Lore

Long before Harry Mason ever sees it, Silent Hill is already marked. A secretive local cult known simply as the Order has worshipped a nameless god in the resort town for generations, believing they can bring it into the world through the right ritual and the right vessel. In 1972, a young member of the Order, Dahlia Gillespie, gives birth to a daughter, Alessa, whom the cult intends to raise as that vessel.

In 1981, the Order attempts the ritual on a seven-year-old Alessa in the basement of Alchemilla Hospital. It goes catastrophically wrong: a fire meant to be part of the ceremony burns out of control, leaving Alessa horrifically injured and clinging to life in a hospital bed for years, kept alive only by the god-fragment burning inside her. Her trauma and rage bleed into the town itself, twisting it into the rusted, monster-filled Otherworld that flickers in and out of the normal Silent Hill whenever her nightmare gets close to the surface.

To keep the ritual's vessel alive without anyone realizing what they'd done, the Order arranges for a portion of Alessa's soul to be split off and reborn as a baby girl — adopted, far from Silent Hill, by a couple named Mason.

September 1983. Harry Mason and his adopted daughter Cheryl are driving into Silent Hill on vacation when a girl appears in the middle of the road. Harry swerves, crashes, and blacks out. When he comes to, Cheryl is gone and the town is buried in a fog that never lifts. What Harry doesn't know yet: Cheryl is the missing piece of Alessa, and the Order has been waiting years for her to wander back into town so the ritual can finally be finished.

Searching Midwich Elementary, Alchemilla Hospital, and the rest of the town, Harry keeps crossing into the Otherworld and meeting people who are each entangled in the cult's plans in their own way: Cybil Bennett, a police officer who rode into town chasing a motorcycle theft report; Dr. Michael Kaufmann, Alchemilla's chief physician, quietly complicit in hiding Alessa away; Lisa Garland, a nurse who's been caring for the comatose Alessa for years without understanding why she never ages or heals; and Dahlia Gillespie herself, Alessa's mother, still devoted to the Order's cause even as it consumes what's left of her daughter.

The deeper truth surfaces gradually: Cheryl isn't just connected to Alessa, she's half of her — split into a "good" half sent away and a "bad" half left to suffer and burn with hatred in the hospital bed. Alessa doesn't want to be saved by the cult's ritual; she wants it to end, on her own terms, and Harry becomes the only outside variable capable of tipping the outcome either toward the Order finally completing their summoning, or toward Alessa reclaiming enough of herself to stop it.

In the ritual site beneath the town, the fragments of Alessa's plan and the Order's plan collide. Depending on what Harry has found and done along the way — whether he's gathered the ingredients to weaken the god-fetus growing inside Alessa before the final confrontation, whether Cybil survives, whether Kaufmann's schemes catch up with him — the ending changes: the god is stillborn and the nightmare ends, the god is born and the credits roll on something much darker, or the whole thing plays out as one of the game's stranger, more tongue-in-cheek alternate endings. Whatever happens, Silent Hill doesn't let anyone leave the way they came in.