Despite its age, the Silent Hill franchise remains both a visceral and unforgettable take on the survival horror genre. At its core, the Silent Hill series traps protagonists in the desolate town of the same name, where beneath its famous fog lies an ominous history involving cults, various horrors, and a nightmare seemingly of the protagonist’s own design.
In speaking of design, surviving the Silent Hill experience doesn’t require players to shoot their way past ghouls and other mobs. Instead, players need to rely on their wit and quick thinking to solve puzzles and get from one area to the next. In fact, some Silent Hill games have become quite infamous for their inclusion of ridiculously-difficult puzzles.
10 Makeshift Handle (Silent Hill 2)
When James Sutherland stumbles upon Toluca Prison in Silent Hill 2, he needs to find his way back to the surface. To do so, he’s informed of having to find three items to form a handle - a lighter, a wax doll, and a horseshoe. While the wax doll and lighter are easy to find, it’s the horseshoe that’s the more complex item as James needs to find three tablets first to access its immediate area.
However, there’s no immediate way of knowing just how these three items can exactly form a handle. It’s only when players burn a certain item and stick it into something that the handle forms and “solves” the puzzle. This is quite an interesting challenge, as it strays away from the usual logic-based puzzles in the series.
9 Colored Plates (Silent Hill)
During Harry Mason’s exploration of the Otherworld Alchemilla Hospital in Silent Hill, he finds a door with eight indents, meant for colored plates. He sees four plates already inserted on the door, which means he now has to search the rest of the hospital for the other four pieces. In order to unlock the door, he has to insert the rest of the colored plates in the slots in the right order.
Thankfully, a poem does exist that provides a clue as to the order of the plates. When analyzed, the lines of the poem each represent a color, which should be easy enough to understand. However, hypervigilant gamers might look at the poem so much that they might be searching for another clue as to the order to the plates when it’s literally already in the poem.
8 Burned Doll Puzzle (Silent Hill 4)
Before Henry Townsend can venture inside Water Sullivan’s Otherworlds in Silent Hill 4, he and his neighbor Eileen Galvin need to solve a riddle regarding a burnt torso mannequin sitting on a wheelchair. This is found among the remains of the burnt Wish House Orphanage, alongside a memo that instructs Henry, as “Receiver of Wisdom,” to reclaim its body parts.
In order to find each body part, Henry has to travel to the five wells scattered around Forest World. Unfortunately, the wells are dark, meaning the limbs are recognizable. And while Henry can carry a torch, players don’t immediately know that the laundry room oil can make it last longer. What makes this puzzle frustrating isn’t the clue itself, but rather the sheer difficulty of finding the mannequin’s body parts in the dark.
7 Louise Box Puzzle (Silent Hill 2)
When James Sutherland ends up in Room S14 of Brookhaven Hospital in Silent Hill 2, he’ll see a lockbox tied down to a bed. Not only that, the box seems heavily secured, possessing four different locks that James has to solve in order to fully open the box. It seemed to belong to a person endearing someone called Louise.
To open each lock, James needs two physical keys and two codes. The Keys themselves are found in different sections of the hospitals. One of the codes can be found on a typewriter, while the other one is accessible only from the roof of the hospital. It doesn’t help that there are rumors of the final code being hard to discern on higher difficulties. What’s perhaps frustrating about the puzzle isn’t its difficulty, but in the sheer effort to open all those locks for a strand of hair. Yes, hair.
6 Coin Puzzle (Silent Hill 2, Extra Riddle Version)
While James Sutherland is exploring Blue Creek Apartments in Silent Hill 2, he sees a locked Room 209 with a note where the house key is hidden. This leads James to Room 105, where a drawer has a lock that can only be opened by inserting three coins to three of its five indents. As with any puzzle, the clue to which coin goes where lies in a riddle. However, things may need a bit of tactical prowess to solve.
Across all difficulties, the Coin Puzzle is relatively easy to solve. After all, the Medium and Hard Difficulties only add more stanzas to the clue that allude to more movement between the coins. However, it’s in the Extra Difficulty that things go haywire, as the puzzle will now have the coins have new symbols on their other faces. This element, alongside an extended riddle, affects the overall placement of the coins, with the new faces being the subject of new stanzas.
5 Brookhaven Locked Door (Silent Hill 3, Hard)
In a world where passcodes are listed as poems instead of actual digits, Heather Mason needs to solve yet another one of these riddles in Brookhaven Hospital in Silent Hill 3. The keypad numbered 1 through 9, unlocks the door to the patient wing of the second floor. Thankfully, the Easy and Normal Difficulties have a chalkboard memo and a diary on the stretcher to give clues regarding the numerical sequence. In the Easy Difficulty, the clue pertains to the direction of each press, whereas the Normal Difficulty provides a logic puzzle.
It’s the Hard Difficulty that makes things awfully difficult, as the clue is a rather horrific poem that describes graphic violence. It doesn’t help that there’s no mention of numbers, either. The only way to solve this version of the puzzle is to imagine a face laid on the keypad as a grid, with facial body parts representing a certain number.
4 Flame Purifies All (Silent Hill 3)
Heather Mason’s attempts to make sense of the world around her in Silent Hill 3 brings her to the Otherworld’s Gallery of Fine Arts within the Hilltop Center. To proceed with the game, Heather somehow has to burn a specific painting, called “Flame Purifies All” that resembles a girl on a pyre surrounded by onlookers. However, with only a bucket in hand, it seems Heather is fresh out of luck to find ways to burn it.
On Easy and Medium Difficulties, Heather can consult a nearby junior high school chemistry book to solve the puzzle. However, the said book is absent in Hard Difficulty. Regardless of the setting, this particular puzzle became a sheer annoyance to gamers, especially to those who simply overlooked the Combine feature in the tutorial. Without foresight that they need to use this mechanic, players may spend hours looking for a nonexistent lighter or a matchbox that isn’t functioning as intended.
3 Zodiac Puzzle (Silent Hill)
When Harry Mason first enters the main hallway of Nowhere, it ends with a set of locked double doors. To access this area, and the final level, of Silent Hill, he first needs to locate the Key of Hagith. The Key itself is inside a locked grandfather clock, which he has to break with the Stone of Time. And to access the Stone of Time, he first needs to obtain it from the top of a pillar in Nowhere’s Ophiel.
The pillar’s puzzle is simplistic, as it involves the 12 major Astrological Signs. There are symbols for each Sun Sign, and a blank section to plug in a number. However, the puzzle earned the ire of readers for its misleading nature. The solutions - the numbers - have nothing to do with the order of the Sun Signs.
2 The Piano Puzzle (Silent Hill)
Before Harry Masok can access the Otherworld Midwich Elementary School in the first Silent Hill game, he needs to enter a clock tower, conveniently locked without two medallions. Upon obtaining the Gold Medallion, Harry Masok will see a piano open a bloodied keyboard. It’s already implied that Harry must play the piano in a certain way to access the Silver Medallion, but the only clue he has is a poem on the classroom blackboard titled “A Tale of Birds Without a Voice.”
Without prior observation of the piano, players might get stuck just trying to press random notes and assessing if the piano is referring to some song. However, what’s even more frustrating for players is the fact that, unlike other music puzzles, the key to the piano puzzle doesn’t lie on sound.
1 Shakespeare Anthology Puzzle (Silent Hill 3, Hard)
Of all the most infamous Silent Hill puzzles, perhaps Silent Hill 3 had the most notoriously difficult one - found at the beginning of the game. Protagonist Heather first encounters this puzzle when she enters the “My Bestsellers” bookstore inside the Central Square Shopping Center. In order to enter the door behind the counter, Heather must place a four-digit code on the keypad, with clues pointing towards the Shakespeare books scattered on the floor.
Solving the puzzle on Easy and Medium are easy peasy, as the clues on the keypad’s memo were straightforward. It’s on Hard that things get tacky, as the memo now gives a poem with eight stanzas. When observed, each stanza is lifted from one of five Anthology books on the floor, all Shakespearean tragedies. What makes this puzzle notorious for fans was that players would either need stock knowledge on Shakespeare to remember which books are referenced by the puzzle - a far cry from the game’s usual logic-based puzzle formula.