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An Excellent Creepiness Per Pixel Ratio
Chris got me Silent Hill for Christmas (a "classic" survival horror game from the ancient days of 1999), and I finally stuck it in the old PlayStation 2 last night. I had two expectations: foggy and creepy, and the game delivered excellently.
Silent Hill feels like one of those games that comes up with gameplay brilliance out of an inspired workaround for a technical problem. Myst, for example, got around the twin problems of limited graphical horsepower and AI horsepower by giving us a beautiful slideshow of an empty world. Silent Hill seems like it came from the fundamental desire to do Resident Evil without having to resort to pre-rendered backgrounds. So what do you do if you want to provide great lighting effects and interesting backgrounds, but don't have the horsepower to draw all that stuff?
Easy.
You make the fog so thick it ends five feet in front of your face.
It's brilliant.
This one technical decision -- give Silent Hill an extremely limited visibility -- informs the entire feel of the game. Sometimes it's dark. Sometimes it's foggy. Sometimes you're in a small, claustrophobic interior space. But you can never quite see what you need to see -- right up until you discover that the almost normal street you've been walking down has been replaced with an gaping chasm and reality has taken a brief vacation.
Sadly, it still has that RE-style "left & right rotate you instead of moving you left or right on the screen" control scheme that I hate so much. But since I can actually move the camera around, it can be lived with. I got up to the school's infirmary in the couple of hours I spent on it last night, and I'll say again: brrrrrrr.
Good thing I'm a big wuss and playing on easy. 10:52:08 AM () 
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