A History Of 'Silent Hill's Bonkers Secret Alien Endings

For some unknown reason, every single game in the original Silent Hill series features a secret UFO-related ending that players who'd previously cleared the game with one of the serious endings can achieve. The reason they're probably not too well known is that most players probably don't have the stomach to come back to the game, but that's a shame because many of Silent Hill's secrets are as messed up as the games themselves.

If you go back to the first game after, making a slew of peculiar decisions will earn you the “UFO ending.” While fans describe it as a joke ending, the entire thing plays out as a creepy ‘50s horror film complete with eerie-as-hell sound effects and ends with the main character getting laser-blasted and taken to space and, therefore, as far away from his daughter as possible. That’s darker than any of the canon endings.

Players who find it in themselves to come back to the game for further suffering will now be able to search for it with a laser gun added to their arsenal. That's all just great news, provided you don't ask how the aliens gave it to you.

The UFO ending from Silent Hill 2 reels you in with a much more joke-y tone, showing the UFOs coming down from the skies like the ships from Space Invaders, and there's even the reassuring reveal that the main character from the first game is back and he's actually alright. How Seemingly nice! Too bad he's either turned evil or that's an evil clone because he just watches as an alien casually laser blasts James, the SH2 protagonist, just like they'd lasered him in the first game's weird ending.

This time around, instead of a cool alien gun, players will get an achievement called “Never To Be Heard From Again.” 

And Silent Hill 3 has the best UFO ending of the bunch. Heather, the protagonist, comes home to find that her father, the protagonist of the first game, is fine and having a cup of tea with James from the second game as well as with a goddamn grey Zeta Reticuli-looking Alien. They ask her if she's alright, she replies that the town of Silent Hill has been giving her crap.  

Then, instead of lasering her as you'd expect, they just take their ships to the town and laser it to oblivion.

Another fun thing about these bonkers alien-themed endings is how they create more connective tissue between the original games than the series' actual canon ever does. However, a not-so-fun thing is that Konami, at some point, went full-on evil corporation and decided to relegate the development of these games to a company that couldn't quite grasp the high complexity of the dumb UFO ending. 

In Silent Hill Homecoming, you don't need to be replaying the game after getting one of the regular endings to get UFO one, and one might end up stumbling onto it even without doing anything too crazy. Imagine being enthralled by a game and working hard to come to its conclusion, then getting a Monty Python and the Holy Grail-type ending where your character just gets taken away by a random force without getting any sort of closure or explanation for any of it.

I just love thinking about how many newcomers to the franchise get this joke-ass ending while thinking this is how the story was meant to end all along.

Top Image: Konami