Silent Hill: The Arcade Game (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Konami's 2008 horror-themed light-gun arcade shooter, Silent Hill: The Arcade.

Played through on the medium difficulty level, best ending shown. I am playing the English-language European version here. The game was never released in America.

Silent Hill: The Arcade is a rail-shooter that, though based on the survival horror series that began in 1999 on the Sony PlayStation, clearly deviates quite a bit from the console-based titles. Surprisingly, despite how different it is, there were a few members of Team Silent, the original team that was responsible for developing the first four Silent Hill games, that did contribute to the game.

Silent Hill: The Arcade starts with a group of college kids heading to Silent Hill on a roadtrip. They are all members of their schools occult club, and apparently they felt it a good idea to go put themselves in the path of mortal danger instead of heeding the stories people tell about the place. Later on at the hotel, Eric has a horrible nightmare about a girl falling from a ship and being pulled under the water by dead zombie-looking hands. Suddenly his bed turns to water, and the same hands begging to drag him under as well.

And then he wakes up.

Everything is covered in fog, there are bloody streaks all over the road, one of his friends is laying half dead in the road, and another one has been taken. Whatever is Eric to do? Well, the very first line of the game makes that very clear: "Shoot! Shoot it!"

There is no build-up, no squealing radio, no finding of random objects: this is a shooter, and it makes no attempt to convince you otherwise. It plays a lot like House of the Dead. The hordes of undead creatures constantly throw themselves at you, and if you don't want to die, you'd better start working on your best Rambo impersonation.

Armed initially with a pistol and an endlessly bitchy lady friend, you make your way through various disused locales while selecting paths to fight through as you find special weapons and keys and make things bleed. There is a neat use of a Silent Hill mechanic in play here: every so often (though entirely too often to create any real suspense or dread) you'll hear a blast of a foghorn and the entire area transforms into the series' signature horrorscape, the Otherworld. Like in the older titles, everything is covered in rust and blood, and enemies become far more twisted and gross looking. It's an excellent way to keep the visuals from getting too samey across such a long game, though I really wish the designers exercised a bit more moderation in their use. It gets to eye-rolling levels when things are switching back and fourth every five minutes or so.

The graphics aren't that great though. They don't look bad - not by any means - but they look like they are from a game far older than 2007. I mean, it runs at 30fps in 640x480. Seriously.

It has nothing on House of the Dead 4 that came out in 2006, but thankfully the art direction helps to compensate for this. It seems a bit strange to have the super dull fog covered stage as the very first one in the game, though. The sound is pretty good - the little music that is here is effective, and the voice acting is certainly... genre-worthy. That's a good way to put it, I think.

Anyway, the game plays very well. Rail shooters don't tend to be the deepest of games, and Silent Hill: The Arcade is no different, but it gets the basics right. The guns are accurate, headshots are the priority, and there are a fair number of bonus items that you can find by killing random creatures lurking way off in the background. The alternate paths usually don't end up doing anything meaningful, but they do add in a fair bit of replay value, as do the four possible endings. There are also a ton of callbacks to characters and places from Silent Hill 2-4 - it's pretty neat to encounter psychotic theme park mascots and Pyramid Head in a different context than we are used to seeing them in.

Overall, I really liked Silent Hill: The Arcade. It's not a terribly good Silent Hill game, but it is quite an entertaining HotD clone that does its job well enough to warrant a few playthroughs. I'd recommend it for sure.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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