Silent Hill knew atmosphere and pacing. You can travel some time without encountering monsters, and in some areas, they are curiously absent. The Otherworld showing up adds an immense aspect of uncertainty, forcing the player to revisit familiar territory in a nightmarish new light and deal with all-new horrors throughout.
Silent Hill's horror is foreboding and cerebral. It confronts you with bizarre, often fantastic imagery, daring the player to seek out the meaning behind each. There are explanations to be found, and if you piece together all the clues, everything in the game makes perfect sense by the end. Horrifying creatures and extremely good use of shadow and light make it a heady experience, but what made it so effective was how it leveraged the themes of its motif so beautifully.
Environments and monsters are terrifying and grotesque, as if shaped from the subconscious of an unsound mind - which isn't terribly far from the truth. The radio lends tension to the individual monsters, and the game's creepy moments, which often involve unfathomable elements, make the game terribly unnerving at times. Silent Hill is unusual in that even though it's painfully rare that a player will ever lack for a way to deal with a situation, it remains scary due to how creepy the environments and situations are. It preys on the player's own fears and worries, unnerving them and keeping them on edge.
So
Resident Evil is blown out of the water, right? Well... Not really.
Resident Evil's horror is not psychological like
Silent Hill's, nor was it ever intending to be:
Resident Evil's horror is visceral and primal. The monsters you encounter are, at once, both recognizable and understandable. The Zombies of the original RE strike at a very primal fear lurking in humankind in general - the so-called uncanny valley. We can recognize the Zombies as being human once, even if they are not human now. The fear in a quality
Resident Evil game comes not from the lurking horrors behind the scenes, but from what I can only describe as a stress-related horror.
In
Resident Evil, you are in
constant danger of being overwhelmed. You are trapped within the mansion, with horrors around every corner, and resources are in precious short supply. Bullets, medical supplies, and even the ink ribbons for saving have to be carefully managed if you are to survive this nightmare. A limited inventory is a direct contributor to this, as every resource
must be carefully managed. Even players who know where everything is must carefully manage their ammunition, and cannot afford to be wasteful, lest a player be left with no way to defend themselves or a critical shortage of medical supplies.
This actually has a way of getting into your head in a way worse way than
Silent Hill can, though mind you, it only will if you
let it. Whereas
Silent Hill creeps you out from the get-go,
Resident Evil grinds you down with what I can only describe as
Survival Management. It's harder to break out of that, and you'll find it fucking with you way harder if you let it. Suddenly you're finding yourself checking to make sure your front door was locked and that there isn't anything in your back seat when getting ready to come home at night.
You know, just to be sure.
Whilst
Resident Evil 2 was probably one of the best examples of this in action, for me, what started it was the
Keeper's Diary, in RE1. By this point, I'd been laughing at RE1's ridiculous voice-acting and the fact that I felt like a certified badass being able to handle things so well (playing Jill's scenario in the original helped; her scenario is considerably easier). So suddenly, I found this file that I'd seen my friends never pick up when we played as a group. Most of the time, they ignored the files because several of them liked speedrunning, but since most of the files were mostly innocuous clues and bullshit, I didn't expect this'd be different. So, at about 10PM, long before I was the night owl I am now, I decided: "You know what? Fuck it, I'll check that out."
That was a terrible decision.
The file itself unnerved the ever-loving shit out of me, since it explained the whole situation and made the Zombies considerably more frightening than they had been before. Suddenly I found myself significantly less brave around these things, and considerably less wanting to engage in combat with them, since I sure as hell didn't have ammo to deal with all of 'em and had no desire to get near any of 'em now. The switch had clicked, I was in the
Survival Management mode, and it'd be a few days before I gradually powered down from that.
Now I actively go out of my way to subject myself to that shit
on purpose, so it wasn't like it had a net positive.
