Silent Hill 1 Demo

Nobody says it’s easy to make video games, especially if you go at it alone. However, it’s not impossible and it has been done over the years, sometimes with huge success. In essence, the goal is to make a game that you would enjoy playing yourself, because if it’s fun and it keeps the players engaged, the graphics matter less and people are quicker to forgive inexperience in other regards.

Silent Hill 1 is an indie production that apparently takes its inspiration from Konami’s psychological horror game with the same name. However, if the name wasn’t so suggestive and you just happened to come across this by accident, at no point would you be able to recognize the fact that this is inspired by Silent Hill, or believe that this fits someone’s definition of a video game.

A short cutscene provides you with a bit of insight into the story, although it’s a generous stretch to even refer to it as such. In essence, you play the role of a man who must rescue his daughter from a town invaded by awful monsters. The action takes place in a school, and you must keep shooting the apparition before they get a chance to touch you, which is not as difficult as you might think.

Silent Hill used mystery and the grotesque in order to make the players uncomfortable, which worked out great. It relied on the unknown to inspire fear, and it didn’t abuse jump scares like most horror games tend to do. In the game at hand, all you have to do is walk through a dark room and shoot the static enemies that wait for you in predefined spots. They do not even bother to attack or make a noise.

The graphics and the level design are by far the most disappointing things in the game, because it looks like you are playing through a children’s coloring book. As such, the environments are ludicrous and the character looks like he was sketched in under five minutes using a hard brush and the paint bucket.

All things considered, Silent Hill 1 does not look like it took more than a few hours to develop, which means that the creator released it way before it was the time to do so. Hence, there is absolutely nothing worth seeing or doing in the game, and it’s going to remain that way until someone decides to put some actual effort into it.