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.

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