Resident Evil Has a Leg Up on Silent Hill for One Reason
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Highlights
- Resident Evil and Silent Hill have different gameplay styles, with Resident Evil stretching its genre legs more than Silent Hill.
- Silent Hill is primarily a psychological horror franchise, while Resident Evil has transitioned from survival horror to action.
- Silent Hill’s future success depends on its ability to carve refreshing narratives, while Resident Evil’s ability to flip between horror and action has kept it from growing stale.
Resident Evil and Silent Hill are often compared with similar metrics nowadays even though they are actually fairly different franchises. The line between what is considered survival horror as opposed to psychological horror is decidedly muddied, and yet it’s what helped distinguish Resident Evil from Silent Hill when they were both fledgling franchises employing tank controls and fixed camera angles on the earliest PlayStation systems. These franchises have also evolved a lot since those initial installments, with Resident Evil stretching its genre legs a fair bit more than Silent Hill.
Neither Resident Evil nor Silent Hill have had a perfect legacy, and that’s an inevitability any franchise will encounter when it’s as long-running as they are. Some games are far more agreeable with a few of them maintaining a legendary status in the horror genre at large, for example, while others represent what fans consider to be the bottom of the genre’s barrel. Silent Hill has fallen victim to more entries being highly criticized than Resident Evil has, and while swapping developers certainly has a role to play in that, so does Resident Evil briefly abandoning horror for action.
Silent Hill is Currently Locked into Psychological or Survival Horror
For as long as Silent Hill has been around, it’s been aptly billed as a psychological-horror franchise with some games leaning more into survival-horror gameplay. Either way, Silent Hill is intrinsically horror-oriented. Even when characters such as Harry Mason or Murphy Pendleton wail on bizarre psyche monsters, the atmosphere in Silent Hill games is always meant to perturb and unnerve.
Team Silent’s Silent Hill games were definitely successful at accomplishing that with subtle environmental frights as well as mortifying sound and enemy designs; however, there’s only so long a franchise can hang onto its primary genre themes before they end up needing to be reevaluated or reinforced. Silent Hill cleverly developed an anthology series that could introduce new characters and that extended its shelf life favorably, but even that eventually led to regurgitated ideas and a lesser quality in games put out once the seminal developer behind its beloved installments was no longer working on them.
That’s not to say that future games like the Silent Hill 2 remake, Townfall, Ascension, and f can’t be good, and in fact the series has more potential now than it ever has. Regardless, it is still restrained to horror and unless it can continue to carve refreshing narratives out of its eponymous tourist town, Silent Hill might end up circling the same tropes and motifs that made its original trilogy popular.
Resident Evil Can Flip Fluidly Between Survival Horror and Action
Meanwhile, Resident Evil gradually transitioned away from survival horror into action. This transition was made palatable thanks to the exceedingly popular Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, and while Resident Evil 6 decided to be a much longer game with multiple character campaigns, it was still popular at the time for its co-op action gameplay.
It wouldn’t be until a little later that fans would comprehend how far the franchise had come from its survival-horror roots, and Resident Evil 7 came at the perfect time to help rehabilitate the series and redirect it onto a course that fans could rally behind again. But at the time, action was working well as a new genre path for Resident Evil, and with the games’ remakes already reaching the fourth installment they are likely to make that choice once more of whether to pursue action over horror.
Some fans will prefer horror or action to their own discretion, though it is guaranteed that being action-oriented for a while helped to give Resident Evil enough diversity in its content to not grow stale as a franchise, which is probably why it’s been able to be as present as it is. If Silent Hill’s new endeavors are able to get creative and innovate a little within their own genres, then perhaps both franchises will be able to flourish.
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