Silent Hill: Nightmare Edition The Game !!INSTALL!!

Silent Hill has been compared to the Resident Evil series of survival horror video games. Bobba Fatt of GamePro labeled Silent Hill a "shameless but slick Resident Evil clone",[6] while Edge described it as "a near-perfect sim nightmare".[68] Others felt that Silent Hill was Konami's answer to the Resident Evil series[7] in that, while they noted a similarity, Silent Hill utilized a different form of horror to induce fear, attempting to form a disturbing atmosphere for the player, in contrast to the visceral scares and action-oriented approach of Resident Evil.[5] Adding to the atmosphere was the audio, which was well received; Billy Matjiunis of TVG described the ambient music as "engrossing";[78] a reviewer for Game Revolution also praised the audio, commenting that the sound and music will set players on edge.[5] AllGame editor Michael L. House praised Silent Hill, describing it as "a truly magnificent work of art" and "a genuinely terrifying experience combined with a unique, gripping story and immersive atmosphere".[67] Less well-received was the voice acting which, although some reviewers remarked it was better than that found in the Resident Evil series,[6] was found poor overall by reviewers, and accompanied by pauses between lines that served to spoil the atmosphere.[5][6]

Silent Hill: Nightmare Edition The Game

The idea of Silent Hill becoming the "personal nightmare" of people who have past traumas connected with it was actually invented in Silent Hill 2, not 1, and since everyone seems to agree that Silent Hill 2 is the masterpiece of the series its "formula" has become highly fetishized, especially by Western gamers. What people forget, though, is that the "it's your nightmare!" twist of Silent Hill 2 was originally surprising because it was someone else's nightmare in Silent Hill 1. It was the nightmare of a girl named Alessa, a poltergeist who had been horrifically abused by her mother and whose latent psychic power had exploded in adolescence and transformed Silent Hill into a living manifestation of her pain.

The impression that you are in Harry's nightmare stems largely from first-person "therapist" scenes. Periodically the story stops and a sleazy therapist appears, urging the player to do little "exercises" before continuing. They range from answering questions about sex and family to taking Rorschach tests and drawing pictures. What they are supposed to do is "tailor" the nightmare imagery and narrative to reflect your--meaning the player's--psychology. Since Harry is the player's avatar, all this manifests in-game as if your sexual, social, family issues were Harry's. If you tell the therapist you sleep around, all the women around Harry dress sexier, seem more seductive, and in the nightmare world disfigured naked women chase you. However...

This twist is in a lot of ways a very good one. It feels dramatic, satisfying, surprising, and functions nicely as a metaphor for the player's relationship with the game (Harry is, after all, Cheryl's "avatar" too). Where it perhaps falters is in its implied mechanics of human psychology. The twist that you're not in Harry's mind but Cheryl's is clever, but it also requires you to believe that the psycho-sexual dreamscape of a middle-aged man is interchangeable with that of a young woman. If the game "creates your own personal nightmare" based on how you answer the therapy questions, doesn't that diminish it as an expression of Cheryl's personal nightmare? Is Cheryl just an empty vessel for the player? She doesn't seem to be, since there are lots of hints in the game as to specific things which happened to her and specific traumas she has, so whose mind is it?

The somewhat cavalier view Shattered Memories takes to dream logic is arguably the result of its "adaptive" narrative system, in which dream images and symbols are interchangeable based on the player's choices. I am not convinced this system helps the game. One reason Silent Hill 1 and 2 endure as artworks is because they have consistent, meticulously designed dreamscapes worth studying and interpreting over multiple play-throughs. Shattered Memories may be trying to do too much by wanting to create a similar experience that dynamically changes. The big "innovation" of Shattered Memories seems to be that the nightmare is the player's nightmare, but it possibly makes a fatal mistake by assuming it can be the player's nightmare and someone else's nightmare at the same time. As an experiment in interactive narrative it's interesting, but as a portrait of a fictional character it may have been stronger had it been entirely static.

I don't mind the choices you make changing things, but one thing I had (incorrectly) assumed is that the player's choices simply change how Cheryl's psychology is expressed, not what Cheryl's psychology is. Playing again therefore isn't even exploring the same mindscape, but a different mindscape... which is sort of interesting... except that this requires the "meanings" of the dream imagery to be so interchangeable they fail to feel as subtle or as purposeful as those in the original Silent Hill games. The genre swap of the ending "twist" is a variation on this problem, and is further complicated by the fact that the player may be male or female, in which case it would be possible for the game to be the nightmare of a woman (the player), role-playing a man (Harry), who is secretly a figment of a woman's imagination (Cheryl).

Projects like Haunted PS1 and games like Signalis or Tormented Souls look back at a bygone age of development in order to learn something about how horror is communicated in games with technological limitations. By restricting development to a certain level of hardware these low-poly adventures crystallize what made games like Silent Hill 2 so great in the first place. They prey on the inherent fear of the unknown that we all have, forcing us to confront the liminal nightmare spaces that we have respite from in our waking hours.

Based on the successful video game franchise of the same name, "Silent Hill" is psychological nightmare film about a woman named Rose (Radha Mitchell) who travels to the fictional town of Silent Hill, West Virginia, to investigate the past of her adopted daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), who she believes grew up in the mysterious town that has long since been cut off from the rest of the world after a devastating fire. Rose and Sharon are separated after a car accident, leaving Rose to explore the horrific town on her own to find her daughter, in a reimagined version of the original game which centers on a man looking in the town for his lost daughter.

Amidst rumors of a game reboot being in the works, director Christophe Gans has offered a promising Silent Hill movie update. The Konami survival horror video game franchise first kicked off with the eponymous 1999 title putting players in the shoes of author Harry Mason as he searches the titular town for his adopted daughter following a car crash. Subsequent Silent Hill entries explored a variety of characters as they find themselves trapped in the nightmare version of the town, confronted by monsters tied to their damaged psyches.