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I thought this was a survival simulator. It turned out to be a death simulator.
You start dying from the first seconds of the game, and all subsequent actions are not exploring the world or immersing yourself in the game, but attempts to delay the moment of death. There's simply no time to look around; your health/mood/warmth/dryness/satiety depletes catastrophically fast... while poison/disease/hunger/smell increase... So you simply don't have time to enjoy the atmosphere. And don't think I just walked in, got disappointed, and quit. I started over four times, interacted with a bunch of homeless people, passersby, a priest, Meisner, Agnes and her dog, gypsies, etc. It's very interesting, even captivating. But while you're running between these characters, you inevitably and inexorably die. Death comes to you from trash piles, cops, thugs, rain, temperature, food, booze, even cigarette butts... In short, if there were a mod that at least slightly reduces the negative effects, I would play with pleasure. As it is... there's enough masochism in real life.



About 15 years ago I launched the third part, but dropped it at the metro because I didn't understand where to go.
About 13 years ago I finished the first part, cursing its clunky PS1 graphics, the infamous PS1 fog hiding everything within five steps, tank controls, and overall some kind of pointlessness — you run through random, illogical levels, beat on mobs in clumsy combat, solve puzzles from the "TV Guide" section of the "Antenna" newspaper, all sprinkled with a primitive story about a chthonic cult. In short, it aged very poorly and left a bad impression of the series.
Over this past year and last, I grit my teeth and decided to give the series one last chance, especially since the second part, as far as I remember, is considered the coolest online.

2. Same tank controls, but this time the graphics are reasonable, and the game is clearly perceived much better — the fog isn't just 5 steps ahead, but 10, so we're no longer feeling our way through milk; the mobs look a bit more oppressive; the hero has more than ten polygons.
The combat, however, is just as sluggish, so it's easier to run past mobs on the street — just wasting time on fools, especially since they sometimes respawn. Also, I didn't see the point of setting the difficulty higher — the essence of combat is to catch a mob close up and bash it with a club until it completely freezes, so higher difficulty just means more kicks needed on the fallen body. I tried starting on Hard, but ended up switching to an easier setting solely because of this — every fight took 5-7 minutes of real time, and the AI is so dumb that except for a few particularly cramped corridors, you can still run past it, and it won't do anything to you. That said, the game has several boss fights, true to the early genre samples — not quite balanced, where you need to not only expend all your ammunition but sometimes poke away with a toothpick for half an hour after, serving merely as a test of the player's patience.
As for the story, overall it's decent this time, though fed to you in drip-feed fashion. The protagonist and NPCs are developed, the story makes sense, and the town isn't just there for its own sake but as a tool to reveal the hero, without deep diving back into the dreary lore about the cult. I especially liked the multiple ending mechanic, influenced by a huge number of hidden factors, such as interacting with certain items at specific moments, timely healing of wounds, and so on — all this ultimately gives the feeling that we've truly reached a particular resolution according to our (the protagonist's) mental state and beliefs, because without knowing the variables, it's nearly impossible to predict what will lead where.
And I'll add that I don't recall any particularly tedious levels in terms of level design, which is a plus in itself, though running around the foggy hub town, while not as bad as in the first part, is still dreary, because it pushes you to vacuum every village nook and cranny clockwise for loot, which is, you know...

3. I can't say I particularly liked the second one, but I don't consider the time spent on it a mistake either; in other words, it didn't give me a solid resolution on whether this series is overrated aged garbage or okay, so I decided to give the third one another chance.
This time I found where to go in the metro, and overall, I breezed through this part — it seemed focused on action/horror(suspense) at the "expense" of story, which isn't so bad overall because I've long since gotten used to the tank controls, the combat, though clumsy, dispatches mobs in a jiffy, and the levels are quite pleasant in design and atmosphere, and this time there was no blind-man hub.
The story seemed like nonsense to me — a girl lived, now she's in Silent Hill. A bit later they explain why, and that's it, plus the cult is back in full force. Only two endings — good and bad — and they're nothing special, with the methods to get them boiling down to just killing mobs/taking hits.
Overall — gameplay-wise slightly more playable, short and not too stressful, in short, fine for a couple-three evenings.

4. Again I couldn't make a decision, so I decided to polish off "The Room," especially since long ago I saw its announcement in a computer magazine, and it stuck in my memory, and also because it's the last part with a decent user rating, after which the decline began, if the internet is to be believed.
A pretty good setup and interesting mechanic in this part — you sit like an owl in a locked apartment, spy on a neighbor through a hole, and can only leave through a portal to the Silent Hill world, always returning to the apartment after finishing a level, observing changes in it, listening and peering through the window/hole/peephole at the neighbors, who discuss you or try to break into your apartment. On the levels themselves, there are sometimes portals through which you can return to the apartment, the only place in the game to save and regen health.
However, this is tied to a stupid move — limited inventory. In previous parts, except for hub treks in 1-2, there was no backtracking; you could carry whatever you wanted, and it didn't negatively affect difficulty/immersion/survival horror. Here, due to the described movement mechanic, a chest for items was placed in the room, and the hero's capacity was mercilessly limited, leading to tedious back-and-forth running when you need to dump looted junk or make room for a story puzzle item. This is absolutely awful; I despise such a thing and can't remember a single game in any genre in my lifetime where this was justified. It's not about making sacrifices and missing loot, or making a serious choice — take a gun with ammo and be more protected, or rely on luck and have a few extra inventory slots. You just run back and forth like a courier, never use firearms throughout the game because one magazine kills one enemy or drops a couple to the ground, takes up one slot, and you have only ten inventory slots, more than half of which might be occupied by story items, healing items, consumables. Meanwhile, as in the old days, the enemy is just as easily beaten with any club, dying just as fast as from firearms.
Setting that aside, the first half of the game is quite good in level design and story delivery — except for a couple of the most tedious places (metro cars and especially the entire lighthouse — that's just a crapfest, conceptually, sure, but so boring and energy-draining; plus a special "thanks" for the phone in the nurse's apartment). But in the second half, the madness begins. On the plus side — the story picks up pace and there's a cool moment in the apartment, while simultaneously cutting off your health regen there, so now you can only heal with medkits.
On the downside — absolutely all the gameplay, I don't even know if to attribute it to laziness, lack of time/resources, or an attempt at conceptuality, but it incredibly undermines the successful start:

😫😫😫

They make you go through all the previous five levels again, adding new enemies, new loot, and one new conditional puzzle, but you have to carry a mutilated neighbor in a cast, guiding her from the start point of the level to the end point, while your usual paths don't work — she can't climb or descend vertical ladders, so you have to make completely crazy detours through the levels and find shortcuts for her that weren't there before. Of course, all this time she limps along behind you, occasionally stopping to catch her breath or mumble a chthonic curse. You can give her a weapon, which takes up a slot in your already tiny inventory, so she can poke enemies, and she herself is immortal, but depending on the damage taken and moments when you leave her alone, her condition can worsen significantly, preventing you from saving her in the final boss fight and unlocking two of the four possible endings.

Otherwise, the story is pretty good with an interesting concept, the hero is a completely dead blank slate, even more so than the girl from the third part, but that's not critical because the story isn't about him this time. Again, they made multiple endings, four this time, and within the part's concept — the conditions for them aren't particularly interesting, but logical, I can accept that.
Overall, the part could have been great if not for its second half, for which full disrespect, and a couple of times I genuinely thought about dropping it, which didn't happen in 2-3, but I had to grit my teeth.


There's another part that came out on PC, but its ratings are already pretty sad, and frankly, after the second half of The Room with its brilliant game design, I definitely don't plan to start it.

Overall for the series, I can offer this opinion:
1: crap
2: above average
3: average
4: above average transitioning to almost crap

Summary — not as bad as I thought 13 years ago, but average at best.
Though now I wouldn't call the title overrated, because certain unique moments of narrative, continuity between parts, gameplay, atmosphere, and level design, which I can't readily recall in a similar format in other titles, are still felt here — another question is how much they resonate with each individual player. As for me — pretty vague, but I can understand the opposite opinion too. Overall, however, I don't think I'll return in my thoughts to any warm memories of the several dozen hours spent in this world.