For nearly thirty years, the Silent Hill series has stood as a titan of psychological survival horror, a genre renowned for making players feel deeply uncomfortable. With the highly anticipated Silent Hill 2 remake launching in 2024 and the recent debut of Silent Hill f, it’s the perfect moment to delve back into Konami’s chilling collection and rank every terrifying entry.
Let’s be honest, not every trip to Silent Hill has been a pleasant one (or even a good one). The series has certainly had its share of stumbles, some more forgettable than others. That’s why you won’t find titles like Silent Hill: Homecoming, Silent Hill: Downpour, the oddly aggressive Silent Hill: The Arcade, or the truly baffling co-op dungeon crawler Silent Hill: Book of Memories on this definitive list. We’re focusing strictly on the best.
So, prepare yourself. Here are our top picks for the very best Silent Hill experiences, from portable nightmares to groundbreaking playable teasers that left an indelible mark.
9. Silent Hill: Origins
Imagine a Silent Hill adventure so terrifying, it could fit in your pocket and still make you jump? That’s precisely what Silent Hill: Origins delivered. This 2007 prequel, initially a PlayStation Portable exclusive before its PS2 port, proved that handheld horror could be incredibly potent.
Set years before the very first Silent Hill, the game casts you as Travis Grady, a truck driver who, naturally, makes a terrible detour into the infamous, fog-choked town. From there, the horror escalates exactly as you’d expect, becoming delightfully unsettling.
What truly sets Origins apart is its unique approach to exploring the town’s nightmarish “Otherworld.” Unlike other entries that abruptly pull you kicking and screaming towards a distorted industrial hellscape, Silent Hill: Origins gives players agency. You decide when and where to transition between realities via special mirrors scattered throughout the town.
While this might reduce the element of surprise, it opens up some incredibly clever and disturbing puzzle scenarios. Picture examining a mannequin’s plastic organs in one reality, only to find it transforms into a gruesome corpse in the next. This mechanic adds a layer of morbid curiosity to the exploration.
Combined with a dread-inducing atmosphere on par with the original game’s foreboding feel, Silent Hill: Origins on PSP offered genuinely terrifying experiences, even on the go.
8. Silent Hill 4: The Room
Though its title might bring to mind director Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic “best worst movie,” Silent Hill 4: The Room is far from a bizarre crossover. It is, however, a significant departure from the series’ established formula. The terror shifts away from the iconic foggy streets of Silent Hill and into the new setting of Ashfield, specifically the claustrophobic, locked-down apartment of protagonist Henry Townshend. The game skillfully alternates between unsettling first-person exploration of Henry’s home and more traditional third-person combat within the nightmarish otherworlds he can access through mysterious holes in his apartment walls.
These otherworlds function as small, distinct pocket dimensions, each with its own visual identity and unfolding narrative. From the grimy, tiled circular hallways of a water prison to an abandoned hospital filled with disturbing dioramas, the environments are truly memorable. As the narrative progresses, Henry’s apartment, initially a sanctuary, slowly transforms into a haunted house. His pursuit of an undead serial killer gradually blurs the lines of his reality, and the game’s skin-crawling atmosphere becomes increasingly oppressive.
While the latter half’s sudden shift to a prolonged escort mission divided fans, there’s no denying the impact of its genuinely disturbing creatures, Akira Yamaoka’s haunting original soundtrack, and the unique, decaying apartment hub. These elements combined to create one of the most spectacularly tense Silent Hill adventures in the entire canon.
Silent Hill 4: The Room marked the fourth and final installment from the esteemed Japanese developer Team Silent. Following its release, the team disbanded, with members moving on to influence other horror titles like Forbidden Siren and The Evil Within. This also saw the development of subsequent Silent Hill games fall into the hands of Western developers, with famously mixed results – we’re looking at you, Homecoming and Downpour.
7. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
Not all Western-developed Silent Hill titles missed the mark, though. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, the series’ sole entry on the Nintendo Wii, stands as a testament to that. British developer Climax Studios reimagined the original Silent Hill, maintaining the core premise of Harry Mason searching for his missing daughter after a car crash in the eerie American town, but spun the plot in an entirely new direction. The gameplay was dramatically restructured, alternating between first-person psychotherapy sessions and Harry’s more typical over-the-shoulder journey through Silent Hill.
Shattered Memories is a challenging game to categorize within the series due to its radical uniqueness. It completely abandons combat, instead forcing Harry to constantly flee from relentless antagonists in chase sequences reminiscent of slasher movies. The familiar fog of previous entries is replaced by ice and falling snow, creating a distinct atmosphere of dread and limiting player visibility in innovative ways. The game also ingeniously utilized the WiiMote, giving players precise control over Harry’s flashlight beam and using the controller’s built-in speaker for the signature radio static and other unsettling sound effects.
Perhaps most notably, Shattered Memories subtly profiles the player throughout the game. The choices made during the psychotherapy sessions influence subsequent changes to level and enemy designs, ultimately altering the story’s progression and determining which of its multiple endings you’ll reach. While this mechanic hasn’t reappeared in subsequent Silent Hill games, titles like Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn clearly drew inspiration from its blend of psychological profiling and slasher-style horror elements.
Meanwhile, Shattered Memories’ writer/designer Sam Barlow (who also contributed to Silent Hill: Origins) has since achieved significant independent success with critically acclaimed interactive fiction like Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality. All these titles involve solving mysteries by piecing together out-of-sequence video clips, which, in a way, are their own form of shattered memories.
6. Silent Hill f
After a thirteen-year hiatus, a new mainline Silent Hill game finally emerged from the fog in 2025. Silent Hill f delivered a fresh Japanese setting, a compelling and twisted narrative that reveals its full depth across multiple playthroughs, and a strong emphasis on melee combat, setting it apart from the more gun-focused action of the previous year’s Silent Hill 2 remake.
Admittedly, the deliberately heavy and slow feel of Silent Hill f’s combat system might not appeal to everyone. With its blend of light and heavy attacks, dodges, and counters, alongside careful management of health, stamina, and sanity meters, the monster-mashing draws inspiration from the weighty combat of the Dark Souls series, though thankfully without the punishing difficulty. However, even if you won’t smash your controller in frustration from dying repeatedly to bosses, your in-game lead pipe or crowbar might break due to the irritatingly brittle nature of Silent Hill f’s destructible weapons.
Yet, if you can embrace (or simply endure) these clunky combat encounters, the rewards are immense. Silent Hill f’s story is genuinely one of the most captivating tales in the entire series. The psychological impact of high schooler Hinako Shimizu’s domestic abuse and bullying is deeply affecting, the monsters she encounters are pure nightmare fuel, and her world is an absorbing place to explore, whether navigating the misty streets of her mountainside village or the mysterious shrine realm she enters in her dreams.
One might assume a Silent Hill game without the actual town of Silent Hill would be like a Resident Evil game without any resident evil. However, Silent Hill f successfully proves that while you can take the series out of Smalltown, USA, you absolutely cannot take the spine-chilling psychological horror out of a Silent Hill game.
5. P.T.
While ultimately a proof of concept rather than a fully-fledged Silent Hill game — P.T. stands for Playable Teaser — this standalone slice of psychological torment ignited fan anticipation for a Silent Hills game that, tragically, never saw the light of day. Dropped quietly as a free download on PlayStation 4 amidst more prominent announcements at Gamescom 2014, P.T. rapidly became a social media phenomenon. Over a million players collectively embarked on unraveling its enigmatic puzzles, making it a true collaborative horror experience.
Confined to a single, looping, L-shaped corridor within a suburban family home, P.T. masterfully delivered scares both subtle and blatant. It would subtly rearrange the decor to create unease in one loop, then ensure you’d never sleep with the lights off again by surprising you with the murderous ghost Lisa the moment you dared to glance over your shoulder. Much like the apartment sequences in Silent Hill 4: The Room, P.T. broke from the series’ traditional third-person perspective, presenting its horrors through a claustrophobic first-person view that made every encounter terrifyingly immediate. It was compact, cryptic, and utterly chilling.
What further deepens P.T.’s mystique is its extreme scarcity today. Following the cancellation of Silent Hills and Kojima Productions’ tumultuous split with Konami in 2015, P.T. was permanently removed from the PlayStation Store, making it impossible to reinstall, even for those who had previously downloaded it. While some unofficial PC workarounds exist, the only legitimate way to play P.T. now is to somehow locate a PlayStation 4 console with the teaser already installed, or experience a fan-made recreation, such as the impressively faithful version in Media Molecule’s Dreams. Or, perhaps, by breaking into that fabled warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant was hidden at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Despite its brief existence, P.T.’s legacy is profound. It has become one of the most influential horror games in recent memory. Layers of Fear adopted P.T.’s looping environments to disorient players in its artist’s mansion, while Resident Evil: Village channeled its spirit with the tight hallways, combat-free puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing deformed fetus found in its House Beneviento section. This doesn’t even account for the countless P.T. imitators that continue to populate Steam to this day. Not bad for a playable teaser of a Silent Hill game that never was.
4. Silent Hill 3
The narrative brilliance of Silent Hill 2 set an incredibly high bar — and we’ll delve into why in just a moment — but Silent Hill 3 carved its own path by serving as a direct sequel to the original Silent Hill. The third chapter in the Silent Hill saga delves into fascinating new details about the doomsday cult introduced in the first game, while also unleashing an almost entirely new array of nightmarish creatures. These horrors were brought to stomach-churning life by visuals that truly pushed the PlayStation 2 hardware to its absolute limits.
Its most significant departure from its two predecessors, however, lies in its protagonist: a spirited teenage girl, rather than a brooding, thirty-something man. Heather (whose surname we’ll keep vague to avoid spoilers) felt like a breath of fresh air amidst the pervasive fog, quickly establishing herself as one of the best-written and most relatable leads in the series’ history. Notably, until the recent release of Silent Hill f, she remained the only playable female lead in the main series (unless you count Maria in the Director’s Cut of Silent Hill 2).
Upon its initial release, Silent Hill 3 faced some criticism for a perceived lack of gameplay innovation, with many finding it too similar to the first two games. However, considering the subsequent string of subpar Silent Hill titles that followed Silent Hill 4: The Room, perhaps in retrospect, staying true to the beloved look and feel of the series’ most respected entries wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
3. Silent Hill 2 Remake
Unlike Shattered Memories, which completely restructured and drastically altered the plot of the original Silent Hill, the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 respectfully preserves the story, characters, and chilling atmosphere of the PlayStation 2 original. However, it meticulously updates everything for modern audiences with breathtaking visuals, anxiety-inducing audio design, and controls that allow for far more fluid player movement and inventory management.
Developer Bloober Team was no stranger to the horror genre or the process of remaking horror games, having previously crafted and revisited their own spooky narratives in titles like Layers of Fear and Observer. This extensive experience clearly served the team well, as the Silent Hill 2 remake stands as their greatest triumph to date, dramatically enhancing the unsettling and claustrophobic atmosphere of the original. The small town setting has been expanded and rendered with a new level of detail, making it utterly absorbing for returning fans and newcomers alike.
Crucially, almost every modernization introduced here has made Silent Hill 2’s overwhelmingly shudder-inducing setting even more immersive and alarming. The volumetric fog feels thicker and more oppressive than ever before. The new graphical fidelity applied to the various dwellings you explore makes them seem infinitely more dank and depressing, bordering on truly disgusting at times. The use of light is particularly brilliant; being forced to navigate every inch of the Toluca Prison area in fleeting bursts of illumination, thanks to failing circuit breakers, creates one of the most frantic and frightening sequences the series has ever seen. Or rather, *not* seen, given how quickly its horrors are plunged back into shadow.
Add in some truly superior voice acting and a terrifying soundscape from Akira Yamaoka that will make you question your own sanity, and there’s no doubt that the Silent Hill 2 remake offers the definitive way to experience — or re-experience — one of survival horror’s most dread-inducing destinations.
2. Silent Hill
Combine the atmospheric dread of Stephen King, the surrealism of David Lynch, and the visceral horror of Francis Bacon, then filter it all through the unique cultural lens of Japanese developer Team Silent. What you get is the twisted and truly terrifying journey that is the original Silent Hill. Breaking away from the often campy, B-movie style prevalent in 90s survival horror, Silent Hill plunged players into previously unexplored depths of psychological torment. It emphasized a deeply disturbing atmosphere over cheap jump scares, establishing a tone for a series that, at its best, is simultaneously incredibly uncomfortable and utterly enthralling.
Unlike earlier survival horror games such as Resident Evil and Parasite Eve, which relied on pre-rendered backgrounds, Silent Hill boldly rendered its environments entirely in 3D. Remarkably, the series’ signature darkness and oppressive fog were initially born from a technical necessity: to mask the original PlayStation’s limited draw distance and unsightly graphical pop-ins. This ingenious solution transformed the system’s hardware limitations into a powerful tool for terror, a constant that has defined the series to this day.
From your very first steps as Harry Mason entering the eerie small town in search of his lost daughter, Silent Hill relentlessly assaults you with its genuinely unsettling emptiness. The fear of the unknown – of what lurks just beyond the impenetrable fog – is arguably more petrifying than the monstrous beasts themselves. This unending sense of unease was further amplified by brilliant atmospheric touches, like the screeching static from Harry’s radio, which grew more urgent as you approached an unseen, pissed-off collection of polygons.
Silent Hill ushered in a chilling new standard for slow-burn survival horror, and its profound influence can still be felt decades later in contemporary titles like The Medium and Alan Wake 2. Yet, it only took Team Silent a couple of years to drag players into even deeper realms of depravity and despair…
1. Silent Hill 2
The original Silent Hill may have laid the groundwork for the series’ unique blend of bleak atmosphere and disturbing adult themes, but 2001’s Silent Hill 2 perfected it. This profoundly absorbing and emotionally draining examination of grief and guilt casts players as the recently widowed James Sunderland, embarking on a tortured tour through his own private hell. This personal nightmare is crawling with awful apparitions that symbolize his increasingly decaying mental state and the suffering of those around him.
Where the original Silent Hill largely focused on the corrupt religious practices of a local cult and their impact on the town’s reality, Silent Hill 2 fearlessly tackles themes that were far more nuanced and, at the time, extremely taboo in the world of gaming. Sexual abuse, suicide, and self-harm are all explored as Sunderland encounters other broken survivors trapped within the foggy lakeside town, with each form of trauma made all the more confronting by the twisted creatures they manifest as. While 2001’s Grand Theft Auto 3 is often hailed as the first true video game for grown-ups, Silent Hill 2 arguably beat Rockstar’s magnum opus to that punch by a full month.
Silent Hill 2 also introduced one of the most iconic antagonists in the series’ history, if not survival horror in general: Pyramid Head. There are few enemies as pants-wettingly scary as this intimidating and unstoppable tormentor, who relentlessly stalks Sunderland through several stages of the story and commits unspeakable acts upon mannequins. Ominously dragging one half of a giant pair of scissors and sporting an angular, rusty skull that demands a tetanus shot just from a glance, this pointy-headed predator’s impact was regrettably diluted by subsequent appearances in weaker installments like Silent Hill: Homecoming and Silent Hill: Book of Memories. However, his profound importance to Silent Hill 2’s sustained sense of dread cannot be overstated.
From its tragic, layered story to its provocative symbolism and an abundance of genuine scares, Silent Hill 2 remains the bone-chilling benchmark for the series. It is, without a doubt, the obvious choice for the number one spot on this list.
And there you have it: our definitive ranking of the nine best games in the Silent Hill series. Did your favorite make our list? Let us know what you think in the comments!
Tristan Ogilvie is a video producer on the IGN reviews team, based in Sydney, Australia. He has over 18 years of experience covering video games. When he doesn’t have a controller in his hand, Tristan is happiest playing guitar, taking photos, or watching cricket.