Silent Hill is a game I really do have a massive soft spot for, it's one of the first PS1 games I ever finished beating it on the PSP through the PS1 Classics section on PS3 over a decade ago. I decided to replay the first 3 SH games since the remake of 2 has recently came out and I'm begginning everything with the game that started it all.
SH1 is a strange came to return to after playing games like the Resident Evil PS1 games, Signalis and Tormented Souls. Everything about the way SH1 is designed feels like it was made for people who aren't very familar with survival horror games and found the RE games to be way too hard. The combat gives you as many resources and gives you a little too many of them like Crow Country does.
I'm not sure if this is due to normal difficulty of SH1 feeling too easy but I always assumed that the purpose of normal difficulty is supposed to be balanced between easy and normal but the start of SH1, I had so many handgun bullets and healing items that I almost thought I was going crazy and played on easy mode, just to find out I did beat it on normal.
Then there is so many other things that made it feel like SH was a game made for people who found RE difficult. You have a stomp button that can kill an enemies in one hit when they are down with bullets, enemies on screen are never going to appear in more than 3, no inventory management, most bosses go down in a couple of shots, a radio telling you where enemies are, guns having longer clips before reloading, enemies being easy to run away from in the overworld unless in tight spaces, and Harry taking a good amount of damage before getting a game over. This is also not including the ability to move while shooting, enemies moving slower and acting less aggresively by comparison to RE enemies on top of some enemies like the nurses having a long wind up and telegraph before they even attack you.
I don't think this a bad thing to be a more "casualized" version of Resident Evil but after playing a number of games in the genre over the years, SH1's pushover normal difficulty can stand out to me a good deal.
I do like that SH1 has a pretty reliable melee combat system you can use, I even tried to fight enemies using melee and the hammer is a shockingly effective weapon but since you will be rolling in ammo so much I hardly felt I needed to use it. Tormented Souls would do something like this and I argue melee combat gets more use since in that you need to use it to damage a downed enemy and using that to save ammo where in SH1, melee just feels optional.
The level design in SH1 also isn't as good as RE since in older RE, every door that you find can be opened containing items you will need or lore details where in the former there is a lot of doors that will never open and could've just been a wall textures instead. I really got to wonder what even is the purpose of adding those doors there if they don't lead to anything.
I thought there was going to be lots of puzzles but there were probably 3-4 at the most.
The map system is pretty well designed, it gives you more to work with than RE and especially Tormented Souls' map which does make the last level an even bigger pain since there is so many doors and floors and now there isn't a map anymore.
The good ending is locked behind a "side quest". Which is very annoying since it catches first time players off guard, it did for me when I first beat SH1.
That was a lot of me criticizing the game, I do enjoy SH1.
The best things about the game is by far the story, atmosphere and music.
The story is presented in an interesting way, the game gives you just enough information to go by to have a clue what is going on but it doesn't really spoon food you either. There isn't even a whole lot of notes for you to read, much of the game's storytelling is environmental. The characters also good too, the voice acting might come off as stiff but I argue the voice direction feels intentional since it adds to how confused as all hell everyone sounds regarding the situation. I enjoy Harry's determination to save his daughter, it contrasts very well with how Dahlia is related to her daughter by blood but only views her as a tool for her cult rituals while Harry not being related by blood geniunely cares about Cheryl, he also shows a caring side and can even be scared too.
Environmental design can look pretty creepy and Otherworld can be pretty unsettling, I normally don't get scared by games but I do got to give the Otherworld design credit for how dark it is and with monsters running around. I do get somewhat unsettled walking alone in the dark and Otherworld does moderately capture that feeling.
Soundtrack is fantastic, the SH series has some of my favorite music and tunes in gaming and SH1 has some amazing ones the opening FMV song, Claw Finger, and Cafe Rest are my favorite songs in the game.
Overall, if you haven't played many survival horror games, my criticisms towards SH1 might not even apply to you but there is a solid game here if you can get past how easy it can be.
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