Silent Hill (video game)
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Spoiler Warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
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March 4, 1999 
- The name Silent Hill may refer to multiple subjects. Please see Silent Hill for other uses of the term.
Silent Hill (also known as Silent Hill 1) is the first title in the Silent Hill series, a highly successful franchise of adventure/survival horror video games developed by Konami. It was released for the Sony PlayStation in North America on January 31, 1999 and has thus far spawned many sequels, a series of graphic novels, a motion picture and more.
Silent Hill 3 is a direct sequel to the game, continuing its storyline.
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Synopsis
The game tells the story of Harry Mason, a 32 year old writer who was taking his adopted daughter, Cheryl Mason, to a vacation in the resort area of Silent Hill, a small United States town known for its very peaceful ambiance. While driving on the outskirts of the town, Harry sees the shape of a young girl walking across the road. Harry swerves his car to avoid hitting her, but he is knocked unconscious.
Harry wakes up later to find that Cheryl has disappeared and is forced to venture into the fog-enshrouded town, oblivious to the horrors he will experience. The story of Silent Hill takes place in the later half of the 20th century.
Plot
After crashing his vehicle just outside the town of Silent Hill, Harry regains his consciousness to find Cheryl has disappeared. After leaving the area to look around, Harry sees Cheryl running away, and immediately hurries to follow her. Chasing her through the streets of Silent Hill, he finds himself running down a small residential street and into a dark alley. The sky suddenly turns dark, and when he lights the area with a flare, he finds his entire environment to have changed; the road and pavement has been replaced by rusted metal grating and platforms, and the walls are a dark, grimy series of mesh and chain linked fences. Everything is covered in rust and blood, tipped with barbed wire and the shapes of hanging bodies discernible behind the mesh. The sounds of industrial clanking and grinding metal form a constant cacophony of ambient noise. With nowhere to go, Harry follows the alley and finds the disturbing body of a mutilated corpse hanging on a fence before him. Moments later he is attacked by small, child-like monsters. Despite his best efforts, Harry is eventually overwhelmed and "killed".
He wakes up in a deserted diner called Cafe 5to2. It is here that an officer named Cybil Bennett appears. After a brief conversation, Cybil provides him with a handgun and the two split up. Harry, having equipped himself with a flashlight and radio that he found in the cafe, soon encounters other monsters on the fog-enshrouded streets. He quickly discovers the radio's usefulness when it emits bursts of static if a monster is nearby. Following a clue left by his daughter, Harry eventually finds a way to Midwich Elementary School.
From his initial inspection, the school itself is long-since abandoned. Instead of students and teachers, Harry finds many Claw Fingers/Mumblers. Harry works his way around, eventually unlocking the clock tower in the school's courtyard. Upon reaching the other side and into the opposite side of the facility, he is shocked to have found the world has once again shifted into the Otherworld. Again, the already dwindling light is reduced to nothing more than what Harry's flashlight can produce, and the surfaces have all undergone a horrific shift back to the metal grating and uneven platforms. In the Otherworld school, Harry finds his way to the boiler room. Inside, light is cast by a flaming corpse and it illuminates a creature known as the Split Head, a large lizard with its head split in half. In its defeat, everything turns to darkness and light returns to reveal an ordinary boiler room.
A young woman, Alessa Gillespie, is leaning against the boiler. She turns to Harry and disappears in thin air. Harry, confused, leaves the school. He hears a church bell ringing in the distance and heads to the Balkan Church, where he sees an old woman praying at an altar. She turns to meet Harry, and in a conversation that Harry has a difficult understanding, the old woman reveals herself to be Dahlia Gillespie. She gives Harry a mystical item called the Flauros and tells him to make haste to the hospital. Before Harry can ask any questions, Dahlia leaves and Harry exits the church. He crosses a bridge that leads to Central Silent Hill.
Harry arrives at Alchemilla Hospital, where he encounters Michael Kaufmann, a doctor who is as bewildered as Harry about their circumstance. Shortly after this meeting, Harry endures another shift to the Otherworld, transforming the medical facility into the Otherworld's twisted version of the hospital. Along the way he also meets Lisa Garland, a terrified nurse. Though she knows much about the town and its history, he is unable to get answers before he is transported back to the normal world, where Dahlia reappears and tells him the "Seal of Samael" he has seen in various locations must not be completed, lest the darkness devour the whole town. Meeting up with Cybil, who has seen a girl out on the lake, the pair find a hidden altar in an antiques store, but Harry disappears out of sight of Cybil, much to her confusion. Harry, meanwhile, finds himself back in the hospital with Lisa, who gives him directions to the lake, but also tells Harry she feels she's "not supposed to leave".
On the way to the lake, Harry crosses a waterway and enters the resort area. The player may determine Kaufmann's fate - and the game's ending - by choosing to assist him in Annie's Bar; soon after, the Otherworld nightmare begins to take over the town completely. Regrouping with Cybil and deciding to stop the mark's completion at Dahlia's suggestion, Harry heads to the lighthouse and Cybil to the Lakeside Amusement Park. As a cutscene shows Cybil attacked by an unknown assailant, Harry once more sees Alessa at the top of the lighthouse before heading to the amusement park himself. On the amusement park's carousel, Cybil appears possessed with a parasite, and the player may save or kill Cybil, once again affecting the game's ending. With Alessa appearing once more, Harry unwittingly uses the Flauros to trap her; Dahlia appears, revealing that she manipulated him into trapping her as he was the only one who would be able to get close, and that Alessa is in fact her daughter.
With Alessa's powers out of control, Harry awakens to find himself back in the distorted world resembling the hospital, simply known as "Nowhere". Here he finds Lisa, who has come to realize that she is no different from the other nurses, and begins to transform in front of a horrified Harry, who flees with sympathy. Lisa's diary, left in the room, explains that she was the nurse who attended to Alessa in return for a drug supplied by Kaufmann, White Claudia. In Nowhere, Harry sees a flashback of a meeting and soon finds Dahlia and Kaufmann (and Cybil if he saved her earlier), as well as a figure in a wheelchair, wrapped in bandages - Cheryl with Alessa kneeling nearby. Both the flashback and Dahlia's words explain that Dahlia sacrificed her daughter to fire seven years ago, in an attempt to nurture and bring about the birth of the cult's God that resides inside her. In so doing, Alessa's soul was split in two, and the God could not be born, so a spell was cast by Dahlia that would ultimately draw the other half of the soul back to Alessa. The other half of the soul manifested itself as Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife found and adopted in the form of a baby on the road outside of Silent Hill. In the present, Alessa, sensing Cheryl's return through an increase in her power, manifested herself in the town to place the marks Harry has seen in an attempt to keep the God at bay. With Alessa's plan defeated and the two halves of her soul now back together, the God creature begins to manifest itself. Kaufmann appears and throws a vial of Aglaophotis at the God. Depending on the actions of the player, the God appears as either Incubus or Incubator. Both forms kill Dahlia instantly, before turning its attention to Harry, who ultimately defeats it.
Endings
- Good+ Ending (Save Cybil and complete the Kaufmann sidequest): Cybil tries to shoot Dahlia, but fails and the two Alessas merge becoming the Incubator. Kaufmann then appears, shooting Dahlia and throwing the Aglaophotis at the Incubator. When hit with the liquid, Incubator falls to the ground screaming as Incubus emerges from her back. The Incubus kills Dahlia. Harry then fights and defeats the Incubus and the Incubator gives him a baby (who is revealed to be Heather in Silent Hill 3) and shows him the escape route. Harry, Cybil and Kaufmann try to escape, but a blood-covered Lisa Garland appears and drags Kaufmann with her into the abyss. It then goes back on Harry and Cybil as they escape, however, the Otherworld is collapsing too quickly for them to make it, but then the Incubator uses the last of her power to stop the world's destruction in order for them to escape. Incubator is then consumed in the flames and Cybil and Harry escape together with the baby.
- Good Ending (Kill Cybil and complete the Kaufmann sidequest): The two Alessas merge becoming the Incubator, but Kaufmann appears, shooting Dahlia and throwing the Aglaophotis at the Incubator. When hit with the liquid, she falls to the ground screaming as Incubus emerges from her back. The Incubus kills Dahlia. Harry defeats the Incubus and the Incubator gives him a baby (who is revealed to be Heather in Silent Hill 3) and shows him the escape route. As Harry escapes, Kaufmann tries to follow him but is stopped by Lisa. Incubator is consumed by the flames. The Lost Book of Memories claims that this is the "orthodox ending" but in the same book, Silent Hill writer Hiroyuki Owaku states that Cybil's fate is "left to players' imaginations." [1][2]
- Bad+ Ending (Save Cybil and don't complete the Kaufmann sidequest): The two Alessas merge, becoming the Incubator, and kills Dahlia. Cybil then appears and tries to kill Dahlia, but fails. Harry then battles Incubator who, after defeat, thanks Harry for killing her. Harry then collapses in sorrow over the loss of his daughter. Cybil walks over to Harry, smacks him out of his grief, and tells him to "go", as The Otherworld collapses around them.
Bad Ending (Kill Cybil and don't complete the Kaufmann sidequest): The two Alessas merge becoming the Incubator and kills Dahlia. Harry then battles Incubator who, after defeat, Cheryl's voice thanks Harry and says goodbye. Harry then collapses in sorrow over the loss of his daughter and we are then shown an image of him bleeding from his head, unconscious in his car, which suggests that everything that happened in Silent Hill was just a dream Harry had before he died. This ending is ironic because at one point in the game, Harry wonders whether everything that is happening to him is just a dream that he is having in a hospital after a car accident.
- UFO Ending: When Harry uses the Channeling Stone on top of the lighthouse a group of UFOs is seen in the sky. As the UFOs land the cutscene changes style to a roughly animated picture show. Harry tries to ask the aliens if they have seen his daughter, but is shot down and brought into their UFO. The UFOs take off and the credits roll.
Merchandise
A variety of rare print merchandise for Silent Hill is available, including:
- Silent Hill Perfect Navigation
- Silent Hill Novel
Gallery
 Playstation Magazine Cover art |
 A Silent Hill magazine walkthrough |
External links
- Official Silent Hill USA Forum
- Translated Memories
- Official site Masahiro Ito design monster of Silent Hill
- Always On My Mind
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![[1]](http://silenthill.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special:Outbound&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.translatedmemories.com%2Fbookpgs%2FPg28-29SH1Ending.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://silenthill.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special:Outbound&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.translatedmemories.com%2Fbookpgs%2FPg92-93.jpg){kind=link}