4/5 ★ – Lechuck0808's review of Silent Hill.

I have always thought of the Silent Hill series as "Konami's depressing Resident Evil", and now that I've actually played one I can say that: 1, it kinda is, and 2, it's significantly better than I thought it would be. First of all, this is less depressing and more just plain weird. It's also easily one of the most impressive PS1 games ever made, with great full-3D environments that are made more impressive because of the scale. I wouldn't call it open world, but it's damn close at times. Every location is great and has good puzzle and enemy design, each one feeling like a little mini-survival horror game. It's hard to overstate how impressive the variety on display here really is; the Resident Evils of the time were damn fine games, but they feel tiny by comparison. The enemy design is, of course, cool as fuck. The combat, while very flawed, is delightfully violent. When you swing a huge pipe at a monster repeatedly, with fleshy squishing sounds and blood spurting with every hit until finally the enemy indicator sound grows silent... It's exactly the kind of scrappy vibe they seemed to be going for, and not something you're likely to find anywhere else in this era. There's also no way around the fact that it's way more creepy than almost all other PS1 games. It was never scary enough to actually freak me out, but I was fully immersed, and the scares are well thought out. The soundtrack is... Effective at what it does. Which is to say, it feels like your head is about to explode. Sure, it's clunky by today's standards, and the melee "combat" sucks ass, but if you scaled up the textures you could easily convince me this was PS2. It's a great example of how the best games are made when a group of really cool designers try to make something super ambitious with limited technology. Oh, and the puzzles are mostly easy, which is a major plus for me. Overall, I was very pleasantly surprised with this very unpleasant game. I'm gonna play the Remake of 2 soon, but I'm also kinda interested in 3 and 4.