Silent hill: play novel

The plot of the game largely repeats the events of the original Silent Hill . The main character is Harry Mason, who is looking for his missing adopted daughter Cheryl in Silent Hill . After the first run of the game, the script for Cybil Bennett becomes available, and after its completion, the downloadable script “Boy” ( Russian for Boy ), consisting of four parts: “Spring”, “Summer”, “Autumn” and "Winter" ^[2] . This scenario was about a seven-year-old boy, Andy, who lives in a nearby house next to the Mason family and ends up in the city of Silent Hill, entering the car with Harry and Cheryl ^[3] .

In Silent Hill: Play Novel, there are three game characters : Harry Mason, Sybil Bennet and the boy Andy, appearing only in this game in the series. Initially, you can play only for Harry, after passing through his script, the game for Sybil becomes available. Andy could be played by downloading the “Boy” script from the Konami server through a special Mobile Adapter GB device that combines Game Boy Advance with certain models of cell phones and allows you to access the Internet through them ^[3] . Currently, the server is no longer available, and the script cannot be obtained ^[4] .

The game is a visual novel in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure books - at certain points, the player needs to choose from two or three options, what the game character will have to do next ^[4] . Depending on the choice, the plot of the game changes, and thus the player can get one of several endings: in the script of Harry Mason there are eight different endings, in the script of Sybil Bennett there are six. Sometimes a player will need to solve a puzzle in order to advance further in the story. At the end of any scenario, the player is given a number of digital trading cards ( Eng. Digital Trading Cards ). The cards received depend on the ending received and the locations visited in the game ^[4] . There are 32 cards in total, 16 of them can be obtained in the script of Harry, 12 in the script of Sybil and 4 in the script of Andy ^[5] . It is impossible to die in the game ^[6] .

For the first time, the development of the game Silent Hill: Play Novel , at that time known as Silent Hill AGB , was announced on July 28, 2000 on the website of the Japanese magazine Famitsu . There also appeared information that the game, along with other Konami games for the Game Boy Advance, will be demonstrated in August 2000 at the Nintendo Spaceworld Expo in Tokyo ^[7] . At the Spaceworld game, 60 demo stands out of 140 were allotted with Game Boy Advance systems ^[1] . It was also confirmed at the exhibition that the game will feature FMV - opening , similar to the screensaver from Silent Hill , but at a lower resolution and with a frequency of 15 frames per second ^[8] .

The game was created by the Japanese studio Will and produced by KCET ^[5] . The developer of the game Silent Hill 2 Akihiro Imamura was also involved to a small extent ^[9] . Unlike the first game in the Silent Hill series and many subsequent ones, Akira Yamaoka ^[10] did not take part in writing the soundtrack , Noisycroak studio located in Tokyo ^[5] , often engaged in writing soundtracks for games, and a separate unit of the Will studio were responsible for the soundtrack ^] .

Silent Hill: Play Novel was one of the first games on Game Boy Advance. The release took place on the day the console was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, the price was 5800 yen ^{[11] [12]} . The game was not published outside of Japan and was not officially translated into other languages ^[6] . It was planned that additional content would be developed for the game, but this idea was not implemented ^[13] .

The game was greeted by critics without much enthusiasm, she was reproached for the lack of a soundtrack and horror factor ^{[3] [15]} . In a review of the portal, the reviewer called the game “addictive,” and also mentioned that there are several problems in the game, such as that “decisions have little impact” on the plot ^[4] . In a review of The Great Dragon magazine, Alexander Bukarov wrote that Play Novel is a “game of surprises and paradoxes,” and also doubted that it should be bought by Russian players if they do not learn Japanese. The browser praised the visuals and soundtrack ^[6] . Sergey Tsilyurik from the magazine “ Country of Games ” described Silent Hill: Play Novel as “a text retelling of the first part with several puzzles and an added script about some kind of useless boy” ^[16] .

• Silent Hill: Play Novel on Wikia's website