Parent's Guide: Silent Hill HD Collection - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

The Silent Hill HD Collection is a bundle of two remastered horror games from the Playstation 2 - Silent Hill 2 and 3. In Silent Hill 2, you take on the role of James, a mourning widower, called to the mysterious Silent Hill after he receives a letter that claims to be from his late wife. Meanwhile, in Silent Hill 3, you follow the story of Heather, a teenage girl, wanted by some sort of a cult from Silent Hill, as she's purported to be their God.

Haunting, story driven, tense games, these two games ply their trade in telling a deep, and at times controversial story, rather than cheap thrills and overblown violence and gore. Less combat based than most games now, in Silent Hill, there's more thinking than shrieking, as you wander around the bizarre environments, searching for the truth, and solving the game's many riddles and puzzles as you go, kind of like Professor Layton, were it based on Steven King.

The Silent Hill HD Collection lets you adjust two difficulty levels separately, letting you choose to play with both combat, and puzzles as hard or as easy as you may like. Great for adults, who may prefer a less combat based game, but like the puzzles and story.

However, Silent Hill really isn't a game that's that suitable for children. Things like domestic violence, child abuse and rape all show their heads in the games, and the package as a whole has an unnerving, eerie, spooky quality to it that few games match, whilst dealing with very adult subjects.

As a horror game, the Silent Hill HD Collection's full of content may find questionable or concerning. The darker parts of Silent Hill 2, and Silent Hill 3 contain satanic imagery, whilst enemies give off large blobs of blood when you attack them - it may not be very realistic, but both games can get very, very gory at times. Meanwhile, the enemies that attack you in Silent Hill 2 are mostly strange, mutated versions of humans, who look like they've been sown together - one iconic enemy seems to have four legs (two on the top half of its body, two on the bottom), but no head or arms. It's all a bit disturbing. Meanwhile, another iconic enemy is the "sexy zombie nurse", which, whilst fairly scantily clad, with a short skirt, is still a faceless zombie. Silent Hill 2 also features a scene of rape, although it's been hugely edited down and scaled back for the HD Collection (and if we're honest, it really wasn't obvious what was happening before - all it looks like is one enemy trying to climb on top of and/or kill another). Surprisingly, though, there's actually next to no proper swearing in the game, and what little swearing there is is very mild, with the rare "sh*t" and "b*tch" being the exception rather than the rule.

Although the Silent Hill HD Collection is an entirely single player game, there is, however, plenty of scope for parents to get involved. Some of the riddles in the game may stump children and young teens, especially one in Silent Hill 3, which, if you're playing on the hardest difficulty, requires a fairly in-depth knowledge of Shakespeare's plays.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360