10 Secret Origins Behind Iconic Video Game Features

Silent Hill’s main appeal as a horror game is its ability to induce most people's deepest fear: fear of the unknown. The game’s signature fog only allows players to see objects in the immediate vicinity of the main character. This creates an atmosphere that makes players tiptoe everywhere as they can’t really know what to expect when exploring.

The tension induces genuine fear that threats lurk in every corner and every passage. The added tension caused by the fog is arguably the main reason Silent Hill is a critical and commercial success.

The signature fog actually serves two functions. It works incredibly well to induce fear, but it also serves as a workaround to the PlayStation’s hardware limitations. The developer realised that the processing power of the widely-loved console could not render high-resolution textures for all the visible objects. As a workaround, only objects closest to the players are rendered with higher-resolution textures. The fog, in turn, obscures the fact that far away objects will only be properly rendered once players get close to them.