing through the highway, he is shaken to the bone when out of darkness, a little girl walks onto the road. She slowly turns to face him.
To avoid an accident, he applies the breaks and the truck luckily grinds to a halt in time to avoid the gir…, wait what girl, was it just a shadow? He’s baffled as he looks around, she seems to have vanished. Unable to see her anywhere, he leaves his truck to look for her. The girl eventually turns out to be Alessa, from the first part of the series.
His search for her is the basis of the game. While the protagonist takes a lot of life risks just to find her whereabouts, there are some reasons to this, and these reasons lie in the character that is Travis. He is a forlorn delivery guy, who drives past cities and towns, with no friends or acquaintances but his truck. Second, if we look at his past, we can see the troubled relation he had with his parents, and also clear signs of neglect, which could have led him to act this way.
Anyway, he finds her in a building which is on fire, and well she seems to have been already burned to a crisp when he rescues her. However, as soon as he saves her, he falls unconscious and later wakes up in the foggy town of Silent Hill. He starts his search for the girl at the hospital, where he feels she would have been brought to.
The hospital is a must have level in all the titles in the series. This one too, I feel does justice to the Silent Hill brand. You meet Dr. Kaufman and Lisa at the hospital, mere fan service and nothing more to it!
However, while the part lacks any meat in story, it makes up more by the terrifying location. As soon as you take the elevator to the second floor of the hospital you spot your first enemy, the nurse. She looks dreadful, in every way.
Her head convulses as it rapidly tilts in every direction. She is covered in a nurse’s musty, bloody uniform as she slowly approaches you with a waddle in her feet. Her head is covered in gauze.
You can either run away from her or attack her. After your first battle, the game shows off its very first unique mechanism, that really changed the Silent Hill formula. You enter what looks like a private room with one bed diagonally placed in the middle of the room. There is a giant mirror in the room, and while its dark, it surely looks like something is not ok, with your reflection.
Things seem more degraded in the mirror, its darker, more lifeless and decayed than what you can feel in the room.
The reflection, or what is the Otherworld, is where he finally sees Alessa, running away. He runs up to the mirror to touch it, to be transported into the Otherworld.
This is where the game gets really into your head. This is the same room that you were in just a few moments ago. However, the walls have peeling paint and a tint of extremely reddish rust (or is that blood!). The entire room has changed. The bed doesn’t have a mattress. It is only a rusty iron bed frame which may have faced an eternity of neglect. The entire room is red and most of the floor is now an iron grate.
The Otherworlds look different in every building in the game, yet they all look equally evil. Some of look rusted, others may look like an old decayed book which has turned brownish, and so on.
In this version of the world, the enemy count rises, and an unsettling almost cacophony of unpleasant music starts blaring up into your ears, terrifying you. The music, which is by none other than the master of horror music, Akira Yamaoka, really shines (or darkens) throughout the campaign. A rich set of instruments really pound at your senses, barraging you with ungodly music that is designed to unsettle. At the same time, somber moments see the more melodic instruments play a nice peaceful tune that’s as haunting, yet signal respite.
The Otherworld sections have been panned by some players, who say that the mechanism to switch anytime makes it more easier, since in the previous titles, the Otherworld came without notice, increasing the shock value. However, I feel different about it. The mirror to the Otherworld almost acts like a safe room from the Resident Evil series.
You know you feel relatively safe in the real world, but you know you have to venture into the Otherworld to explore and perhaps fetch an item or to unlock a door. This makes me perspire, fearing what lies ahead.
Another positive I feel, is that you get to explore another more nightmarish version of the same world, which is unique in a way. However, Travis cannot alter anything in the real world by doing something in the Otherworld. This is something I loved, but most don’t. I prefer no overlapping because the Otherworld is a different dimension, and is completely different from the real world. This knowledge, that it is two distinct worlds, terrifies me even more.
The Medium, a game being developed by the Bloober Team, has a similar concept, BUT, it has one crucial change. You control your protagonist in both the real and the other demented world at the same time. This is extremely interesting and surely worth checking out. The game releases later in the year and I for one won’t be missing out on it.
Back to Silent Hill Origins, there is some good enemy types in the game. One of them, a person trapped in a type of cage that looks like a straitjacket made of steel, really would increase my blood rate. Not just because of its shrieks as it spotted me, but also the fact that the person’s body is completely invisible, save for the cage that is. Although you can see this person’s shadow when you direct your torch on it. Thing of NIGHTMARES!
The sanitarium was my favorite part of the game. It’s long and utterly scary! Running around, switching from the real to the Otherworld in search for clues can really mess up your head, making you think more than twice if you want to continue playing. The best part of the area is the lobby, but in the Otherworld. While the real world variant looks like a well maintained and spacious marble floored one, the Otherworld one is bleak and harrowing. The entire circular lobby is now like an eerie spin top, with a shaft that looks like a rusty pipe, which holds an iron grated floor.
What’s more, there are two Two-backs, a ghoulish enemy type, that has one torso attached to a hunched up body of another. They circle around this giant spin top. They look sick, and if one of them lunges on you, two hits can kill. However, this is also when you get the trusty shotgun, so best to blast them away.
After the sanitarium are the theater and the motel levels, the latter of which is actually pretty frightening, and the hardest of the places you visit in this iteration of the game.
To sum it all up, I just want to say that while the game may not be as spine-chilling as the other four that came before it, its surely something that fans of the series must revisit. If you totally ignored it because you heard bad things about it, then you surely must give it a shot.
The game plays well even for today. The controls may take time to get used to, and the camera angles and movement can remain a little frustrating till the end, the atmosphere, and nightmarish hellscape that is created in this game is surely unmatched by any of today’s horror titles.
The deep psychological horror aesthetics that are embedded to this game can’t even be matched by the likes of the Resident Evil 2 remake. Hardly do such masterpieces come to gamers these days, and it would literally be a sin to miss out on this extremely grisly title.
