The Silent Hill Historical Society is a small organization dedicated to preserving the small town’s rich history. Which makes their decision to set up shop on the grounds of a prison whose inmates were wiped out by disease a little questionable. Still…lakefront property doesn’t come cheap, so the lapse in judgment can be forgiven. Covering up the murder of a former colleague? Slightly less forgivable.
The Silent Hill Historical Society is an alternate reality game connected to the Silent Hill franchise, created by Konami the team at Daiyonkyokai (“The Fourth Boundary”), the Japanese collective of ARG creators previously behind Project:;COLD. And while Project:;COLD is only available in Japanese, The Silent Hill Historical Society is structured to allow gameplay in English or Japanese, by selecting the preferred language in the upper right corner of the website.
A Deceptively Simple Structure, Obscuring Surprising Depth
On the surface, interactivity with the website is limited: the site’s “Contact” page is down, and the only thing visitors can do is take the Ultimate Silent Hill Quiz: a series of 10 questions that can be answered by closely reading the website, paired with a little research into the Silent Hill games themselves. Fans capable of acing that test are encouraged to tackle the advanced level, an additional 20 questions that go even deeper into the Historical Society’s archives.
Curiously, while the staff pages feature six employees at the Silent Hill Historical Society, staff posts reference a seventh employee, erased from the site. That former employee’s story is told through a series of 36 hidden pages, scattered throughout the website. Some of those links are clickable links that can be found by closely investigating each page of the website, while others require a bit more creativity, finding the right keywords and entering them into the website’s URL, after the domain name.
Finding Felix: A Particularly Compelling Puzzle Flow
Identifying Felix Crain as the missing employee is relatively straightforward: a number of his now-former coworkers mention him by name in their staff blog posts, and there’s even a picture of him celebrating his birthday with the rest of the company, to make his absence all the more noticeable. However, someone has scrubbed his presence from the site. And the process of finding him is emblematic of Silent Hill Historical Society‘s gameplay at its finest.
To find Felix, players must first figure out how the URLs for staff pages are constructed, and then hunt down the information necessary to reassemble his page. And while it’s possible to narrow things down approximately using public-facing information and find his deleted page through a bit of guesswork, the details to narrow that down are scattered across a number of hidden pages.
At the time of writing this, I’ve managed to track down 25 of the 36 links with more than a little help from the Vehemence Discord server. And so far, the experience has been self-contained within the single website. But that doesn’t take away from the experience: discoveries have been surprisingly satisfying, whether that takes the form of turning to the current network administrator to learn how to fix a broken link, or chasing down a hidden page I will personally insist represents the internal monologue of an extremely cute cat, even if alternate theories are considerably more likely.
While the Silent Hill franchise revels in the supernatural and the town’s history reminds fans of that fantastical past, the story told through the Historical Society’s archives is one that just might be mundane – and that tension makes the unfolding mystery all the more gripping. This is very clearly an alternate reality game set in the world of Silent Hill…but it’s also one that feels much closer to our own.
An Introduction to ARGs, with a Surprising Deadline
It’s tempting to say that Silent Hill Historical Society is an evergreen alternate reality game that players can explore at their leisure. But one particularly fascinating unanswered question implies there might be more urgency to uncovering the truth of Felix’s murder than one might otherwise assume. In the bottom right corner of a vintage Silent Hill travel brochure, barely legible text warns players, “You can enjoy solving the riddles in this brochure until October 15, 2024, at 11:59PM JST.”
So while I am left wondering who is responsible for Felix’s murder (if his death was indeed a murder), I’m also left with one additional question: what in the Silent Hill is happening, on October 15th?
Start exploring the Silent Hill Historical Society now to try and puzzle things out. The r/SilentHill community on Reddit has also gotten in on the fun, if you’re looking for a nudge in the right direction.
Edited to Add (Sept. 25th): As of 12am EST all but four of the hidden pages have been discovered, including one possible ending. I’ve compiled a walkthrough to help provide nudges / spoilers, as needed, with the understanding that the developers requested that direct links to the ending(s) remain secret, although “sharing the method of discovery or screenshots is not a problem”.
book of bill
black watchmen
escape rooms
field studies institute
generation loss
simulacra
Has anyone found out the rest of the pages? During the conversation through e-mail, Ruby has asked me to send the detective’s and the specialist’s e-mail address because she wants to investigate.
If you check the walkthrough I linked at the end of the article, it provides where and how every page has been discovered – at the time of writing this, pages 32 and 33 have been found through the game’s second phase (focused around exchanging virtual emails with Ruby).
At least one (and possibly both) of the missing pages will likely correspond with the finale of that experience, but there’s a time-based element to that gameplay.
Thanks for the reply!