00:00:02.40 Dave Hello, everybody. My name is Dave Jackson and you're listening to Tales from the Backlog. This is a video games deep dive review podcast where each week I'm joined by a guest to bring a game out of the backlog, play it and discuss. My guest today is a friend of the show and author as well as editor and podcaster for Boss Rush Network. And she's standing just off camera in today's game with a fog machine. Welcome to the show, Stephanie Klimov. 00:00:37.47 Steph Thank you. The fog is so thick, I can barely see you, but at least I can hear you. 00:00:42.48 Dave Yeah, that fog machine going crazy over there, but it's good to have you on the show. 00:00:45.87 Steph oh yeah Thank you so much. I was jumping for joy when you asked me to give this game a shot. I've been listening to your podcast for quite some time and I'm just excited to be here, so thank you. 00:01:02.11 Dave Yeah, of course. Thank you so much. Today, we are going to talk about Silent Hill, which is a survival horror game developed by Team Silent, which is a sub-studio within Konami and published by Konami for PlayStation in 1999. 00:01:18.36 Dave And a quick plug at the beginning of the podcast, I did an episode about Silent Hill 2 way, way back in episode 10 of Tales from the Backlog. 00:01:27.84 Steph Ooh! 00:01:29.19 Dave And the audio quality is going to be different on that episode, especially with my microphone. But I think that is a good discussion. So if you like Silent Hill 2, maybe go check out that episode as well. But today we're doing the first Silent Hill game. And if this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, thank you for stopping by. Here's how spoilers work today. Just like every episode of this podcast, we're going to have a spoiler wall in the middle of the episode. 00:01:55.52 Dave So before that point, we're not going to spoil the story. So if you have not played Silent Hill, you don't want to be spoiled. You're thinking about playing it for yourself. You can jump out when we warn you spoilers are coming and then go play the game. It's pretty short. And then come back and hear us talk about, you know, what's going on in the story. 00:02:13.42 Dave So what is Silent Hill? We have elevator pitches for the top of the show for what Silent Hill is in case you don't know. And Steph, you took the simpler elevator pitch here. So I'll let you go first this time. What's the pitch for Silent Hill? 00:02:32.09 Steph Thank you. and Can I just preface this? Normally, I'm very bad at elevator pitches and I was typing this up. I had the voice in my head and I was so proud. For me, Silent Hill is the godfather of psychological horror. What's foretold by Gyromancy? 00:02:48.97 Dave fantastic I didn't know you were going to do the voice. That's awesome. 00:02:51.93 Steph I can't get that out of my head. 00:02:53.51 Dave So ah since the real elevator pitch is gone, I say ah Silent Hill. Make friends with dogs in atmospheric Silent Hill Old Town and nothing here to see other than that. Just pay attention to the dogs. They're very friendly. 00:03:07.51 Dave ah That's the pitch for Silent Hill. I played this game on my Steam Deck. Silent Hill is not officially released for anything more recent than the PS3. So emulated on my Steam Deck. Took me seven hours to beat. Steph, how about you? 00:03:24.20 Steph Yeah, I'm a little surprised that I couldn't find it on more modern hardware. So thanks to a certain 00:03:29.73 Dave That's Konami for you. 00:03:32.15 Steph Yeah, ah very helpful individual that you might know this person, Dave, but help me emulate it. And I played it right on this laptop using an Xbox controller. 00:03:42.06 Dave There we go. Of course I know him. He's me. ah So um let's talk about our personal histories with Silent Hill and with this series and a little bit of history, I guess with horror games in particular, uh, stuff, the guest always gets to go first. So what was your connection to Silent Hill? Why did you want to play this? Uh, I believe that I gave you a couple of options for games that maybe we could do on the show and you seemed interested in playing this. So, uh, why was that? 00:04:13.09 Steph Yeah, I guess, you know, I might not be upfront, the most ideal candidate, because I haven't really played any Silent Hill games. I'll get to the exception, Asterix in a minute. So I never had a PS1. My early consoles were N64 and GameBoy Color. So it was like a Nintendo person. 00:04:31.97 Steph And I'm a huge wimp. I'm a weenie. I never played a Resident Evil game till last year. um I didn't play a horror game till maybe 2020, because I'm just terrified. But after I got more involved with the gaming community, at least the nice ones in the gaming community, they said that there're a lot of great games that are horror. It's not just blood, guts, and gore for the sake of it, although there are games for that too, if that's what you want, right? 00:04:57.38 Dave Mm hmm. 00:04:57.94 Steph and I also avoided the movies. I just avoided Silent Hill like the plague. But you know now that remakes are coming back, Resident Evil got remade and they're going to remake Silent Hill 2. I'm like, you know what? Silent Hill is an iconic franchise. I really want to be able to truly appreciate why people love it. So I said, you know what? I'm going to put my big girl pants on. Since you're going to play it, I'm going to just hop right in too. so Quickly, my asterisk was, 00:05:27.98 Steph When Konami, I just forgot what showcase it was on. It was sharing details about the Silent Hill 2 remake. They released a free game, 00:05:40.09 Steph Silent Hill the Short Message. 00:05:42.77 Dave Yeah. 00:05:43.48 Steph So that actually is my first Silent Hill game. I booted it up. I played it to the end. I nearly crapped myself, but I could see the essence of you know the themes behind Silent Hill, so I just wanted to go for it. 00:05:58.79 Steph So that's my history. 00:05:59.17 Dave Nice. Yeah, ah you and I have had a very similar history with horror games in particular. I know we've talked about this like in real life before. ah the My like introduction into horror games was pretty slow, and then now I'm i'm still i'm not like seeking out every horror game I can get my hands on, but I was definitely looking forward to October podcast time so that I could play some interesting horror games and you know build out a an October schedule. 00:06:29.46 Dave And Silent Hill 2 was a favorite of mine a couple years ago when I played that for the first time. But I never played the first one. I've kind of said it before on various shows that I had a PlayStation back in the day, but it was a Spyro machine. 00:06:44.20 Dave And then it was gone one day. 00:06:44.36 Steph No. 00:06:45.92 Dave I think my parents sold it because we were playing our N64 more. ah so Or maybe you know sold it so that we could buy new Game Boys or whatever we wanted at the time. so I didn't play Silent Hill back then, this is my first time playing it. And the rationale is really just like, I really loved Silent Hill 2. And enough people said the original Silent Hill still has a lot to offer, ah even if you were introduced to it with Silent Hill 2. 00:07:14.77 Dave that I was like, OK, sure, well let's go back and ah and give it a shot. And um to do our quick, you know, opening thoughts at the beginning of the episode, ah this first of all, I'm not a huge fan of the tank control era of survival horror, but this was easier to play than like Resident Evil one. So I was actually able to beat the game and stuff like that, unlike Resident Evil one. 00:07:40.93 Dave um It took a while for this game to really get going, I think, like a super strong opening. And then for a while, there's a long time before you get any real sense of what the story is. ah But eventually you do get there, the revelations about like the backstory and the nature of Silent Hill were, I have expectations from Silent Hill too. And I have expectations for what psychological horror games do. 00:08:08.62 Dave And so I was expecting some pretty fucked up stuff in this. And what I got was some pretty fucked up stuff. It was just as I expected. So I thought the story was a good ride. I enjoyed that. um People always talk about the atmosphere of Silent Hill 1 with the fog and the darkness and stuff. and overcoming technical limitations, and that stuff still holds up really, really well as far as creating an atmosphere. Gameplay-wise, it's kind of a mixed bag, as you may expect from the tank control era of survival horror. But I did enjoy going around and exploring the spaces. I thought the boss fights were dog shit, but there's only like four boss fights, so it's not a huge deal. 00:08:53.79 Dave Overall, I would say Silent Hill 1 is a first step toward greater heights, but it's still pretty damn good. 00:09:02.91 Steph Yeah, I um unfortunately, I don't have the history of Silent Hill 2. And I don't know if this is what you hear in your circles, but whenever I hear people talk about the franchise, they tend to favor Silent Hill 2 over the original Silent Hill. 00:09:17.87 Steph I don't know if that's kind of what you usually hear. 00:09:18.56 Dave Yeah, basically like I always hear, you know, Silent Hill two is the best one. Then one and three are really good. And then the series gets progressively worse as it goes on. That's what I always hear. 00:09:31.46 Steph Gotcha. All right, well. um Kind of as a and a newbie to the franchise, I would say, generally speaking, the game didn't age the best, like most games in the PS1 uncanny valley era, which is ironic because a lot of indie games are like really ah you using that PS1 visuals, but just with more modern ah control sensibilities. 00:09:51.38 Dave Mm-hmm. 00:09:54.54 Steph um Yeah, the tank controls, this is my first time playing with tank controls. 00:09:56.82 Dave Ooh. 00:09:59.14 Steph I've been dreading that for the longest time. so 00:10:02.02 Steph It took me a while to get used to it. However, after a few hours, I don't know, you just get used to it, right? I think the only time that it really bothered me is, you know, when you start getting flanked by a couple of those quicker enemies. 00:10:15.97 Steph I already forgot what they're called, but they're like monkeys or something in the old days. 00:10:19.37 Dave Oh yeah. Yeah, those are assholes. Yeah. 00:10:21.70 Steph Yeah, and I guess I'm like trying to move. I'm like, oh yeah, Perry, come on. And also, we'll talk about it later, but some of the battle mechanics were probably the most frustrating to me. 00:10:25.84 Dave Yeah. 00:10:31.49 Steph But on the other side of the coin, I do think they were pretty freaking brilliant. The guy was just as terrified playing this game than a horror game with ultra real graphics, because the sound, oh my gosh, don't get me started on the sound, the visuals, and just, yeah, the really messed up themes once I eventually started realizing what's going on. 00:10:44.04 Dave Oh yeah. 00:10:53.23 Steph Because I would say, yeah, the first few hours, I'm like, I'm just running around a bunch of broken up streets, OK? 00:10:58.56 Dave Mm-hmm. 00:10:59.71 Steph So yeah. 00:11:01.90 Dave Yeah, there's definitely a lot to talk about here. And I'm glad you mentioned it at the top, because we'll talk about it in a little bit more detail later. But I want to agree with you before we dive into all this stuff that this game is still scary. 00:11:14.49 Dave This is scarier than Silent Hill 2, which is interesting, because Silent Hill 2 had, you know, more advanced technology to work with on the PS2 compared to this one. So I agree with you, this game was generally scary and of the five games in the October slate on Tales from the Backlog, this was one of the scariest ones. Maybe Devotion would rival it, but that's it. yeah yeah This is a pretty scary game, so I just want to agree with you there. 00:11:44.10 Steph Can I throw one more thing out? 00:11:45.78 Steph I just don't know where it would fit later in the conversation. 00:11:48.40 Dave Yeah, for sure. 00:11:48.71 Steph One thing I appreciated for a PS1 game, not that I know too much about the PS1 games, but that era, I appreciated the map system when there was a map, if you had a map, because you can figure out quickly which doors were jammed and which ones were locked. 00:11:57.35 Dave Oh yeah Absolutely. 00:12:02.82 Steph So that was helpful. Thank you. 00:12:04.95 Dave Yeah. Silent Hill one and Silent Hill two are also just fantastic maps for the amount of doors that you're checking in these games. They have to have a system like that, ah but it's awesome. 00:12:16.85 Dave I totally agree with you. So let's put a pin in these various points. Let's listen to a bit of music or soundscape. I'm not sure what I'm going to put in this part of the episode, but when we come back, we're going to set up the story for Silent Hill. 00:12:35.50 Dave Silent Hill was written and directed by Keiichiro Toyama, and the game opens up with a quote as a kind of opening cinematic play. The quote reads, the fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh, which it's a really sets a tone for you know some of the stuff that's gonna happen in this game, or at least maybe how you as the player should be preparing to feel as you see all the stuff that's going on here. 00:13:04.71 Steph Like the blood in the flesh? 00:13:06.59 Dave Oh yes, plenty of blood and plenty of flesh. 00:13:06.67 Steph Oh, sorry. so 00:13:08.71 Dave yeah um The opening cutscene shows the protagonist Harry Mason and his wife finding an abandoned baby in a casket. And so they do what everyone would do. 00:13:20.88 Dave They take that baby home and they raise it as their own. um So you play as Harry in this game who's driving to the town of Silent Hill on vacation with his daughter Cheryl who's now grown up. Suddenly Harry sees a girl in the middle of the road swerving off the road to avoid her and crashes the car. 00:13:39.78 Dave Harry wakes up from the car crash, but Cheryl is gone. So Harry goes into town to look for her. The streets are all foggy. ah He thinks he sees her kind of out in the mist, but she disappears. So he follows her into some back alleys and suddenly things change in Silent Hill. All of a sudden the fences are all rusted out. ah There's barbed wire everywhere. And on the barbed wire, there is a mutilated body strung up in it. 00:14:08.62 Dave And then Harry is attacked by these little monsters and killed. but then he wakes up inside of a cafe alongside a police officer named Sybil. So a real quick, before we do any more plot detail, I just want to say this opening to Silent Hill, you know, with the car crash following her into the fog with this trip into the alleyways and then with this like shift in the town. And then suddenly it's like, it's terror time, super strong opening. This was legitimately scary. 00:14:43.05 Steph Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm like, okay, we're just going to dive straight into it. You know, when I first saw the fog, I'm like, that's the infamous fog. I don't want to go. 00:14:50.96 Dave Yeah, exactly. 00:14:51.15 Steph And the look ah little monsters and I, I've heard very like various right descriptions of what they're supposed to be. If you know definitively what they are, let me know. But I was trying so hard to avoid them. 00:15:03.05 Steph I did not have the knowledge of knowing that I was supposed to die. I was like, like trying to dodge them. And I was almost in tears. I was so scared. 00:15:11.45 Dave Oh, yeah, I tried to dodge out of the way. Like you don't have a weapon during this point, and but all like the gates are locked and everything like that. 00:15:16.78 Steph Yeah. 00:15:19.07 Dave So eventually they'll get you. um And yeah, those little monsters, they look like kids with knives to me like little deathly gray brown toned kids. 00:15:22.60 Steph Yeah. Yeah. 00:15:30.52 Dave Yeah. So ah After Harry wakes up in the cafe with Sybil, the police officer, he tells Sybil he needs to go out in the town to find Cheryl, his daughter. ah And Sybil does what every logical cop would do in that situation. She takes her gun out and gives it to Harry and then tells him to go by himself out into the fog. So that's how the game begins. And this is where the plot you know sends you off on your way um is with Harry. He now has a gun. 00:16:03.60 Dave but just out in these weird ass streets of Silent Hill. ah So you search the town trying to find Cheryl, you learn the mysteries about why the town is the way it is, and so on and so forth. um I thought it was really interesting playing this game, having some knowledge later in the series about what Silent Hill is or how the town works and things like that. A big part of the plot is like figuring that stuff out. And depending on your familiarity with later things, whether it's movies or Silent Hill 2 or Silent Hill 3 or a later game, you may have an idea in your head about what's going on in Silent Hill in this game. And you may not be correct, which was an interesting little thing. 00:16:55.72 Steph Yeah, for sure. um I feel like whatever knowledge you have coming into it might slightly alter your expectations. um 00:17:04.74 Dave Nothing. 00:17:05.34 Steph For me, I have a very novice view of it. i've just All I had were friends telling me, yeah, Silent Hill, um though there are many theories of if it's an alternate world or a nightmare or whatever, but it's basically a horrible place for guilty people ah that you know, either they're being punished or they're mentally punishing themselves, like it's a manifestation of some sort of guilt, something horrible, something. 00:17:27.91 Steph So with that, and after playing the short message, kind of, because the main character is very guilt-ridden, I was like, waiting the whole time to see what, and what did Annie do? 00:17:37.91 Dave Exactly, yeah. 00:17:37.98 Steph And so I, yeah, I was waiting the whole time and I was surprised, not in a bad way, it just kind of reset my expectations there. 00:17:47.31 Dave Yeah, for sure. It's interesting because I like psychological horror games. They're probably my favorite type of horror game now. And psychological horror games are often a character study about your main character and like their psyche in their past. 00:18:01.22 Steph Yes. 00:18:03.45 Dave And Silent Hill 1 is not that. like You barely learn anything about Harry and the entire game. except he wants to find Cheryl. That's about all you get from Harry. 00:18:13.94 Dave And he does some you know heroic acts and he helps some people out and stuff like that. um the The other thing you learn about Harry or that you know or figure out is that Harry's like an everyman. 00:18:26.94 Dave He's not a soldier. He's not a police officer. He's just a guy, which makes it weird that Sybil's like, here, I'm a cop, but take my gun. You go out by yourself. I'm going to hang out here. 00:18:36.20 Steph Yeah, just make sure you don't shoot me. 00:18:37.27 Dave um 00:18:38.62 Steph It's like, okay. 00:18:38.81 Dave Exactly. Yeah. As long as you don't shoot me, I don't care. you Do whatever you want with that gun. Just don't shoot me. Yeah. um But it was interesting, like, just having expectations about like, think that having expectations that come from knowledge about later in the Silent Hill series, and later in the history of psychological horror games, and Silent Hill one kind of It's not that like other games too took things that Silent Hill introduced, or maybe they're more inspired by Silent Hill too. 00:19:15.41 Dave Just interesting to see that this is um like not a simpler story because it's not, it's really weird and like goes some places for sure, but it's very different from what I expected. 00:19:15.73 Steph Yeah. 00:19:24.96 Steph Yeah, if anything, it's like by the end, I'm like this poor guy, he just happened to find a baby on the side of the road and then he just got dragged and dragged into this nightmare. 00:19:37.58 Dave Yeah. 00:19:37.60 Steph where there is a character or two that they ended up having some really nice twists that kind of build up to what Harry e got swept into. So it was a nice surprise for me. 00:19:46.51 Dave Yeah. 00:19:48.99 Dave Yeah. So it's like a, without, I would try not to say too much, but it's like, it's not a psychological like study of Harry, but it is that for somebody else, somebody else's shit is manifesting and, you know, causing all this nightmare stuff that we're having to go through, which is interesting. 00:19:53.95 Steph Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. 00:20:09.22 Steph yeah. 00:20:13.71 Dave The other thing I guess to note about the story here is, um well, two things. Number one, the voice acting for this game is interesting. 1999, we're still in like, I don't want to say we're in the era of poor video game voice acting still because like Metal Gear Solid had come out and Soul Reaver came out in the same year and those are games with great voice acting. ah Silent Hill definitely sounds amateurish and Yeah, that's the word I'll use amateurish. It's not, it's like, I think people sell situations, okay, but like, it's not, it doesn't sound like professional, great voice acting to me. It definitely sounds like, you know, if someone's like, uh, what's an example of weird early video game voice acting, you would say resident evil one, but then you might also say silent Hill one, I think. 00:21:06.16 Steph Yeah, I would agree. I almost feel like whoever these voice actors were, they just gave them the stack of the game, the script without any context behind it. So like they can't really I don't know, but I just want to shout out Gillespie because she went hard in her role. 00:21:15.42 Dave Yeah. 00:21:22.20 Dave Oh, yeah, Dalia. 00:21:22.97 Steph I loved it. 00:21:23.00 Dave Yeah. 00:21:24.17 Steph She was my favorite. 00:21:26.20 Dave Yeah, she definitely likes to ham it up in those scenes for sure. 00:21:30.35 Steph Yeah. 00:21:30.80 Dave So there are people who are like, you know, they're trying. They're trying to, you know, put on these characters and stuff, but it just doesn't sound like some of the marquee voice acting games, even of 1998, 1999. 00:21:44.14 Steph Oh, yeah, and and very disconnected because I feel like each voice actor is saying their lines and they're doing maybe the best that they're given. But they're like they're talking into their microphone, not an actual back and forth conversation. 00:21:57.45 Dave Yeah. And Silent Hill two is like that too. Like you would think that by 2001 they would have, you know, put more emphasis into voice acting, but they really didn't, especially in the original version. 00:22:08.67 Dave Uh, so yeah, I don't know. Just chalk it up to Konami. 00:22:13.04 Steph yeah 00:22:13.09 Dave This is what we can do anytime. Like there's nothing bad about any Konami thing. You can just be like, it's Konami. Like what do you expect? 00:22:20.68 Steph no 00:22:21.06 Dave So, uh, at least they were still trying to make games back in 1999. So um other thing I just mentioned because we'll like bring it up again in the spoiler section but ah this might be a game to check does the dog die calm for content warnings because there's some pretty fucked up things that happen ah later on. 00:22:42.57 Dave and some even more fucked up things that you learn about, like you don't see, but you hear about. 00:22:46.99 Steph Oh no. 00:22:48.85 Dave And, you know, if you cannot all empathize with what you read about a character's situation, this might be something to check ahead of time if you're worried. And I will give more specific content warnings at the beginning of the spoiler section. 00:23:02.45 Dave ah But the nature of this podcast spoilers get saved till later. Some of the things you've got to learn late in the game um are some of those things. Yeah. 00:23:11.47 Steph Yeah, it can be very disturbing, which again for the genre might not be surprising, but these days it's always kind of good to have a heads up if you have certain triggers. 00:23:21.59 Dave Yeah, psychological horror. I feel I mean, I think every single episode this month, except for deadly premonition, I've had to give some kind of warning about ah content. 00:23:32.92 Dave But that just comes with the territory and psychological horror there, you know, exploring fucked up things and fucked up acts. 00:23:35.32 Steph Yeah. 00:23:40.93 Dave So um before we leave the spoiler section, we'll just just ask you something like, Did you enjoy the ride of the story and like finding out what's going on here? Did you find it confusing or anything like that? 00:23:55.10 Steph Overall with the story. um 00:23:57.07 Dave Yeah. 00:23:58.14 Steph Yes, I'll admit it and almost until the end. like it didn't It took me till the end for everything to really click. 00:24:05.15 Dave Mm hmm. 00:24:05.60 Steph I kind of had. just a vague idea of what's going on. But again, I came in with preconceived notions about what Silent Hill should be. So I don't think that helped. I definitely had to watch a let's play that had some narration behind it to kind of help me put the pieces together. And that's I don't know if that's necessarily a critique per se, that's just me struggling to put everything together. 00:24:31.89 Dave Well, it's also the way the story is told because I would be shocked if anyone figured out what's going on before the last hour of the game. It's just kind of the way the plot is given out. 00:24:40.35 Steph Yep. 00:24:43.65 Dave You're given an idea and you might have a preconceived notion like the both of us did that turns out to be wrong. And then like they... feed you bits and pieces and like stuff out of context that you'd be like, that was weird, but I don't know what the fuck that means. 00:24:59.70 Dave And there's red herrings to kind of throw you off a little bit along the way. So I'm with you like, if I played this for seven hours, I would say around hour six, I was like, Oh, okay, I have an idea. 00:25:13.25 Dave And then I definitely used um a, I followed a walkthrough for like the last couple levels in the game and the walkthrough I was following spelled out what's like how some of these pieces connect, which I really appreciated too. 00:25:28.74 Dave So yeah. 00:25:29.60 Steph That's helpful, yep. 00:25:30.98 Dave Yeah. No, uh, nothing wrong with, you know, using outside information to help you understand what's going on. Because the way it's delivered is pretty confusing. 00:25:42.16 Dave Uh, that said this, um, kind of, if people are like me and only played Silent Hill two, Silent Hill two is a game that's very open to interpretation about what you think is happening. 00:25:52.35 Dave And I don't think this is one of those. I think the story is pretty clear in this game. 00:25:57.69 Steph yeah Yeah, once it delivers the plot point, yeah, I was like, OK, I see what's going on. 00:25:58.51 Dave Yeah. So yeah. 00:26:03.27 Steph Though I will say um we'll definitely get into it in the spoiler section, but I do feel like If people don't click on certain things, return to certain rooms, and or depending on the kind of ending you get, I do feel like you might miss out on pretty vital pieces of information on characters. 00:26:22.50 Dave Yeah, yeah, that's definitely possible. um You're kind of encouraged to explore and find like there's lore notes and things around that will give you story and if you miss them or if you don't go to optional places where you might find them, you might yeah have less of an idea about how all the pieces fit. 00:26:41.36 Steph Yeah. 00:26:42.17 Dave Yeah. Well, let's put a pin in the story for now. We'll revisit it in the spoiler section. We will listen to a bit more of that, I don't know, fucking crazy industrial soundscape, and then we'll come back. We'll talk about audio visuals. 00:27:02.31 Dave Let's talk about visuals first. So visuals are credited. Well, actually not credited. Character designs and cutscenes were done by Takeoshi Sato. And Sato was not credited because the older employees at Konami didn't like him. 00:27:17.82 Dave So there we go. 00:27:18.03 Steph Hmm. 00:27:19.02 Dave Very nice of everybody. um So that's the only visual credit that I could find. ah So Silent Hill, unlike Resident Evil ah in this era, Silent Hill is a fully 3D world. It does not have pre-rendered backgrounds. So you are using those tank controls to go around an actual 3D world. ah The camera will swing to follow your character behind him. 00:27:42.31 Dave um Character designs I think are fine for the era. The one thing I'll note is that Harry has really funny big clown shoes, which I thought was very, ah, very fun. I tried to screenshot it, but it didn't work, ah but his shoes are very funny. 00:27:56.53 Steph Maybe he lent them to Sora when Kingdom Hearts came out later. 00:27:59.49 Dave and There we go. Yeah. um Most famous thing about Silent Hill's visuals, of course, will be the fog and the darkness, both obscuring the low draw distance of the PS1 and of course the fully rendered 3D world. 00:28:16.75 Dave ah Could only show you so much of it at a time, but that fog really does set an atmosphere So I'm just you know going out and saying that you always hear about this with Silent Hill But not overrated. It's very good at setting that atmosphere with the fog and the darkness 00:28:33.24 Steph Yeah, absolutely. I remember, because I had N64, a lot of the games had some sort of fogginess to it, but that's just purely because of the lack of draw distance. So it's like, oh, OK, well, that's just technical limitations here. you know Clearly, it was used to give you that sense of uncertainty, what's going to be through that fog. So they used it to their advantage. 00:28:58.46 Steph um I know you put your notes in here about similarities to The Mist. And boy, did that movie give me nightmares. so 00:29:07.98 Dave Yeah, that is ah I don't remember anything about The Mist except for the ending, which is one of the saddest things I've ever experienced in media is the ending to The Mist movie. 00:29:19.38 Dave ah so um then I think the creators said that they took some inspiration from the book, The Mist, which I learned came out in 1980, so a long time before Silent Hill. 00:29:26.93 Steph yeah 00:29:33.10 Dave um the other thing is the darkness so like the fog is people always talk about the fog i feel like people don't talk about the darkness but there are lots of times at night when you're out on the streets of silent hill and uh this has got to be one of the darkest games i've ever played when it's dark outside it's fucking dark ah really hard to see. So both sides of that very ah effective at setting the mood and it ties in really well because ah Harry has a radio that like plays this this tone when an enemy is near and because you can't see anything you're gonna hear that radio sound a lot of times before you see something coming out of the fog or out of the darkness which is just amazing for setting horror vibes. 00:30:18.77 Steph Oh, absolutely. That's static and that ringing. I think that's just going to haunt me for the rest of my life. And yes, I tend to hear that before I see the enemy. 00:30:28.10 Steph And then I start spinning around in my tank controls trying to find the enemies. I don't know. 00:30:36.02 Steph Which ties into the camera, but I know we'll get to that. 00:30:39.84 Dave Oh, yeah, the camera. um So interesting thing about the camera I had written down so like, so it's, it's a fixed camera, you can't control it, the way you control it is by moving Harry around. 00:30:52.41 Dave And eventually, the camera will swing around back behind Harry, not immediately. ah So you do get a little bit of that, like, I'm running toward the camera or I'm running off to the side and the camera's like set off to the side somewhere. Eventually it'll swing back around him. um The camera work in that opening cutscene when you're going through those alleys or not cutscene, the opening section when you're going through those alleys, the camera is like twisting and like changing height and it's like it's constantly moving and it's yeah it's it's really creepy um it doesn't quite get to that like that type of dizzying camera work again but it is always used for effect you know so combine the camera and the obscured vision and the sound that like there's an enemy near but you can't see it or maybe it's around a corner but you can't swing the camera around to look you gotta actually go out there around the corner to see what's going on. 00:31:24.47 Steph Above you, yeah. 00:31:53.09 Dave So all these things work in unison, I think. 00:31:56.49 Steph They do. And ultimately, I was fine with it, except again, when it came to having to engage in combat. um I'm not sure if you took more of an ah run approach versus trying to fight the enemies. But either way, I just think that's the only time where I just kind of got a little frustrated with how the camera you know swings around and follows Harry while you're trying to move at the same time. so 00:32:21.08 Dave Yeah, especially if you have a specific goal in mind, like I got to get to that ladder as soon as possible. 00:32:26.49 Steph Yeah. 00:32:29.34 Dave Maybe the camera's not going to show you that ladder to easily run to it. Stuff like that can get tough for sure. 00:32:35.29 Steph yeah 00:32:35.76 Dave And, uh, you know, we'll talk about gameplay in a second, but you're definitely right. Like. In this type of game, I've learned through playing more of them that most of the time you're better off just running if you can. 00:32:50.04 Dave Like you don't get experience points for killing enemies. So if you don't have to fight them, just run. 00:32:55.18 Steph Yep. 00:32:56.08 Dave Yeah. um The other thing, just about visuals to note, is that the town of Silent Hill is very oddly designed in an uncanny and weird way, I think. The biggest thing is that the streets are so wide. like it they're very so like The houses on the sides of the streets are spaced normally. 00:33:19.14 Dave and the houses look normal, but then the streets are like four times as wide as normal streets are. And it's really weird. Like, it's a simple touch, but really just, you know, strange. So like, you'll be running for a while and you'll be like, how many blocks have I gone? And the answer is one. You've gone one block because the streets are so big. 00:33:39.18 Steph I know they're like highway links almost. 00:33:41.82 Steph It's like, jeez. 00:33:42.23 Dave Yeah. 00:33:44.70 Dave It's weird. And then, you know, you can't see this as it's coming up to you, but a lot of the streets in town are, uh, the, the end in these huge, you know, cliffs and and crevasses. And it's, it's, uh, you know, maybe you're running for your life from some enemies out in the streets. And then suddenly you get to like a cliff edge where the map tells you that the street continues that way, but not this time. So all that stuff is real good. 00:34:14.63 Dave um And no, go ahead. 00:34:14.85 Steph I got this. Oh, sorry. No, the only other thing is um because the streets were so wide, I just felt overwhelmed. I wasn't sure if this was the kind of game where I should be searching every nook and cranny for collectibles or or items or if this was an and I know this is an unfair assumption. 00:34:29.59 Dave Mm hmm. 00:34:37.11 Steph It's just a big empty. world just because things were simpler back then. I really wasn't. It took me a while to kind of figure it out and I did miss a few things. 00:34:46.76 Dave Yeah, like so it's not one of those where you can go into every building and there's definitely no treasure everywhere, but it is a game that rewards exploration. um But it's kind of tough to know sometimes like where can i like what buildings can I go into, where do you know the key place. 00:35:05.69 Dave I think a lot of the time they just signal it by having the doors open or like the doors cracked open. um But you know you'll look at your map and be like, 00:35:11.83 Steph Oh 00:35:14.84 Dave Oh, over here is a gas station or something. And so like you're like, oh, it's marked on the map. 00:35:19.53 Steph yeah. 00:35:20.48 Dave It must be important. And it's not. It's so sometimes it is tough to tell for sure. The only other thing for visuals is the enemy designs are cool, I think, mostly, especially considering the limits on, you know, how much detail can go into them on the PlayStation. 00:35:40.03 Dave So I think this, this you know, the dogs are pretty iconic in Silent Hill. ah They're very friendly. They definitely love it when you, yeah, they love hugs. 00:35:47.98 Steph Mm hmm. They love bugs. 00:35:51.00 Dave They love to jump up and lick your face. Yeah, they're great. ah But there's also these weird, like, pterodactyl enemies flying around Silent Hill. Um, there's those little, you know, gray kids with knife enemies. And then later on, uh, some of the other things that you meet are really odd, but, um, I think enemies in silent Hill definitely give you the, the feeling when you see them, like the first time you see them where you're like, what the fuck is that? Like, I don't know. How do I approach this? I don't even know what that is. What am I supposed to do with this? So I think that's cool. 00:36:26.75 Steph Oh, yeah, it's just the design is very the little gray children with the stabby stab knives. Those are the most terrifying to me. The way they move, ah the sounds they make like the nurse later on, like the nurses and the doctors, ah the way they moan and groan. 00:36:43.11 Dave Mhm. 00:36:44.04 Steph Oh, gosh, gets me. So yeah, just all around where there's their design and their sound and all of them kind of, you know, have a bit some are slower, some lunge at you. 00:36:54.34 Steph So it's a bit diverse. It's a diverse cast of baddies. 00:36:58.79 Dave Yes, it is. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned sound design because that's like, it's, it's a hallmark of any good horror game is having good sound design. And I think Silent Hill might be like the masters of, you know, sound design. So the soundtrack, um, and I don't know if it's the sound design too, but soundtrack is credited to Akira Yamaoka and, um, 00:37:21.50 Dave starting with, like, the sound effects that you hear. um All the enemy sound effects are unnerving. 00:37:30.48 Steph ah Yeah. 00:37:30.68 Dave They're very good. And then just I feel feel like the the main idea when creating the way everything sounds is like what's what's going to be so weird that people are like, what is that like, 00:37:45.96 Dave you know, creating horror by giving you these unknown and odd sounds and things like that. um So whether it's from enemies or like the radio, when enemies are near, or like you might hear a whirring in the background that sounds like a dentist drill or something, you know, taking stuff that people would have an association with. And that's just what this level sounds like. It sounds like the dentist drill. So, 00:38:13.61 Steph Yeah. Or like someone just hammering away at something. It's just sometimes it makes me jump and I have to pause and wonder, is this something that I'm actually going to have to ink? 00:38:17.20 Dave Mm 00:38:23.41 Steph Is this a threat? Like a real threat? Or is it just, I don't know, ah psych move, you know? 00:38:31.51 Dave Yeah. Well, a lot of the soundtrack is not melodic. A lot of it is just like industrial sounds and like hammering. And it, you know, it sounds like somebody just screamed into a trash can and recorded that or is, you know, banging on pipes and stuff like that. 00:38:49.22 Dave And like, there's a rhythm to a lot of it. 00:38:50.74 Steph Yeah. 00:38:51.34 Dave So it, it gets like your pulse pounding and stuff, but this is not a soundtrack that's full of melody. 00:39:00.37 Steph No, I would not go and meditate to this soundtrack by any stretch of imagination. But I like the word industrial because that also plays into the nightmarish world of visuals because it's got like rusted gates and everything. 00:39:11.49 Dave Yeah. Yeah. 00:39:13.77 Steph But there's something about industrial sound. It's because it's unnatural. 00:39:18.90 Dave Mm 00:39:20.34 Steph It's truly unnatural. It's not part of nature. 00:39:22.42 Steph It's all man-made. There's something kind of, there's something ugly about it. so I don't know. 00:39:33.19 Dave It's super effective. I mean, like there are different ways to get your blood pumping in video games. A lot of games will go on. almost like motivational, uh, like songs. 00:39:47.86 Dave Like I'm thinking of battle music and RPGs will go for stuff like that, uh, to get you pumped up for the big fight. Uh, or, you know, uh, souls games. Like I love soul games. 00:39:58.44 Dave Like they'll, they'll go for like this really intense music and stuff. Silent Hills. Just like, no, this is, uh, just someone hitting, you know, blocks of iron with a sledgehammer to a beat. 00:40:08.44 Steph I'm like, all right. It's like, oh, you think you're scared now. Well, guess what we're going to do here? It's totally different. Like when you mentioned other genres, I immediately jump to Baldur's Gate 3 when you're near the end because I bought the soundtrack. 00:40:23.62 Steph I love the soundtrack. And this is the song called Gather Your Allies. 00:40:25.22 Dave Mm hmm. 00:40:27.32 Steph And man, that just really motivates me. I'm like, let's go, team. Yeah, I feel strong and powerful. And here I'm like, I'm going to die. 00:40:36.81 Dave I do not feel strong and powerful when those industrial rhythms start. 00:40:38.72 Steph Yeah, exactly. 00:40:41.05 Dave Yeah. um A lot of the ah soundtrack is atmospheric background and just generally creepy stuff, but there are a handful of songs that are very melodic and I think that they stick out the same way in Silent Hill 2. I think they stick out really well and they leave an impression because they are so different from the way the rest of the game sounds. 00:41:05.89 Dave so you have the main menu theme which has like this really unnerving like tremolo picking and then goes into like a like an alt rock song um and then there's a couple of others that are like acoustic guitar and piano songs that play during important cutscenes maybe sad moments in the game one is called not tomorrow and then another one is called tears of which i thought were both 00:41:32.14 Dave They're both very simple, you know, compositions, but I think it's just the fact that they are such, you know, a sad melodies, but they're so different from everything else in the game. It makes them have more of an impact. 00:41:47.25 Steph I agree it is simple, but effective. You know, it's not overused only in key moments and really kind of kind of pulls at your heartstrings a little bit. 00:41:57.40 Dave Yep. Good, uh, good soundscape. Yamaoka is really good at this. And, um, there's another game coming later in October called Decarnation that Yamaoka worked on the soundtrack to, and there were some of these. 00:42:13.47 Dave Kind of trademark sounds that I heard. and I was like, that sounds like Silent Hill. And then later on I learned it actually was the guy who did the silent Hill soundtracks. So, uh, definitely got a style. 00:42:23.50 Steph Oh, cool. I love it when that happens. you know You're able to see patterns and influences when it ends up being that same person. 00:42:26.04 Dave Yeah. 00:42:31.38 Steph Very cool. 00:42:31.79 Dave Yeah, good, ah good stuff. So I mean, this, I think this is something that this series is super famous for. But the way that they use, like the visual design within the constraints of the technology on the PlayStation, and then the way that this sounds, this soundtrack and soundscape and sound design all works together. Like that's 99% of the horror in Silent Hill is those things, I think. And then there's a little bit of tension of like, I can't get attacked by too many dogs or else I'll die and have to start over at an ah checkpoint. But I think it's mostly based on these things, where the horror comes from. 00:43:14.87 Steph Absolutely. And it's because these two aspects are so strong in this game, it made me feel more forgiving towards the less sophisticated controls of that time. 00:43:30.82 Dave Let me ask you, speaking of that time, did you have a notion, because sometimes I still think this foolishly, did you have a notion that this game wouldn't be scary because it's so old? 00:43:43.82 Steph Yes. not I wasn't going into this game fully confident, but I thought, this game's 25 years old. It can't be that bad, right? 00:43:54.66 Steph And then once I got through the opening area, I'm like, nope, this is just, as I said, maybe at the top, just as scary as the most modern horror game with real life graphics. 00:43:54.89 Dave Mm hmm. 00:44:05.77 Steph I'm just as scared. 00:44:07.45 Dave Agreed. I'm with you. I catch myself in this trap of being like, this game, this is pixel art. It can't be scary. Or this, this game is super old. 00:44:14.21 Steph Right? 00:44:15.82 Dave It can't be scary. And then like, I just forget when I'm having those foolish thoughts, like horror often just comes from sound design and stuff like that. And that stuff is timeless. 00:44:25.83 Dave So, uh, funny how I keep talking myself into that and I keep, uh, finding out. 00:44:26.36 Steph Uh-huh. 00:44:35.54 Dave Let's talk about gameplay in Silent Hill. So Silent Hill is old school survival horror with tank controls, limited resources, and puzzles. Silent Hill as a series puts more emphasis on puzzles and riddles than a Resident Evil does, for example. 00:44:52.56 Dave ah But we have all of those trademarks of survival horror here. So we talked about this a little bit, tank controls. ah You said you got used to them after a while, even though this was your first time playing a game with tank controls, right? 00:45:06.86 Steph Correct, yeah. so It's still not my favorite. If I had a choice, I would not want to use tank controls ever again. um bye i don't know just the mind. The mindset that I have is I might not like the way a certain game controls, but you know it was made for the time and I just need to get over it. so I eventually got over it. There were times I was frustrated, of course, but Also, by the time I got halfway through the game, I realized it actually works with the horror as well, because there's this frustration and urgency to get to safety, and you have this added layer of a challenge to get to where you need to go. So I'm like, and it's not like I'm having an action adventure game, and tank controls are preventing me from platforming. That's just, you know, pulling my hair out. Here it's like, 00:45:58.05 Steph I don't know, I just feel like it actually adds to the fear. So, you know, and that's why I kind of got used to it and I leaned into it and embraced it, so to speak. 00:46:08.16 Dave Yeah, I. Yeah, I didn't have an issue with the tank controls here and like I've I have some experience playing games with tank controls and I think the big thing for me is that if the camera is behind your character, tank controls are fine with me. They don't bother me really. ah It's in the games where you have fixed camera perspectives in different rooms and so like. 00:46:36.13 Dave pressing right on the, you know, the control pad will turn my character in different directions depending on where the camera's facing. 00:46:41.10 Steph Uh-huh. 00:46:43.55 Dave That fucks me up real bad. ah So like the old Resident Evil one was, I hated playing that game because of the controls. Silent Hill was fine because the camera is mostly behind you. 00:46:56.98 Steph yeah It's going where you're turning, yeah. 00:46:57.06 Dave So Yeah, everything kind of makes sense logically with my brain and where I want the character to go. So it's, you know, I'm kind of mixed on tank controls. I don't like them. I'll never choose them. Um, and I, I personally, I agree that they do add some tension to like trying to accomplish things, but I don't like it, I don't think that that's a design intention. I just think it's like. 00:47:26.36 Dave ah consequence of that control scheme or 00:47:29.48 Steph Right. 00:47:29.97 Dave if it is a design intention i don't respect it i think it's you know don't fuck with me like physically trying to play the game you know you can create tension in other ways and this game does 00:47:41.20 Steph Yeah. 00:47:41.48 Dave a We talked about combat, so a little bit. You have melee weapons which are unbreakable, but melee swings are a little bit imprecise and it requires you to get right up next to enemies. So, melee is good to save ammo in theory. 00:48:02.12 Dave But I never really used it in this game ah because ammo is not really scarce in this. You pick up a lot of ammo. So it was either like I shoot stuff or I run away from it. 00:48:15.03 Dave I think I might have gone around with like, I think you pick up a hammer at some point or like a big axe. 00:48:21.90 Steph the long red one. Yeah, because it had a little bit of range, a little bit of range to it, because there's like a shorter axis. 00:48:23.70 Dave Yeah. 00:48:27.13 Dave Yeah. 00:48:27.99 Steph I'm like, hell no, I'm not getting that close. 00:48:30.11 Dave Yeah. So I use them a little bit, but most of the time, if it was something that I absolutely had to fight, I would pull the guns out because it's not really a game where ammo is that scarce. Unlike, you know, some other survival horror games. 00:48:46.80 Steph I'll admit I was afraid of ammo becoming scarce in the beginning because my mind is survival horror, especially Resident Evil, resource management. like I became a hoarder. like I hoarded for a while, but then I realized 00:48:56.58 Dave Mm-hmm. 00:48:59.92 Steph With the melee weapons, I don't know, it just, it was a little clumsy. There are times where I know I hit the enemy, but I feel like it clips through the enemy. Sometimes it doesn't make contact, doesn't hit. And then I got a little frustrated and also flew enemies. 00:49:12.72 Steph It's not so great. So I'm like, all right, screw it. 00:49:14.31 Dave Yeah. 00:49:15.77 Steph I'm going back to my gun. And I realize there might be times where I might get a little bit low, but no, I've never run out of ammo, whether it's my pistol, my shotgun, or the rifle. 00:49:25.02 Dave Yeah. I ran out of ammo in a couple of the guns, like during the final boss fight, but I was able to beat the final boss and the final boss is coded so that if you run out of ammo and then just survive long enough, it will, it will go away. 00:49:30.44 Steph Oh, man. 00:49:40.01 Dave And you'll beat the game, which was nice of them, it would be really shitty to run out of ammo in the final boss fight and then just be like, well, guess I'm like, but maybe you're having trouble you go into the final boss fight with like 11 bullets and then, you know, so you can't like soft lock yourself like that, which is nice, nice of them. 00:49:59.09 Dave It was kind of interesting. Like this is not like a lot of survival horror games where inventory and resources are at a premium. 00:50:10.25 Dave Like you have unlimited inventory space. 00:50:13.11 Dave And I had more pistol bullets that I knew what to do with by the end of the game, which is very weird, um but appreciated because I think that the focus of this game was trying to tell a story rather than give you this intense mechanical challenge. 00:50:30.05 Dave So interesting in comparison, but I appreciate it in practice. 00:50:31.67 Steph Yeah. 00:50:35.92 Steph Right. Yeah. Yeah. The fact that they gave you enough ammo was appreciated because I felt like combat was not the strong suit of the game. um i I would assume then maybe that wasn't Konami's focus either. It was there, sure. but I'll know we'll talk about boss battles later. I just feel like the story, the atmosphere, maybe a little bit of the puzzles were a much bigger deal than the combat. I would say combat was a bit secondary. 00:51:02.61 Dave Yeah, we can talk about boss battles now. um i I think they're dog shit, like across the board, they're awful. Especially the final boss fights, one of the worst boss fights I've ever done in a video game. ah But it's like just the way that final boss fight is designed, um you get hit by attacks that You get hit by consecutive attacks that if you don't pause and heal in the middle of it, you'll die instantly, which sucks. 00:51:32.37 Dave And then there's like off the top of my head, maybe three others that are just not like not good or interesting. They're just a big thing that kind of chases you around. 00:51:45.55 Dave The first boss has a gimmick, which is kind of nice. The rest of the others are just like, Hey, shoot them when you can. 00:51:51.66 Steph Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's just there, like it's almost a little pathetic. ah You could still get hurt, obviously, but they're just kind of. 00:51:58.87 Dave Yeah. 00:51:59.66 Steph following you around, lobbing something at you once and all until you kill it. I'll say, all right, well. 00:52:03.97 Dave Yeah. Yeah. So not great, but luckily there's not that many of them. So, you know, you're probably not going to spend hours fighting the same boss or anything like that. So that's good. 00:52:15.26 Steph Yeah. 00:52:16.89 Dave ah I thought this game was a joy to explore, to like poke around in corners, and especially when you're in dungeons like ah the school building or the hospital, you know the trademarks of survival horror games, right a police station, a school, a hospital, stuff like that. ah These buildings are really fun to explore. ah They reward you really well for exploring every room that you come across and want to reiterate, like you said earlier, the map is so helpful. It's so incredibly helpful. It makes you want to, it doesn't make you afraid to backtrack. And, you know, again, there's so many fucking doors. So like, if they didn't tell you, and I had to remember which doors I had been in and stuff like that, it would have been a nightmare. They did us a real solid here. 00:53:09.99 Steph Yeah, it definitely helped ah the, yeah, the, I like how you call them dungeony areas, the school and the hospitals. um There was a lot to do in the duality of what's there, you know the daytime and or nighttime nightmare. 00:53:23.99 Steph It just provides even more um because of how dense I can be sometimes. 00:53:26.87 Dave Mhm. 00:53:30.81 Steph and I don't know if it's just me or maybe graphics, but there especially when it comes to pushing a bookshelf. I think there's like two scenarios where you need to push a bookshelf or something. 00:53:39.07 Dave Mhm. 00:53:40.68 Steph I didn't know those things could be pushable and I'd had to look up a guy like, Ooh, okay, so. 00:53:46.84 Dave Yeah. that happened to me a couple times in this game and because you can't push every bookshelf and it's not always obvious like sometimes there's scrape marks on the ground but sometimes it's hard to see because the cameras you know it's where the camera is and the other thing that kind of trips me up in the dungeons is 00:54:00.64 Steph Mm-hmm. 00:54:08.06 Dave Kind of tough to see key items. Uh, so like a lot of them stick out really well, but inevitably I would go through a dungeon and let's say like the, the school building has 10 keys or key items to help with puzzles to then, you know, you do a puzzle, then you get a key and stuff like that. I would usually find like eight or nine of them by myself. And then I'd just be like running around and be like, I missed something. Where is it? And so my choices are. 00:54:38.09 Dave I can go back through every single room in the school and see if I see something new this time, or I can check the walkthrough and be like, hey, I don't remember them talking about it, I don't remember seeing this item. That's what I did. I checked the walkthroughs, but ah this happened to me a lot in Silent Hill 2, happened to me in this game also. 00:54:57.41 Dave Um, sometimes I think it's my fault for not being super observant. Uh, but other times I think the game puts key items in weird places. And, uh, I don't really, I don't think that that's always the optimal place to put something that's like necessary or at the very least super helpful. 00:55:17.43 Steph Yeah. Um, I know you have it in your notes, but for example, I would not have known the rifle was where it was, um, without the walkthrough. 00:55:23.77 Dave Yeah. 00:55:25.68 Steph Um, I missed out on the best, best ending because you need to pick up one item somewhere in the hospital and then take it to another part of something on the floor in the hospital. 00:55:38.60 Steph I, and I missed it. And then by the time I realized I needed it, it was too late. So. 00:55:43.69 Dave Yep. Yeah. I didn't get the, uh, the key item to get the best ending either. Uh, I, you know, just missed it, which is fine. 00:55:51.33 Steph yeah 00:55:51.51 Dave Like I'm fine with missing an item to get an extra ending or whatever. 00:55:52.00 Steph yeah 00:55:55.35 Dave But, uh, when it's like, I'm checking the walkthrough and they're like, you definitely want the rifle for this boss. I'm like, what there's a rifle in this game? And then I. 00:56:03.96 Steph um 00:56:04.95 Dave went back and like, I, I Google where to find the rifle in silent Hill. And it's like, Oh, remember that boss fight that begins the second you go into a room. It's leaning up against a wall in the boss arena. 00:56:15.62 Dave Like, why would they put a, it doesn't make any sense anyway. 00:56:16.65 Steph Yeah, yeah. The key item, yeah, and oh, wow, yeah. 00:56:21.01 Dave Yeah. Um, the last thing about gameplay is, uh, silent Hill games are full of puzzles and more, more so than like, you know, the adventure game puzzles where it's like, 00:56:36.43 Dave There's a key and a drain so I need to figure out a way to turn on the water that will push the key down into the next room so I can go down and pick up the key. There's puzzles like that, but then there's also these like story based or riddle based or like poem based puzzles. 00:56:53.15 Dave where you'll read a folktale. And in that folktale, there will be key information. And then like later on, you'll go up to a clock that has imagery from the folktale. I'm just making up a Silent Hill puzzle right now. um And then like if you understand the folktale and how it relates to the things on the clock, then you know what order to do the things so that you can open the clock and get a key out of it or something like that. 00:57:21.96 Steph and 00:57:22.19 Dave How did you find these puzzles? 00:57:24.80 Steph So I didn't realize that Silent Hill um had puzzle elements in it. I thought that was more of a Resident Evil thing. 00:57:30.41 Dave Yeah. 00:57:32.13 Steph So I was caught off guard, but I liked it. It took me a while. I'm not. I'm not really sharp with a puzzle sometimes, but um some of them made me feel real smart when I figured it out. 00:57:43.55 Steph um i I enjoyed them. 00:57:44.08 Dave Oh yeah. 00:57:45.58 Steph I just think at the very end, endgame, and maybe it's also had to do with the pacing too, it all of a sudden got super puzzle heavy where it's like puzzle after puzzle to get a key to open to another door, dissolve a puzzle to get a key to another door, dissolve a puzzle to get a key and you're in a the nightmarish part of the hospital where I don't think you have a map for the nightmare portion of the hospital. 00:58:08.90 Dave you You do not. Yeah, you're right. 00:58:11.41 Steph And it was the only time I got lost and I was a little frustrated. um It was just a lot of puzzles at one time, but the nature of the, it was actually a little endearing. I'm like, okay, I get it. 00:58:21.67 Steph um You got your one where you have different zodiac signs and you have to figure out what the numbers mean and you punch in the numbers and yeah, it's fine. 00:58:23.44 Dave Mm-hmm. 00:58:32.13 Dave Yeah, I think that they do have some of those puzzles where it's like literally taking information and interpreting it. And some of the puzzles subvert like what you think the puzzle is going to ask you to do in some cool and creative ways. So most of them were fine. A couple of them I had to check a guide for because that's just how puzzles go with me. And I'm not going to spend an entire day, you know, working through a puzzle in Silent Hill or something like that. 00:58:59.89 Dave um I appreciate in Silent Hill 2 how there's separate difficulty for the game and then puzzles. And I kind of wished for that in the first game too. So if you ever play the second game, that's something to look forward to. It's very funny. Like the normal puzzles are kind of like they were in this game. The easy ones are much easier. And then like hard mode on puzzles is like the flouriest fucking writing you've ever read. And it's really funny to read, but it would be a nightmare to try and solve, I think. 00:59:30.45 Dave But it's funny. 00:59:31.55 Steph Interesting. Cool. 00:59:32.97 Dave Yeah. 00:59:33.83 Steph And actually, I don't know if this counts. ah I would like to think it's a puzzle, so to speak. so It's not really combat. And it was the only time I died in the game. The only time I died. 00:59:44.66 Steph And that was, there was a refrigerator or something. 00:59:49.36 Dave oh Oh, yeah. 00:59:51.46 Steph And you have to like it, the chains and the sword, like you have to make sure you, the chains are not connected before you get grabbed or else you die. And I didn't know that. 01:00:02.09 Dave Yeah, I would have if I wasn't looking at a guide for that portion of it, ah which yeah it's very, I did watch it on YouTube. It's really funny. And just, ah I don't know if I, I don't know how it would feel if it happened. And I was like, well, I saved 25 minutes ago, so that sucks. 01:00:22.01 Steph That was my problem. 01:00:22.30 Dave That would have sucked, but there you go. Yeah. Uh, that would have been lame, but like from my side of it, it was very funny. Um, let's, uh, let's listen to a bit more of the ah music and sound and stuff like that. And we'll come back and wrap up this non-spoiler section. 01:00:41.55 Dave All right, so in the kind of wrap up section here, we always begin by giving our final thoughts and then answering the question, who would we recommend to play Silent Hill? So Steph Guest always goes first, who do you think should play this game? 01:00:57.74 Steph Well, thank you. So overall, for final thoughts, Silent Hill definitely deserves its place in key video game history, rightfully setting that precedent for the franchise's place in psychological horror. Many aspects of Silent Hill of that game, the first game, are very dated and hard to work through, like the voice acting and melee combat. 01:01:21.96 Steph However, the visual and audio design places us, the player, in the environment, as Konami intended, even after 25 years. So with that all being said, I do recommend this to fans of psychological horror and or those that are on a quest to experience key video games in history. I'm kind of one of those folks where I might not want to play every video game under the sun. I ain't got the time for that, but I will make the time to go back and play, you know, 01:01:50.90 Steph key titles that have influenced the industry over the years. so 01:01:57.75 Dave Yeah, I 100% agree with that last point there. like And i'm I'm on a similar kind of thing, because like I didn't have a PlayStation that played games other than Spyro when I was a kid. So ah I have been kind of going back and you know unofficially been filling in those holes. So playing Silent Hill 1, playing Resident Evil 1, and Tomb Raider, and stuff like that, all for the first time in the last couple years. 01:02:24.70 Dave um Silent Hill like absolutely should be in someone's plans if you're doing something like that. Absolutely. 01:02:30.86 Steph Uh 01:02:31.78 Dave And it's not just a historical curiosity where it's like, I'm going to see this, but it's not good. and like it was it was like influential or it was popular but it's like it's not that good like Silent Hill's not one of those games i think this is actually really good and um just one of those games that kind of just makes me think that like you know it's it's not so much that certain games age well or age poorly it's just you know the really good ones they're just good they're kind of timeless in a way and 01:03:05.43 Dave There are things in Silent Hill 1 that are of its time, like tank controls and the camera perspective and the way the game looks, but a lot of that stuff plays into what the game is trying to do really well. So you could look at a screenshot and be like, yeah, Silent Hill 1 doesn't look great, but those visuals amplify the horror so much that it's super additive to the game to look the way it does. 01:03:31.07 Dave so 01:03:31.41 Steph Yeah. 01:03:32.33 Dave This is, you know, unless you really don't like horror games, um I would say that basically anyone should try the original Silent Hill and You know, even if you're someone like me that doesn't seek out games with tank controls and stuff like that, I was able to, you know, I was able to beat the game, uh, with the tank controls and stuff. 01:03:52.93 Dave It's not, it's oddly not a very difficult game until like the last area and the final boss is a ah real, it's a real thing. We talked about it already, but other than that, I didn't think this was super difficult. 01:04:06.99 Dave Uh, so yeah yeah, pretty easy recommendation. 01:04:09.37 Steph Yeah, very doable. 01:04:10.99 Dave Yeah. 01:04:11.07 Steph I would say if anything, especially if you're a younger, I call the modern gamers, but of the younger generation, and you're curious, just be mindful and be patient. That's all I know, I think that's all it asked for. 01:04:22.27 Steph Because if you're not used to the controls, yeah, you might not be used to the instant gratification and immediate responsiveness. But if you can Keep that in mind and go through it. You're right. It's not grindingly difficult or unnecessarily difficult. um it's not a And it's definitely not a bad game. It's great. And there's just a lot of amazing things about it that I feel like are worth the experience. 01:04:44.54 Dave Yeah, and again, the story is really interesting. And if you have preconceived notions about what the story of a Silent Hill game is doing, ah you might be surprised by this one. And I think the surprise was not disappointing. It was a cool surprise. Like, I think this story is working in some really interesting ways. So we'll dig into that in the spoiler section, though. 01:05:09.85 Dave And before we get into spoilers, we'll do our customary housekeeping, starting with the guest to talk about the things that they do. So Steph, tell people about the boss rush network and what you do over there and where people can find you. 01:05:25.71 Steph I do, I do kind of a lot there. So the Boss Rush Network, uh, we are, uh, a network of podcasts and a website, bossrush.net. I am a copy editor over there. We cover news, uh, reviews. Uh, we'll be covering packs West. I'll be flying out there with Corey, uh, Pat and Ed on the podcast side. I think we've got a few shows, but I'm part of the co-host of the flagship show, the boss rush podcast. 01:05:52.34 Steph ah We talked about what we've been playing. We cover various topics and have a couple guests a quick shout out. We just recorded last night an episode with a very special guest speaking of horror games Nick Apostolides who voiced Leon Kennedy, so um Very very good get there. 01:06:05.56 Dave Mm 01:06:10.17 Steph So that's kind of what I do. I just chime in and talk nerdy to my friends and write and edit articles there so There's that. So again, bossrush.net and people can find me on socials at Klimov, K-L-I-M-O-V underscore author, because I also write. 01:06:30.48 Dave Awesome. Uh, Nick Apostolides is a great, I'm going to have to listen to that one. And by the time this episode will come out in October, so people can go down and, or go back and listen to that episode. 01:06:42.02 Dave I'm sure that was a good conversation. um 01:06:45.52 Dave slightly less exciting guest on Boss Rush was me semi-recently as we ah ah did an episode a couple weeks ago now at the time of recording and we missed you on that episode but that was a lot of fun talking ah with the gang over there and I made sure to shout that episode out ah during the week when it released. 01:07:09.57 Dave So, uh, listen to the one with Nicka pasta ladies first, then go listen to the one with me. And I know that boss rush has done, uh, has had guests, uh, lots of other friends of tails from the backlog as guests on the show before. 01:07:23.38 Dave So it's a good time and recommended, and I will put a link to the website and the podcast down in the show notes so people can find you all easily. 01:07:31.38 Steph Oh, thank you. We're all a big happy family. I think this is because I like our little podcasting network. 01:07:36.25 Dave Yeah. 01:07:38.76 Steph We're all kind of independent, but I feel like it's that six degrees of separation. We all have interacted or known with each other and it's just a really wonderful community. 01:07:48.47 Dave Absolutely. Yeah. I always shout out the indie podcasting community. Everyone's super cool. There's like no competition between people. Everyone just wants to see everyone, you know, make good stuff and hang out and check games with each other. It's awesome. 01:08:02.10 Steph Yep. 01:08:03.91 Dave For this podcast, the same ways to support the show as always. If you've enjoyed the episode, please consider leaving a rating and review. ah If you listen to Apple podcasts, Spotify or podcast addicts, that's really helpful because when people search for podcasts about Silent Hill, maybe they'll find this episode and that's what we want. 01:08:23.75 Dave So again, ratings and reviews are super helpful. You can join the Discord server and come in and talk about Silent Hill this week. You can talk about the other games you're playing and lots of other stuff because it's not just a place to talk about the podcast. It is a thriving and friendly community. 01:08:40.72 Dave So we would love to have you join. There's an invite link in the show notes. You can listen to my other show. It's called a top three podcast where we do top three lists and draft episodes and things like that. That's a fun show. And last but not least, if you would like to support the show monetarily, you can do that at patreon dot.com slash real Dave Jackson. 01:09:03.10 Dave Where, where every, uh, patron gets to vote in polls for games that I do on the show. I do some bonus episodes from time to time. I have a bonus retro gaming series called tales from the way backlog and much more. So that is all for the housekeeping and plugs. We're going to take a break. And when we come back full spoilers for Silent Hill. 01:13:04.51 Dave All right, we're back and it's full spoiler time for Silent Hill. And before we get into specifics, ah two things, not going to be a beat by beat plot walkthrough. So if you don't wanna be spoiled at all, please leave now because we don't go in order of what the story tells you. And ah the other thing is content warnings for specifics about the, well, we will say like, 01:13:39.81 Dave The torture of a child, I think is the main thing that's going to be talked about in the spoiler section here. 01:13:44.90 Steph yeah Right. 01:13:46.31 Dave Uh, very fucked up thing. Um, so like, yeah, child abuse. And, um, that's probably the main thing, uh, as far as content warnings go here. Uh, yeah. 01:13:59.70 Dave as if that's not you know enough all by itself. But something to keep in mind, yeah that is what the story of Silent Hill eventually is about. Now, ah before we talk about that stuff, we talked a little bit, we danced around our preconceived notions of you know what Silent Hill is and what it you know good we played we both I think played a good portion of this game expecting this to turn out to be like okay let's find out what fucked up thing Harry did in his past and how he's being tortured for it and how he has to relive these events and um you know a tone maybe for what he did 01:14:41.71 Dave And that's not again, not a character study for Harry. 01:14:45.99 Dave Harry is barely a character. Uh, he has, you know, no play character development or anything like that. He just kinda goes on the search for Cheryl and does what needs to be done. 01:14:58.57 Dave And that's kind of about it. Um, so as you were going, what did you think was going on? Uh, did, were there any, you know, ideas that you had along the way? 01:15:11.41 Steph Maybe a few, but ah ah something real quick that popped into my mind literally just only as you said it, and normally we seek or enjoy protagonists that have some level of development fleshed out and everything, right? But I think just due to other really fleshed out ah characters and twists, I didn't mind it. and I almost felt like Harry was a vessel for you to be in his shoes. 01:15:39.49 Dave Yeah, I think that's, yeah. 01:15:39.58 Steph kind of like Link to a Zelda. 01:15:42.59 Dave Yeah, Harry's not like a silent protagonist that a lot of games will use to, you know, put you in the shoes of the character. Uh, but he might as well be like he talks and stuff, but everything he says is pretty standard. 01:15:53.77 Steph Yeah. 01:15:55.20 Dave You know what most people would say. 01:15:57.85 Steph Exactly. and But ah to not necessarily to copy you, but that's exactly where my mind was for a good half of the game was, all right, What did Harry do? and Because it you know had to do with her daughter his daughter was missing and then he kept seeing a ghostly vision of some other girl, 01:16:16.70 Steph um 01:16:16.85 Dave Yeah. 01:16:17.51 Steph I thought, like, did he abuse his daughter? like he did also that's That's where my mind was going. 01:16:24.26 Dave Yeah. 01:16:24.35 Steph and I know you had your notes soon. There was a lot of talk about drugs, there was a type of plant that caused hallucinations. There were news reports like, I think it was the death of an anti-drug mayor. 01:16:37.17 Steph So I'm like, all right, hold on. And then they started talking about an occult. So I was like, okay, you know that that always sunny in Philadelphia meme where Charlie Day is like pointing at that. 01:16:46.73 Dave Oh yeah. 01:16:47.91 Steph I'm like, okay, so the cult uses the hallucinogen and they're trying to summon something to do with the demon. ah But what does it have to do with Harry? Maybe he tortured the kid. I don't know. And that's kind of where I was running in this hamster wheel up until like that last hour, hour and a half. 01:17:07.81 Dave I was definitely trying to put the pieces together with that drug subplot too. 01:17:12.03 Steph Yeah. 01:17:12.67 Dave And like, so like the drug subplots are red herring. It's not that the drugs are not important because that's, it's like what keeps the town alive basically is like it's become a tourism town. 01:17:24.57 Dave um 01:17:27.06 Dave supposedly the tourists come to town to do drugs by the lake or whatever the fuck's going on in there. But ah I wasn't sure, I was never quite sure on like, you know, how does this help what the cult wants other than like bringing money into the town or something like that. For a while I was like, are all of these, you know, 01:17:47.76 Dave You know, the monsters that I'm fighting are the tourists that like, this is what the drug does to people, they turn them into these monsters. um But I definitely for a while I was like, 01:17:59.88 Dave I was still operating under the assumption that Silent Hill is not a real place and that this is all in Harry's head or something like that. 01:18:07.15 Steph but Right. 01:18:07.50 Dave Or this is purgatory or any of the many interpretations of Silent Hill that people have had. And in this game, Silent Hill is a real place with real history and real people. 01:18:19.03 Dave And it's an occult history, like you mentioned. um It's kind of an interesting thing where they talk about how we have this old history of like a town of people that worship this, you know, occult god. And then people move out of town, the young people move into town, and it kind of gets watered down. and then you have like these people in the background, like Dahlia and Kauffman, and these other people kind of like pulling strings and stuff. So that was kind of cool as it all formed together. 01:18:52.46 Dave But for a while I was definitely like, okay, so is this an anti-drug game? Are they trying to make a message about drugs here? Which is not really. 01:19:00.06 Steph Drugs are better than drugs. 01:19:01.78 Dave Yeah. 01:19:01.85 Steph no But at the same time, even though it's a red herring, there's a character, Lisa, that like she did when we eventually get to talking about her character arc, there was a tie to drugs. 01:19:14.94 Steph So like there's there's it's technically related to the story. It's just not the main point of the story. 01:19:20.39 Dave Yeah, it's definitely like a real thing that affects people for sure. Let's talk about Lisa because I wasn't quite sure what causes her to die in the way that she dies. Was it a drug addiction, do you think? 01:19:38.37 Steph It happened so quickly when I played it so when I watched the last play and saw it again the way Harry pushed her and she hit the wall. I was like, damn, he's so strong. He cracked her head open. But then with the cutscene, her face was just pouring blood. So I'm like, all right, I don't think ah that was his sheer strength. So um I'm not really sure, like the way i I interpret it, I'm not saying I'm right by any means is maybe that was her time where she starts to turn into, she didn't doesn't turn into a zombie nurse, but like maybe 01:20:11.26 Steph Her time is up and now her body is just succumbing to whatever is happening in this nightmare world. 01:20:17.88 Dave Yeah, I didn't know if it was like an effect of this drug addiction or if, you know, it's a nightmare world, so like anything could happen. But she says something to Harry before she dies where she says something like, you know, I'm becoming like them or I'm the same as them or something like that, which makes me think that she thinks that she's turning into these monsters. 01:20:36.52 Steph Yes. 01:20:44.94 Dave Uh, basically, um, and that, that scene is, is super, uh, super tragic. Like, uh, for, you know, I, I kind of ripped on the voice acting a little bit, but I think this scene with the the music in the background, the voice acting for Lisa, and then the, um, 01:21:03.33 Dave ah the way that the CG cut scene looks, it's really, ah really fucking sad. 01:21:06.83 Steph Uh huh. 01:21:07.78 Dave Like she's super scared and she likes it, she knows that this is coming and she just begs Harry to stay with her because she's so scared. And she tries to hug him and he realizes like, Ooh, this is not good. 01:21:20.54 Dave And he pushes her away and runs out the door and she, you know, dies in there by herself. 01:21:26.95 Steph Yeah, very tragic because you know well we find out because when you, if you reenter the room, you see a diary and it basically outlines what happened or I thought maybe, again, this is with other Silent Hill perception influencing my thoughts here. I'm like, well, maybe she was kept alive in this nightmare world long enough for her to remember what she did. Quote unquote. That was an old Gray area wrong. 01:21:53.52 Steph She was kind of manipulated into participating in the horrific things that occurred because basically as soon as she realized what she's done, that's when she just completely bled out, fell apart and essentially disintegrated. 01:22:00.65 Dave Yeah. 01:22:08.22 Steph Because yeah, when you go back in the room, she's nowhere. 01:22:11.10 Dave Yeah, I thought that was weird. I didn't wanna go back in the room at first, because I thought I would have to fight her or something, but she's gone, yeah. 01:22:16.70 Steph Mm hmm. 01:22:19.85 Dave um So yeah, she was manipulated by a Kauffman who got her hooked on the drugs to control her into ah working in the hospital, overseeing what's going on with Alessa, which, you know, you read her diaries about like the condition that Alessa was in, and you can, 01:22:40.48 Dave You can see like, you know, I'm sure that she, any, any nurse, anyone who survives in the profession of nursing or like medicine in general, like feels a, a duty and like a pride in like taking care of people because how the fuck are you going to survive that job if you don't get, you know, some, uh, satisfaction and fulfillment out of that. But like. 01:23:03.71 Dave It's so it's just like so terrible the condition that Alesa's in where eventually she's like I can't do this anymore and like she tries to quit but various forces keep her there which is yeah just awful. 01:23:13.72 Steph Oh. 01:23:24.89 Dave So I mentioned Alyssa for anyone who didn't play, here's what's going on with Alyssa. So Alyssa is a little girl or was a little girl ah who her mother is named Dahlia, Dahlia Gillespie, who is this woman who's kind of just talking nonsense for part of the game, talking about a ritual, talking about a demon that has you know power over the town is gonna come Whatever. 01:23:51.90 Dave She needs to find Alessa. Turns out, Alessa's her daughter, in and Alessa's trying to run away from her because um this is where that Pepe Silvia, ah you know, bored with all the yarn and post-it notes and stuff comes from and the marker and stuff. 01:23:57.84 Steph Yep. 01:24:12.06 Dave Dahlia sensed a, I think, a power in Alyssa and she wanted to make Alyssa be the vessel to carry this demon inside of her and then eventually she could give birth to the demon and then you know bring it out into the world or something like that. ah So they did this ritual to put the demon in her. Alyssa mentally resisted the ritual which caused her soul to be split in two which caused the demon to lay dormant inside of her. um The other half of her soul 01:24:50.70 Dave became Cheryl, who's Harry's daughter. ah That's why they found a weird baby alone in the cemetery. That's where that came from. um 01:25:00.33 Steph Ah, so that's where split up souls just pop up just as newborns in a cemetery. 01:25:03.76 Dave Yeah. 01:25:05.29 Steph Okay, cool. 01:25:05.76 Dave Exactly. So I will, you know, next time I see a baby in the cemetery, I know where it came from. Yeah. Um, so this, this like revelation of what Cheryl is, was pretty wild. Like I did not see this coming. I for sure thought Cheryl was going to be connected to the town somehow, but not, you know, obviously not the second half of a soul that was split during a demon birthing ritual or whatever fucking crazy. 01:25:35.85 Steph Yeah, I did not see, well, I mean, at a certain point when I saw the engravings, symbols everywhere, I started to say, oh, this is going to some weird demon shit. But prior to that, I wasn't thinking of demon summoning for Silent Hill. um Hindsight's 2020, I noticed, when you especially the first few times you see Alessa's spirit like around somewhere, I'm like, dang, she looks kind of like Cheryl, like a little older version of Cheryl, probably just because it's a, 01:26:04.75 Steph a meek fair-skinned girl with black hair. They both had the same physical qualities, but I don't know. I just thought maybe it was a coincidence. And what do you know? 01:26:12.68 Dave Yeah. Yeah. um Crazy. So what happened ah because Alessa had this demon you know inside of her. She's immortal. and i I think I might be getting my details mixed up, but there was a house fire at Dahlia and Alessa's house. 01:26:40.95 Dave and um The newspapers say that Alessa died. She didn't die. ah She is being kept alive by this demon inside of her, but she's like super badly burned and lives in the hospital. 01:26:55.48 Dave ah So she's kind of like living this eternal agony. And I think that Dahlia caused the fire because there's a 01:26:59.46 Steph Yeah. 01:27:04.38 Dave quote from her where she says like pain can start the process or something like that. um So what's happening in the game is like Cheryl is being called back to Silent Hill to make the soul whole again. And I think that Dahlia thought that causing intense pain to Alessa could set this in motion. And so the fire is the way that that happened. 01:27:29.66 Dave And then Alyssa is kept in the hospital in this just eternal anguish because she's so badly burned her skin can't heal, but she also can't die because she's immortal because of this demon. And that's what Lisa is supposed to just take care of. She's supposed to be in there, just take care of this nightmare, this living nightmare down there. 01:27:54.03 Dave um And don't tell anybody that's the other part of it is to keep it all a secret. ah So this is like learning about like all of this where you're like, Jesus Christ, this is so tragic for like this little girl again, she's a she's a child. um Just terrible. 01:28:15.46 Steph Yeah, those little bits and pieces, when you put them all together like that, it does click. But during the gameplay, I could only grasp a certain level of that. I understood that, OK, Alesso is Dahlia's daughter. Dahlia wanted to summon a demon. There was definitely a ritual. There was a fire. She's being kept alive. She won't die. 01:28:38.20 Steph and Yeah, Cheryl was in some way connected with Alessa. And I felt that because of this poor girl's complete and utter torture and torment, that it that's how the nightmare version of Silent Hill kind of manifests itself. 01:28:55.41 Dave Yeah, that too. 01:28:56.16 Steph This is my hell. 01:28:56.45 Dave Yeah. 01:28:57.33 Steph Yeah. 01:28:59.27 Dave So that's super cool. Like, our intuition about Silent Hill was kind of correct. like The nightmare in Silent Hill is a manifestation of Alesa's nightmare. right So I like the way that like once you figure out that the nightmare is like subconscious things or memories from Alesa, 01:29:23.22 Dave ah the designs of the enemies, the places that get taken over by the nightmare, and then especially the way the last area of nowhere is constructed, all of that stuff starts to make perfect sense. 01:29:39.77 Steph Yep, there's the classroom. with the desk and there's like really hateful things like scratched onto the desk. 01:29:48.67 Dave Mm-hmm. 01:29:49.58 Steph I'm like, okay, this is a bunch of maybe her subconscious kind of a lot of the terrible things that she had to go through and it's all there. you know 01:30:00.08 Dave Yeah, there's there's that there's the fact that like all the enemies in the game are things that like a little kid might be afraid of like dogs, 01:30:10.18 Steph ah 01:30:11.33 Dave um moths and worms for sure like there's the worm boss and then there's the big moth boss. Um, other kids. So like, you know, like you mentioned, Alessa was getting bullied at school at some point. 01:30:23.86 Dave So other kids are enemies in the game, you know, with their little knives. I think that's what those little kids, those enemies are. Uh, and then there's those flying pterodactyl type enemies, which I'm just going to assume little kids are afraid of. 01:30:38.04 Steph Yeah. Yeah. And also places, too, because a big part of the game more towards the end ah took place at like ah like a carnival like setting. 01:30:49.36 Dave Yeah. 01:30:50.55 Steph Great place to be terrified in by the way. So I'm glad there's no clown boss because I'm telling you I would not have kept playing if there was a clown boss. 01:30:53.78 Dave Mm hmm. 01:30:59.46 Dave Yeah, there is no clown boss, but that's where you fight Sybil. If you didn't save her, uh, which both of us, uh, did not because we didn't get the, the, uh, uh, what's it called the aglaophotis, uh, which is the liquid that can exorcize, uh, people. 01:31:18.42 Steph Yeah, that's the part that I just didn't understand. I know it was a red liquid. And yeah, I can exercise things. 01:31:23.29 Dave Mm hmm. 01:31:24.66 Steph I just didn't know how they got to the hospital. like where ha I missed the connection there. 01:31:34.13 Dave It's interesting like once you figure it out, it made me remember the part in the hospital where you find a smashed glass bottle that had the red liquid in it. So like Dahlia is trying to make sure that it's all destroyed so no one can you know stop this demon. 01:31:51.70 Dave which is cool, but I missed the one that would have saved Sybil, so I had to fight her, which ah didn't want to kill Sybil. It's not a good boss fight. um 01:32:02.70 Dave It reminds me of a Yakuza boss fighting against enemies that have guns, because every time that she shoots you, you fall down and it's... 01:32:10.50 Steph Yeah, Harry took forever to get up. 01:32:11.63 Dave Right. 01:32:12.58 Steph Not that, you know, surviving a gunshot wound is easy by any means. I'm pretty sure I would be down on the crown, but 01:32:19.95 Dave Well, it'll probably only take one to take me down for good, but yeah. 01:32:23.16 Steph so yeah 01:32:24.48 Dave um Yeah, just not a good boss fight, which is par for the course here. 01:32:28.70 Dave So neither of us saved Sybil, but you can if you get that item. There's one other time where you can find a bottle of that. in a motorcycle gas tank. Um, and then Kauffman takes it from you so that you can have that come up in the final boss fight to exercise Alessa during that last part. Uh, so did you find that one? 01:32:56.66 Steph Yes, I did make sure I did that side quest, because I was aware of the various endings. And although I did not necessarily need the best ending, which would be to save Sybil, I at least wanted the good ending. 01:33:11.56 Steph so I believe that that side quest was necessary for that. 01:33:15.17 Dave Yeah, 01:33:16.67 Steph And Kaufman's a douchebag. 01:33:19.30 Dave yeah he's a i think he I think they wanted to portray him as like ah you know like a puppet master or something. And in some ways he kind of was, like he's involved in the whole, 01:33:34.62 Dave conspiracy in town, but he's not as important as the game might make you think he is. Um, they, they kind of lay it out like he might be responsible for the drugs. 01:33:48.93 Dave And then like, when I found that red, you know, liquid in the motorcycle, I thought that was the drug. Cause I didn't know what the drug looks like. 01:33:55.13 Steph Yeah. 01:33:59.68 Dave So, um, yeah. 01:34:04.74 Dave You said you got kind of mixed up and turned around in that last area, nowhere, ah because of all the keys and all the doors and the elevators and the shortcuts and all of that stuff. um i I agree with you. i didn't. I don't like that as a gameplay experience, but from visuals and like connecting the story. Like it's a big jumble of all of Alessa's memories and stuff. I thought that was awesome, but like navigating it and finding all the keys and stuff was that kind of sucked. 01:34:35.42 Steph Yeah, but yeah, but I agree with how everything comes together because part of that is collecting a bunch of trinkets that are either like religious trinkets or magic, whatever occult trinkets. 01:34:48.36 Dave Mm hmm. 01:34:48.70 Steph And then the room where you have to put them all in, I believe almost looks like a kid's room. Am I correct? Is that, it was supposed to be Alessa's bedroom. 01:34:55.09 Dave I think it's Alessa's bedroom, yeah. 01:34:57.11 Steph Yeah. So I'm like, Oh my gosh. Like that's when it's like kind of creep, creeped on me. Like, you know, I'm gonna have to, I thought, like oh, we'll have to kill Alyssa, put her out of her misery. I just felt really bad. like At this point, I wasn't really quite sure, although I had sympathy and empathy for Alyssa, and none of this is really her fault, but what state of mind is she in? 01:35:19.78 Steph um so 01:35:22.75 Dave it would be understandable if she was not in a sound state of mind with everything she's been through, yeah. 01:35:27.65 Steph Yeah. 01:35:30.05 Dave So after that area in nowhere, you go into like the final boss area. 01:35:33.22 Steph Uh 01:35:37.35 Dave And so ah this is where, so the other thing to mention that I think is pretty cool is we've asked like, yeah or we've kind of wondered like, This is not exploring something that Harry did. 01:35:50.02 Dave It's not exploring his subconscious or something like that or his guilt or something. So what is Harry's role in the story? And Harry's role in the story is to be manipulated by Dahlia to get a lesser or to bring number one, to bring Cheryl back. 01:36:11.55 Dave But also, Alyssa won't reveal herself to Dahlia because she doesn't trust her, but she does reveal herself to Harry because maybe she thinks he can help. And he doesn't help. He plays right into her trap and gets Alyssa captured. And so the demon ritual is back on. So that's like the climax that we're working toward. 01:36:35.48 Steph Yep. and Throughout the game, Dahlia is that character just that appears out of nowhere and gives a little bit of exposition. But um it's interesting how the way she manipulates him is that she's telling half-truths, right? 01:36:48.70 Steph Because 01:36:48.99 Dave Yeah. 01:36:50.23 Steph a demon is coming, you know, she's not lying about that. 01:36:52.41 Dave Yeah. 01:36:53.38 Steph But obviously she omits things like the fact that she wants it, wants it to happen and the consequences of it all. 01:36:57.93 Dave Yeah. 01:37:00.22 Steph So you that's why I was that in the voice acting, she intrigued me as a character. 01:37:07.79 Dave yeah She, I mean. She's presented as like the local crackpot. Like you, you're not supposed to take what she takes, what she says seriously. 01:37:13.52 Steph Yeah. 01:37:17.54 Dave And so that's good storytelling and good characterization and voice acting because we didn't take her seriously. She's like a demon's going to take over the town. You're like, I know what's going on in silent Hill shut up, but she was. 01:37:30.22 Steph I was like, it's okay, old lady, sit down, which is kind of interesting. 01:37:32.91 Dave Yeah. 01:37:34.44 Steph I don't know, foils, the right word, because you also got the, you know, Dr. Kaufman, and he's a doctor, a director at the hospital or something like that. 01:37:41.53 Dave Mm hmm. 01:37:42.43 Steph So he's, you know, you see a crazy crackpot lady talking about demon summoning, and you on the other hand, you've got ah ah a baddie, so to speak, that's more of a doctor supposedly rooted in science and drugs and what whatnot. so 01:37:56.50 Dave Yeah, and then like the other main characters, Lisa is a nurse who is in it deeper than Harry is so she can't really help. She doesn't know what's going on like the truth is being hidden from her too. And then you have Sybil who just kind of shows up sometimes. 01:38:13.92 Dave She's not really a major part of the game until you have to fight her or and not. 01:38:18.55 Steph am 01:38:20.47 Dave But, so Dolly is going to summon this demon. ah She says she's gonna release everyone from pain and suffering, which I'm sure that's what's really, I'm sure that's gonna happen, yeah. And, um, she says, my daughter will be the mother of God, which, um, again, crazy. 01:38:40.25 Dave Good, uh, nice, nice goals, nice, uh, good mothering right there. 01:38:45.38 Steph I was going to say, I don't think that's in the parenting handbook, but you know nobody's perfect. 01:38:49.46 Dave Yeah. 01:38:52.45 Dave She writes her own parenting handbook and stuff. So there's a lot of ways that this final encounter and then endings can play out. ah So I assume we both got the good not best ending, right? 01:39:07.66 Steph Correct, yep. 01:39:09.81 Dave So this one comes the way this one plays out, ah Kaufman, he's still alive because we saved him earlier. He comes in, he shoots Dahlia because he's mad. 01:39:17.16 Steph Okay. 01:39:20.07 Dave She tricked him also. And then he throws the red exorcism liquid at Alesa, which causes this boss called the Incubus to come out. 01:39:32.29 Dave um I am not sure how well this aligns with what I know of an incubus to be, which is like the male version of a succubus. But ah this is more of like a flying goat creature. 01:39:44.97 Dave and Maybe there's different mythologies of what an incubus is. um This is like a fairly traditional demon design. um And it is. 01:39:57.47 Dave Again, one of the worst boss fights I think I've ever done in a video game, this is truly bad. 01:40:03.78 Steph I know the thematics were great, like everything building up to it. I was like, all right, I'm buying it. This is great. This is nice. And then once the demon came out and I'm like, alright how are we going to fight this thing? 01:40:13.88 Steph I was like, oh, it wasn't great. 01:40:17.58 Dave Yeah, yeah, it's uh Yeah, 01:40:19.43 Steph I just brute forced it. I just brute forced it. I just stood there because I knew I was just going to get blasted no matter what. Didn't want to deal with running around in angles. I'm like, I'm just going to stand here, shoot it with my most powerful weapons, and then heal intermittently and frequently. 01:40:35.31 Dave yeah and it's like it's possible to do that because the game gives you so much ammo and so many healing items like I had. It was one of those games where I was like, I was, I always just used the weakest healing items because they were still really strong. And then I finished the game with like 10 very good healing items. And I just kind of just tanked through the final boss once I realized like, this is what it is. So it's just like, it floats above your view. So you can't really see where it is. And then it just shoots these lightning attacks at you that are 01:41:10.67 Dave Like the only way to avoid them would be to run around, take your eyes off of the boss and just run while they crash around you. 01:41:10.78 Steph Hard to avoid. 01:41:18.96 Dave But then you have, by the time you like to turn around and reorient yourself, it's lightning time again. 01:41:23.09 Steph He's shooting them again. 01:41:24.40 Dave Yeah. 01:41:24.61 Steph Yep. 01:41:24.86 Dave So. Just stand there, heal and tank through it, use up all your ammo. And then again, kind of throwing the player a bone here. If I hear, if you run out of ammo, the boss, and then you stay alive long enough, the boss will, the boss fight will just end. 01:41:41.61 Steph Would be interesting to see that. 01:41:43.32 Dave And like you'll get the ending. 01:41:46.24 Steph Like I appreciate, like you said earlier, avoiding the soft lock. But I don't know. I would like it maybe if they just would drop ammo somewhere, but you know. 01:41:55.59 Dave Yeah, like if you shot the boss and it was like, oh, I dropped my box of shotgun shells, I sure hope Harry doesn't pick that up. 01:42:03.08 Steph yeah ah We're already fighting a goat demon in a nightmare world with a girl that has split souls. Come on, I mean, we're already suspending our belief. 01:42:10.61 Dave Yep. Straight stranger things have happened. 01:42:13.09 Steph Why wouldn't he drop shots? Yeah. 01:42:14.86 Dave Yeah. Um, so in this ending, oh, you, you reminded me real quick, uh, the kind of like the last chapter or so before you get to the ending where it's like nightmare Silent Hill where the streets are replaced by just these, like these iron, you know, greats basically. 01:42:34.94 Steph Oh, great. Yep. 01:42:37.16 Dave That was super creepy and just like an amazing visual. ah You could go around like going on the boat and the docks and all of that stuff. 01:42:40.79 Steph Yes. 01:42:44.49 Dave That was wild. I thought that was very scary. 01:42:48.12 Steph Terrifying set piece much more terrifying than not to keep going back but the sewers the sewers weren't bad, but they're like Yeah right yeah Yeah, you're right 01:42:54.54 Dave ah But it's sewers like we play video games. We spend a lot of time in the sewers. 01:43:03.48 Dave um So, the good ending that we got ah is, after you beat the incubus, it dies. Alessa gives Harry a baby as she's dying and fading away. And the nightmare kind of like crumbles around them. And I don't know physically how this works, but Lisa and, uh, or sorry, not Lisa, uh, Harry and the baby and maybe Sybil, if you saved her, just like run out of the nightmare. 01:43:33.05 Dave I don't know what happens, but you know, apparently the nightmare is crumbling. They're back in Silent Hill or something like that. 01:43:40.92 Steph It's the same thing as how we started all over with a new baby, but I don't know. 01:43:41.16 Dave So. 01:43:46.86 Dave Again, suspending disbelief here, yeah. 01:43:47.68 Steph Biology. 01:43:50.20 Dave um In my ending, Kaufman is like going to escape, but Lisa comes back, so she didn't disintegrate. She turned into one of these monsters. 01:44:02.76 Dave ah Lisa comes back and grabs him and tackles him down, so like she gets revenge on him at the end. 01:44:09.34 Steph Mm-hmm. Yeah, I got that too. So I'm like, all right, good for you, girl. 01:44:13.20 Dave Yeah, exactly. Obviously things have not gone well for you, but at least you got revenge. 01:44:19.36 Steph Yeah. 01:44:20.40 Dave Um, and, uh, Harry runs with the baby into the fog and, uh, if Sybil is alive, she's there too. And he's apparently just going to, uh, raise this baby as his own, as like the fog parts. 01:44:35.53 Dave And he walks out into the normal world again. 01:44:39.33 Steph Cheryl 2.0 Yeah. 01:44:41.49 Dave Yeah, so this is a good ending, and it's like two different versions of the same ending, whether or not, because if Sybil's there, if you watch the cutscene, it's implied that they're going to raise the baby together. So this is the good ending, and it's still pretty fucked up. like he did not save his daughter. He lost his daughter. So he has a new baby, but it's not like the new baby replaces Cheryl in his mind. like 01:45:11.48 Steph Wow. 01:45:12.66 Dave He, yeah, he did not. 01:45:13.66 Steph He raised a child for years. Child grew up before he lost her and he saw a lot of disturbing shit. 01:45:16.25 Dave Yeah. 01:45:18.74 Dave Yep. 01:45:21.61 Steph Had to kill a demon. 01:45:22.86 Dave Mm hmm. 01:45:24.17 Steph Saw people burning, dying, and even, yeah, like I said, even though he got a new baby, it doesn't mean like you can just replace your child, so. 01:45:33.31 Dave Exactly. Yeah, so um this is the good ending, but it's still pretty sad for Harry. 01:45:33.94 Steph I don't know. 01:45:38.36 Steph Mm-hmm. 01:45:39.26 Dave And I read Silent Hill 3. 01:45:39.70 Steph Very tragic. 01:45:44.85 Dave In Silent Hill 3, you play as this baby after she's grown up. That's the protagonist of Silent Hill 3. 01:45:54.34 Dave Yeah, so Silent Hill 2 is not connected to this at all. It's very different in so many ways. But Silent Hill 3 is like a sequel slash reimagining of Silent Hill 1 from what I understand. So pretty interesting. I'll probably play that next year, next October podcasts. Sounds cool to me. um Bad endings in ah in this game. Did you watch these on YouTube or something? 01:46:25.07 Steph um I did not make it to watch the bad endings, but Spill them That's horrible 01:46:28.51 Dave Okay. So, uh, they're, they're fucked. So, uh, in the bad ending, Harry actually does get to go talk to Cheryl and she fades away. Like she just kind of fades out of existence and Harry says, this can't end like this. And then it cuts and it shows him lying dead in his car. Like he died in that car crash, which is. 01:46:54.57 Dave Yeah, which is fucked up and it's it's loud like his head is laying on the horn and everything. It's like it's pretty brutal. So that's ah that's rough. And then what they call the bad plus ending. um Same thing. Cheryl disappears. Harry's feeling bad. Sybil, who has to be alive in here, um she comes up and she literally slaps Harry to like slap sense into him and then they leave together, which is weird. 01:47:24.50 Steph Oh yeah. 01:47:27.59 Dave And then the joke ending, ah which you can get in New Game Plus if you get a specific item and use it at specific points around Silent Hill, ah you summon a UFO, ah the aliens come, they abduct Harry, and Harry says, hey, have any of you seen a little girl? 01:47:45.53 Dave And it's like ah like a joke ending, which I thought was funny. The joke ending of Silent Hill. 01:47:49.55 Steph Sense of humor. 01:47:50.94 Dave Yeah, the joke ending of Silent Hill 2 is pretty famous with the dog, but this one also has an alien joke ending. 01:47:55.69 Steph enough. 01:48:01.18 Dave and um yeah that's a So those are the endings of Silent Hill. They're all varying degrees of messed up and sad, which I think fits this game. 01:48:13.66 Steph I know normally I'm a happily ever after person, but it makes sense. It's very very, very tragic, but it was satisfying, so to speak. Not like, yay, not satisfying, but like it made sense. 01:48:23.23 Dave Yeah, 01:48:26.08 Steph I feel like I experienced a worthwhile story for sure. 01:48:33.41 Dave yeah even the ending where Harry's dead in the car, I think you 01:48:39.78 Dave I think the pendulum has swung too far. It was all a dream the whole time type endings, which this is, if I mean, obviously this isn't the ending you want to get, but I still think that it's a really interesting thing to think about. 01:48:54.16 Dave Like this is what played in his head as he was dying in the car. Like, you know, like a dream, a dream can feel like a long, long time when it actually happens like in a split second. 01:49:06.44 Steph Seconds. 01:49:08.50 Dave Which is probably what this ending would be. Like this is what he experienced in that split second, which I think is really cool. Like the fact that it's all a dream doesn't really bother me. 01:49:19.86 Steph It depends on how it's executed. And When I read in your notes the ending, um I was like, you know what, that's actually not a bad, well you know what I mean, not a bad quote unquote ending. 01:49:30.97 Dave Yeah, it's bad. 01:49:32.45 Steph Yeah, but because it makes it even more tragic because the poor guy can't just die instantly. He has to kind of go through this mental torture before he dies. 01:49:38.51 Dave Yeah. 01:49:42.96 Steph That's awful. 01:49:44.47 Dave Yep. And that's a very silent Hill. Um, and I, I love a downer ending. 01:49:50.89 Dave So like all four of these are like, just give it, give it to me. The bad plus ending, the one where Sybil slaps him is the one that I liked the least. Uh, that just, that seems a little bit too, yeah, too cheesy. 01:50:00.38 Steph It's so silly. It's like, OK. Yeah, I don't know. Please. You can't solve things just by slapping someone. 01:50:08.56 Dave Yeah, get it together and then they leave. 01:50:10.17 Steph Yeah. 01:50:10.56 Dave Yeah. Um, and then at the end, uh, just real quick, there's a blooper reel where like in CG, they like to run through the credits. 01:50:20.27 Dave They show you the characters, their actors, but it's played as a blooper reel at the end of a movie or something, which I thought was very cool. I really liked this. 01:50:29.85 Steph yeah I was very surprised by that just because the nature of the game and also like I don't know I am just for video games given that it's already like a made up scenario. I'm not sure if I can recall at least off the top of my head any other game that does this. I'm sure there's at least one but it's definitely very it's done it's not common. 01:50:50.82 Dave Yeah, I think the creators are um like film buffs. So, or at least to some degree, like I think I read the creators didn't have a lot of experience with horror movies, but um which makes this all the more impressive, but that they did take inspiration from, you know, films and stuff like that. 01:51:10.99 Dave So having the bloopers makes sense. It's a little bit of a jarring tone shift to go from like the most tragic thing you've ever seen to the blooper reel. 01:51:16.40 Steph Yeah. 01:51:21.85 Dave But I thought it was funny. 01:51:23.79 Steph yeah I just felt that it was an added touch, um added effort and thought from the developers and I always appreciate that. 01:51:33.06 Dave Yeah. Yeah, it's a nice thing to be like, hey, you're you're done. Enjoy this. You know what? Watch these characters smile and laugh. 01:51:39.53 Steph Yeah. 01:51:43.03 Dave Nobody's been smiling this entire game. 01:51:44.41 Steph the whole time. Yeah. 01:51:46.65 Dave So ah that's Silent Hill. And ah this has been a good ah conversation. Really appreciate you taking the time and going through this story with me. It's been a good time. 01:51:56.96 Steph No, I really appreciate your notes were helpful. And I think this was a great game for me to talk with someone with because there's just a lot to dissect. And I just don't feel like I would experience Silent Hill to this fullest without a discussion with someone. 01:52:05.57 Dave Yeah. 01:52:10.84 Steph So I appreciate it. 01:52:12.48 Dave For sure. Um, one more question for you. Are you interested in playing later games in the series? 01:52:19.47 Steph ah Definitely. I don't know how far I'll go. Like I definitely will play the Silent Hill 2 remake. I'm not sure if I'll play the original just because the remakes are going to be here in two-ish months, month and a half. 01:52:30.42 Dave Mm hmm. 01:52:31.66 Steph Definitely gonna play that. And I love the Bluebird team anyway. I love the medium. It's one of the few horror games I liked. um And based on what you explained, I may do Silent Hill 3. 01:52:41.98 Steph I think that might be it though. It depends. So we'll see. 01:52:46.33 Dave I think even the Silent Hill fans would probably tell you to stop at three. You know, if anyone out there is listening and disagrees, please ah send your complaints at patreon dot.com slash real Dave Jackson, or let us know in the Discord server or something like that. 01:52:55.08 Steph Yeah. 01:53:02.06 Dave But Um, yeah, I'm definitely interested in playing three. I highly recommend two. I think it's a wonderful game. Hopefully the remake's good. Uh, I'm dubious because I just don't trust anything Konami is involved with at this point. Uh, but you know, I hope it's good. I hope it comes out and people are like, this is actually great. They get it. They, you know, capture the spirit of the original. I hope that's what happens. 01:53:28.06 Steph Yeah, that's that's the thing, right? Because of all the Silent Hills, too, it is kind of the most recognized and favorite. That's the one they chose to remake. 01:53:34.36 Dave Yeah. 01:53:35.58 Steph So the stakes are high. Konami doesn't really have the best reputation when it comes to showing their franchises love, unlike Capcom with Resident Evil, with their fame, with their Resident Evil remake. 01:53:45.88 Dave Yeah. 01:53:48.86 Steph So that's how I'm going to approach it. I wish them all the luck. I want them to be successful, but I'm going to temper my expectations, so I'm not disappointed. 01:53:58.59 Dave Yeah. Well, worst case scenario, I still think the original Silent Hill two is worth playing. So that's there too. Silent Hill three is out there as well. Also on the PS two, I believe. So there we go. Um, yeah, so thanks again for, uh, for joining me. This has been awesome. And I, again, I appreciate you taking the time and I appreciate the conversation. 01:54:20.94 Steph Appreciate it anytime you want to talk about games. Definitely keep my name in mind. 01:54:25.79 Dave For sure, I will do it. And for everybody listening, thank you for listening all the way to the end. As always, if you've made it this far, you are my hero. Check down on the show notes again for links to Boss Rush, the website and podcast. And as always tune in next week for the next game to come out of the backlog. 01:54:45.87 Steph And also just a bit of advice, stay away from Gyromancy. That's the gateway to demon summoning.