The Silent Hill game franchise has been synonymous with the horror game genre since the series came out over 20 years ago.
Horror enthusiasts have been scaring themselves on these moody and suspenseful games ever since.
Silent Hill enthusiasts often haven’t had to wait long after each installment was given how fast the games were coming out in the early 2000s either.
There are lots of options to choose from now for newcomers to these survival horror games.
In the following list we present and describe each Silent Hill game edition in the order they were release.
This is a great order also to follow if you want to start playing the series.
Silent Hill (1999)
Silent Hill is the game that started it all, and it’s one of the most famous titles in the Survival Horror genre.
You control the main character, Harry Mason, as drives into the town of Silent Hill with his adopted daughter, Cheryl on vacation. He gets into a crash, and when he wakes up, his daughter is missing.
The gameplay has a lot of puzzles solving and running away from monsters, as well as fighting them with weapons.
It’s done in the third person, and items like a radio that fills with static when enemies are nearby. The game came out for PlayStation and Game Boy Advanced.
Silent Hill 2 (2001)
The second installment of the game came out for PS2, Xbox, and Windows for PC.
It was very well received by critics and players alike. It’s once again in the Survival Horror genre.
In this game, a new protagonist is named James Sunderland, and he goes to Silent Hill after he got a letter from his dead wife that she was waiting for him.
Once again, the gameplay is focused on guiding the main character through the dangerous Silent Hilltown.
He uses weapons and tools like flashlights to navigate through the town. As a player, you’ll need to solve puzzles, find clues, unlock doors, and generally figure out what’s going on, as well as plenty of fighting monsters.
Silent Hill 3 (2003)
The third episode of this series came out for PS2 and Windows. It’s still in the survival horror genre, and this time the main character is a teenage girl named Heather.
She wakes up in a monstrous shopping mall in Silent Hill, and her goal is to survive so she can get back to her father.
A big element in the game is the Otherworld, which is a bloody, supernatural version of the regular world.
Once again, the gameplay has you in the third person, and you have to fight your way to survive and figure a way out of your predicament.
There’s lots of exploration and combat in equal elements. There are different difficulty levels that dictate what puzzles you get, and they can be really hard. You can also set combat and puzzles differently if you want.
Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)
The fourth episode in the series plays on PS2, Xbox, and Windows. This time the character’s name is Henry Townshend, and he’s just trying to get out of his apartment.
The POV is actually first person from the beginning this time, and there’s only one place to save, so it can be rather difficult.
Later on, once he finds a way out of his apartment initially, he meets Eileen, and it goes back to third person. The gameplay is similar to previous games, with only two firearms and melee weapons that break.
Silent Hill: The Arcade (2007)
This game was chiefly available in Japan at the Arcade. Unlike the previous games, it’s a rail shooter.
This means the world moves around you, and you shoot enemies with the gun accessory at the arcade. It focuses on Eric and Tina who came to Silent Hill to discover where Eric has nightmares about the area.
Silent Hill: Origins (2007)
Origins plays on PS2 as well as PlayStation Portable, also known as PSP. The character you control this time is named Travis Grady, who is a trucker looking for a girl he rescued from a fire.
It’s Survival Horror and plays very similar to most of the series. This means having exploration elements, along with survival combat elements, and solving puzzles. This game is a prequel to the series and happens before the first game in terms of time.
Once again, the gameplay has you going back and forth between regular reality and the Other World reality in order to get keys and other items you need to solve puzzles.
Silent Hill: Orphan (2007)
This game was intended for mobile phones as a platform. The setting for the game is an abandoned orphanage in the titular town. You play this game from a first-person perspective, and you have a point-and-click interface.
The game has you controlling Ben, who is a survivor of the orphanage, and what happened there decades ago.
You slowly move through the plot, switching characters from one to another, until you come to realize the truth about who is behind everything that happened.
Silent Hill: The Escape (2007)
This episode of the series was made for mobile phones, including iPhones. The purpose for the players i that they had to make it through ten levels by locating keys and then bringing them to a locked door at the very end of each level.
It’s a first-person perspective unlike the third-person perspective for lots of other games in the series.
In order to move your character, you just slide your finger along the screen. Then, you tapped the screen to fire at enemies. These enemies might include evil nurses or monsters like the Pyramid Head.
Other gameplay mechanics include moving around the camera perspective by shifting the phone or gaming device, tilting it in one direction or another.
You can play as more than one character, including a regular human, a woman named Mira, an alien, or a rabbit named Robbie. You have to unlock the extra characters by beating the game each time.
Silent Hill: Orphan 2 (2008)
This game is a sequel to the other mobile game called Orphan from a year earlier. This game is also for mobile phones, and it has the same basic gameplay as what you got in the first version.
This means it’s a horror survivor game where you have to fight monsters and solve puzzles in the haunted city of Silent Hill. Characters from this game include Lucas and Vincent.
A mystery ensues from this situation in which Lucas doesn’t know who he is and what is wrong with him. You begin with him until you progress through the story and move to Vincent who finds a dead woman in an office that was killed by Lucas. The game says to be continued.
Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008)
The game is playable on PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows. The main character you follow this time is named Alex Shepherd. He’s a soldier who’s coming home from war.
This time, he’s in the town of Shepherd’s Glen instead of Silent Hill. When he comes home, he finds his younger brother is not there, so he decides to search for him. In his search, he comes across a cult called the Order.
Gameplay is similar to the other games, as you control Alex Shepherd and fight your way through the town, trying to find clues to figure out what’s happened by exploring and solving puzzles.
He eventually ends up in Silent Hill while following clues, after completely searching Shepherd’s Glen. New additions to the game including dodging attacks and initiating counterattacks.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009)
Shattered Memories works for Wii, PSP, and PS2. The game goes back to the first game in the series, as a sort of re-imagining of it.
So, you’re controlling Harry Mason again as he tries to find his daughter. However, the universe is different and the plot changes as a result.
In the first part of the game, you are in first-person mode and taking a psychotherapy session. The second part shows Harry’s journey from an over-the-shoulder point of view.
The gameplay was more about exploring puzzles, running away from threats and psychological elements as opposed to just combat.
Silent Hill: Orphan 3 (2010)
This is the third game in a series of mobile games, all available for mobile phones. The game starts with Vincent both at the beginning and at the end of the game.
He looks through a mansion that has a room in it. There are butterflies on the wall and pictures of Karen, the murdered woman from the last game. The clocks in the house are all stopped at a date where an accident had occurred 40 years earlier.
The game goes back and forth between controlling Vincent and then controlling Emilie, another girl from the orphanage.
Then it goes back to Vincent again, finally concluding. The gameplay has the same point and click style, with some streamlining for combat.
Silent Hill: Downpour (2012)
Downpour came out for PS3 and Xbox 360. There’s another new protagonist. This time, he’s named Murphy Pendleton who is a former prisoner.
He comes back and forth from the Otherworld and starts to explore his previous memories that he had repressed.
Gameplay has the usual third-person approach. One difference from what games had offered previously is that this world is a lot more open-world than the others.
This means that you can explore nearly the whole world on your own and go where you want a lot more.
This includes abandoned subway tunnels so that he can travel more quickly to other parts of the time. The world is a lot more destructible too, which means that you can blow up doors, pull down fire escapes, and more.
Silent Hill: HD Collection (2012)
This collection is available for PS3 and Xbox360. This game is a port of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. It updates the games so that you can play them on more modern gaming devices.
It took two years to make, partly because Konami hadn’t given them the entire source code. The voice acting was a bit strange due to the fact that they had to make a new deal with the original voice actors in order to fix technical issues due to the incomplete source file.
Silent Hill: Book of Memories (2012)
As a game that breaks a bit from the rest, Book of Memories came out for PS Vita, and it’s in the genre of dungeon crawler instead of the usual Horror Survival.
You play your own created player, and then you receive the Book of Memories on your birthday. It has the character’s whole life in it.
You build up experience points as you go, and improve your abilities, just like in any crawler. You can also choose your class from different archetypes like jock, bookworm, and so on. You can play multiplayer with friends.
There are 5 different endings, and these depend on your alignment which is blood, light, or steel.
Images Credit
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6458478
By http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/image/561292.html?box=22613, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19405073
By Amazon UK, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32971266
