WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Silent Hill 1 and 3.

I remember that it was a sunny and beautiful Sunday afternoon when I first cracked open the shrinkwrap on my copy of the original Silent Hill. I knew very little about the game, only that it was similar to my beloved Resident Evil and that the main character’s daughter would go missing. I popped in the disk, shuttered the blinds in my room, grabbed myself a glass of Coke, and prepared to dig into the unexpected. Fast forward thirty minutes, and I am now under a blanket, despite it being a surprisingly warm day. The blinds in my room are now slightly more open than they were previously, my Coke has sat untouched, and I am more terrified than I have ever been in my entire life. This is the beauty of the Silent Hill series…it managed to freak me out on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in broad daylight.

There are numerous examples of which I equate to "defining moments" of early survival horror; the dog jumping through the window in the original Resident Evil, the T-Rex blasting through the wall in Dino Crisis, and everything and anything pertaining to the Licker from RE2 and the Nemesis from RE3. What Silent Hill did, more so than any other game, was stretch this "defining moment" from beginning to end, with no moments of calm to rest your mind. There is never a moment in Silent Hill that you are not uneasy, nervous, or downright frightened. Some games will ease up the tension by throwing a lot at the player at once, and others will build up towards a nerve-wracking ending that tests all the player’s abilities. Silent Hill does both of these, but also does something that no other game series has done: cast the player into a hopeless situation.

From the moment that you press start to begin the game, you realize that what you are playing will not end well. You realize that there will be no ’happy’ ending, no moment where everything goes back to the way it was before for the characters. You realize that what you are seeing and what is happening will only get worse, and the further along you go, the more dour the situation will be.