there are many, many things that make the idea of A Franchise Of Sequels To Silent Hill kind of a bad and awkward one, so its miraculous that we were literally already provided an answer as to how to do so via the team silent entries, as they over and over proved themselves to be a bunch of lightning-in-a-bottle geniuses. yet when they disbanded this impressive streak just ends up being Another reason why making silent hill sequels is such a shaky proposition...all four games are so deceptively similar that there are many easy patterns to latch onto, yet so fundamentally and eccentrically different that there is no actual big central trick to fall back on when all else fails. they have no vivid central mechanical identity beyond a simplified version of their survival horror contemporaries, they are far less about systems in and of themselves and more about how the systems ask for Deliberate Player Involvement, which helps pull them on the wavelength to emotionally mingle with everything else. subtlety is important, the small details are important, the high-level symmetry is important, these things are Not easy to replicate, especially since no team silent game approached them in exactly the same way either! combined with mandates from konami, making a silent hill sequel rly does just seem like an entirely un-enviable position to me, and one that im not interested in being performatively callous towards. i wouldnt know how to do it either!

all this considered, the lack of Big Swings in origins is understandable, but also deeply disappointing. it rly is the first silent hill that i didnt hear say anything new, nothing to be felt or thought about...and i cant tell how much is deliberately playing it safe, how much is a vision compromised by higher-ups and rewrites forcibly done in a week, and how much is genuine conviction in emotional strokes that could easily work in a silent hill game (probably because they Already Have) but have their mystique ruined.

the raw materials strike me as familiar but fine...cynically the game just seems to be about reconciling the conflicting visions of the towns mechanics as seen in sh1 and sh2, bringing together the personalized monsters/otherworld into the same fold as alyssa and the order. its slightly annoyingly lorebrained in that way but it could be worse (even though i dont think the two need to be reconciled anyway...many fans of 2 tend to discount the cult stuff in the other entries, as if the searing text on religion in these games is somehow separate from the psychological/emotional experience, insane to me!!). i think travis is a pleasant presence and in the warmer corner of the silent hill everyman, Gruff but not Macho, and i like him enough for his familiar beats to go off with at least Slight emotional involvement. but it would definitely be a lot more with less ham-fisted lines just explaining every intended emotional consequence, and with more of an actual resolution for the guy...as it stands, it reads like if james' story ended at the Resolute Acceptance of the pyramid head fight, which no further time dedicated to his darkness, as if Acknowledging That Something Bad Happened is all u need. i do think that accepting the painful parts of the past and learning to live on IS an incredibly important sentiment for silent hill...but when the game shows u its homework, attempts to do all the legwork for you, it makes everything appear Arch in a very distant way that is not typical for the team silent entries...they were much better at letting the (honestly mostly relatively Simple) stories breathe emotionally in a way that allowed for complex personal reactions rather then ones that are just dictated to you.

i dont wanna go off too much more, the game isnt bad enough to deserve being thrashed for, essentially, not being able to recapture works of genius while already in a very unideal development process. the puzzles are genuinely quality, the monsters are mostly fleshly blobs but i like fleshly blobs, and while the game frontloads a full TWO hospital levels (the sanitarium is NOT different enough for this to not feel like silent hill self-parody), the theatre and the motel feel genuinely fresh for the series, and while i wish it was there to bring out the color in something im more emotionally attached to, yamaoka's soundtrack is perfectly fine and id say even gets better as the game progresses and it starts to serve a more emotionally meditative function,,,the game is less affecting in its immediate telling of the beats then it is the quiet and melodic walking around in the aftermath, being allowed to soak in the hanging feelings. but i can only do so many compliments towards silent hill stripped of all eccentricity...a thudding rhythm with little faith in anything, best experienced via fan wiki summary where its overbearing transparency and literalism would be far less disappointing

the original silent hill was an eccentric swing in the context of its contemporaries in survival horror, and while its still an enduringly vivid and creative piece of art it also spawned iterations and imitators that have at least Somewhat diluted its raw lightning in a bottle quality. i knew that sh4 was considered to be The Weird One of the team silent run but io was EXTRA delighted to find that its So Weird that it may have recaptured this semi-lost quality of the original within the context of its own series...everything is uncannily Just Familiar Enough, with enough big swings to knock familiar rhythms off-balance. even within its OWN rhythms! that second half is so audacious lmao.

worth it for the high display of white-hot creativity alone, stuffed to the gills with loving details even by the standards of team silent...stimulating to think about, and often impressively abrasive to experience considering that this has by far the least demanding combat and puzzles in the series (at least for me). less of a display of raw skill and more of increasingly taxing mental tenacity, which gives the whole thing a texture that i think is p unique to this entry!

everything else is just the super awesome the cell/rob zombie halloween killer psychodrama, the outsider perspective of SH1 but on a much more complicated victim. during the actual play experience my reaction was mostly "wow cool!" but sitting with it afterwards it Does slowly get its teeth in u...the childish wording in young walter's messages scattered thruout the second half is really crushing, and stirs some very unpleasant Pastor's Kid feelings in me. despite being in many ways so separate from the original three games (and not even conceived as in the same series supposedly), the added text on religion makes the first four games as a unit feel retroactively way more complete. beyond generically Insane cult members, the main acknowledgement here is that the faith does actually provide for walters needs, in ways that are not by the world at large. it is a refuge as much as a place of pain, but its pain that happens in consistent terms, and is easier to embrace then the chaos of the corrupt outside world. cheryl was emotionally formed enough to accept the past and her pain without giving into the desire to see the entire world destroyed for hurting her, but for walter its easy to see the world's destruction as the only sustainable peace. theres something in that...the mechanical stress of the otherworlds broken up by the relief of going back to your room, hiding from the world.

the more i think ab it the more this is a rly dense and symmetrical text and i wont be able to write on it definitively today, but ill close by saying this is all a really fun wrinkle in my ongoing theory that silent hill is about Parenting...about being affected by things that happened in ur formative years, and also about Bringing Your Own Things Into This World, and the two crossing over. anything thats responsible for the way you are, or that you see as the safe beforetimes that u must return to, could be your Mother...why not an apartment! what an outrageously cool video game!!

ludic poetry tbh...every room a precisely chosen word in a line, every dungeon a verse, full of rhymes and rhythm and melodious surprises. the line between downtime and climax feels far less pronounced then in the first two installments, instead channeling a near-endless flow state thats not so much barrelling as it is Sickly and Congesting. very unpleasant and deeply compulsive to play, and absolutely the most i have ever felt Involved with one of these games moment to moment (and easily the scariest time, if that wasnt clear!). i struggle with whether to give this the edge over 2, but theyre clearly in the same ballpark...for all ive said 2 is i think still on the whole the more Unpleasent experience simply because perhaps no other games story has so effortlessly channeled Here's A Bunch Of Things That Would Suck If They Happened To You, with both a gentle human hand and fist of divine pseudo-justice. if anything, 3 makes me feel more at home, its terror lovingly vindicating. the campaign is half Having A Bad Time Walking Home and half You Can Never Go Home Again...every moment of destabilization feels like a cathartic acknowledgement of the sinister underbelly to things that people by and large Pretend Are Okay, with notes specific to my life in ways that r obvious if u know me. cheryl is on edge and looking over her shoulder and has been for years before being plunged into the events of a silent hill game...running on messy strength pulled from the experience of living in a world hostile to her Body and Self (at least insofar as she is in control of both). just rly wonderful stuff...almost good enough to take my mind off recent silent hill news!!!

neglected to log until i got the 100%/true ending to see if it would change my (already positive) perspective in any major way, and the answer is, kinda??? coming to this in a world where the superficially similar Tunic already exists and is one of my favorite things ever, the easiest description i had for this was that it was like if tunic was more focus on being a pure action game, designed around deliberate one-way progressions thru specific combat encounters. im a lil mixed on how this affects the postgame...in a way, these spaces dont feel made to be run thru back and forth over and over in search of secrets. but if its not as mindblowing as tunic, theres still tons of DELIGHTFUL revelations and large scale puzzles...many of the games most memorable moments are in the postgame. but even just judging the main campaign, its a lovingly symmetrical and well-manicured set of challenges with an essentially perfect combat system...took a bit to get used to the lack of targeting, but honestly it gives u way more precise control over ur positioning. character designs and charms are also uniformly incredible, and the ghibli-esque comforting melancholy is a wonderful emotional vibe. zelda dna is an easy way to put any game in my comfort zone, and this was an especially wonderful version to come back from work and relax into. i just like little guys with swords in big worlds

perhaps the pirates of the caribbean game ive been needing, in terms of buoyant swashbuckling anti-authoritarian escapism ofc but also just the Physicality of ecstatic and yet inherently comedic action spectacle. so many combinations of actions and fast reversals of fortune that are just Inherently Amusing!!! and the written jokes aint bad either, on the whole they give the game a much more lighthearted and breezy tone then the movies im comparing it to and it works perfectly well for this,,,i can easily picture a worse version, but its all exuberant action movie giggles completely sold on the gravity of how Awesome ur character and her accomplishments are. just pure joy!!! and one of the best swordplay games ive yet come across, as fantastic as the main crowd control stuff is i was always happiest to just sink my teeth into a good one-on-one duel...lots of promises fulfilled here

it started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this...

its so weird and hard to try and explain whats good about echo because its surface level is equally ridden with humble shortcomings and overwhelming power...the prose is not anything special, the presentation is often in the novice land of weird sprites and endless kevin macleod music (though the cgs tend to be wonderful at least) theres a couple route-specific flaws, and maybe a couple ideas or plot beats have been Done Before if u care about that stuff. but its just so clearly one of the greatest things ive ever experienced in any medium, and could only exist in this specific form as a visibly amateurish gay furry itch.io cult classic...a sprawling, ambitious, colorful, comforting, gutting, endlessly fascinating generator of Thoughts and Feelings stepped in the kind of emotional truth you can only get from a niche product whos very conception will grant it the safety of probably not penetrating beyond its niche. but maybe thats a shame...echo is difficult to recommend, but i Do want more people to know about it, if for no other reason then its going to inspire at least one of them to take its lessons and go back something possibly even better...tho nothing could ever replace this

i am under no illusions that i will write a definitive review of echo, especially in the spoiler-free fashion i keep my stuff in, but after having spent literal years now reading this (i read my first route in late 2021, and took massive gap breaks between all the times i slowly returned to chip away at it), starting in one of the most tumultuous times of my life and ending it what has been one of the most peaceful times of my life, there are some things is especially have to commend...i owe it that much for its companionship

for me, echo's greatest strength, and its greatest thematic idea, is its commitment to the long-term effect...a relative de-emphasis on the individual moment-to-moment reading experience as anything amazing in isolation, and ability to weave these seemingly non-amazing scenes into something unspeakably identifiable and powerful. identity , for the game, for its routes, for its characters, is rich and multifaceted because it exists less in any big gestures and more in an increasingly dense personal history spent interacting with them. part of why the game took so damn long for me to playthru is that it has a kind of naturally rising emotional difficulty...the more routes u do, the more emotional baggage u have with the characters, the more u have to reckon with when they are onscreen , consciously and subconsciously. its not the the innocuous becomes massive in hindsight, it mostly stays innocuous...but it takes on a different color and flavor, becomes more specific and distinct

none of this is unique to echo, hopefully it could be applied to most good longform storytelling. but i do think echo has a uniquely powerful and steady hand in this department that resonates in myriad ways...its characters overwhelmingly traumatized queers with varying backgrounds of abuse, attempting to not be defined by the dry and brittle embrace of the town they spent their whole lives in...a struggle that often fails because the past cannot be truly left behind, and when actively denied manifests in secret subtle horrible ways that are now beyond your understanding because you have refused to reckon with it. the characters are their experiences, every moment of their lives enabled by every previous moment of their lives...there is no way to un-form themselves, who were formed in great pain and a deeply unjust world.

it is in this way that this being not just a gay game but a Gay Furry game is so fucking important. being queer is inherently traumatic in the cishetero patriarchal world, inherently abusive...even if not overtly, then internally, raised in an abnormality in a world that doesnt even teach u to recognize urself as one, leading to potentially years and years of ur identity and attractions being isolated from urself as u subconsciously recognize they are not yours. furries are overwhelmingly queer, and why not? u spend so long separated from urself, that u have to look in unexpected places to find it in a comforting and authentic way...why not cute animal people?

echo's niche is not tangential to its power (tho it is refreshingly un-exhausting about the logistics of its animal people world, leading by almost entirely intuition with a couple moments of playfully leaning on the unmovable concession that is the central aesthetic identity), it is Exactly Why i dont care if another vn ten years ago did similar things with anime girls or whatever. this is a frank and harrowing and emotionally complex discussion of internal and external queer trauma for an audience that will inherently understand it, without having to do any pandering or explanations to those who dont. this is why the game constantly blurs the line between romanticism/eroticism and horror, rather then being a DDLC style bait and switch where one becomes the other. this is why every single one of the deeply lovable incredible main characters could be convincingly argued to be a terrible person, and why theres no contradiction in that when the game asks u to love and accept them anyway. this is why every route has revelations that re-contextualize the entire game, with a full workable picture denied until the very end (and even then, in a world so vast, whos to say what we're still missing?). this is why the shit with sydney's dad is the way it is.

because if queerness is beautiful, yet also inherently traumatic, then that trauma can be, from some specific angle and trick of the light, beautiful as well...or at least, it can still produce a beautiful being, of which i have known countless...we are our experiences, especially our ugliest and most unjust ones. we cannot undo it, and yet we are worth something anyway. this is the revelation, and reorientation of how i see myself, that has allowed me to like myself for the first time in my life

i hadnt had this realization when i started echo, finishing it now id say its been the dominant pattern in my thought for the past year or so. echo is a space where i have returned like an intellectual checkpoint. am i being as kind and understanding to my younger self and their mistakes as i am to sydney? am i keeping a good holistic view of all of this enlightened traumaqueery to make sure im not making any excuses for genuine abuse, from or against or outside myself? has my acceptance turned to passivity? has my fear of passivity overturned my acceptance? have i been remembering that my worth and energy comes not from easily listenable or observable traits but something far more ephemeral built up by individual points of view choosing to spend time with me? echo has been equal parts challenging and comforting, realist and idealist, indulgent and thoughtful, spiraling and perceptive. at least in this stage of my life, its difficult to imagine being "done" with it , or having learned all i can from it. but even if i move on eventually, it, like everything, will remain within me. i could not be happier to have it here

kinda difficult to parse...oftentimes literally (busy artstyle and cacophonous sound design made things unpleasant more often then id appreciate) but also just a strange compromised vision that was perhaps lucky enough to land on some extremely striking decisions in the concept stage. even more lucky is how much i value Being In A Place in video games, perhaps more then anything else in the medium...if nothing else, rapture is an enduring Video Game Place, its garish advertisements are fun to navigate by, and just about every level is a well defined and satisfying Enough contained exploration box. the game plays all its cards on making sure u know How It Feels To Exist In Rapture, and the imprint is strong...definitely something i will be able to recall well into the future. randian aesthetics always make for great visual maximalism as huge egos splatter their wills all over the canvas of the world. the whale-like gurgles of the big daddies and their animal-like patterns of behavior are mesmerizing to be in the presence of. the environmental storytelling cracked open the brains of a bunch of teenagers in 2007 who didnt even know u could Do stuff like this in games. and water is so pretty!

everything else i am mixed or conflicted on. the actual play experience is fairly exhausting, yet weirdly frictionless...extreme player fragility even up to the end of the game intersects with effectively consequenceless death, and the resulting chemistry robs the game of some of its potential color. there are many tools by which to strategize, many resources to manage, but the economy is deceptively forgiving (often swinging wildly between loaded and starved and back again in the matter of a half hour) and effort towards strategy effectively only buys you some saved time from running back from a vita chamber and throwing yourself at the same enemy over and over in a battle of attrition. i can like this sort of messy systems design, and its not like theres no logic to it, but i kept wishing for either a more refined high octane action game or a slower more strategic survival horror thing...system shock 2 may still have the best rhythm for this particular vision. the gloppy soup here of not quite action, not quite survival horror, not quite immersive sim is a real bummer for me considering i usually go for this kinda weird spicy Not Totally Functional Stuff...often i think it just lacks texture

the narrative stuff is a lot more focused, but it also leaves me a little cold. i think if the game manages at least one salient critique of its randian society its that andrew ryan replicates all the bureaucracy and state sanctioned violence of the world he claims to reject , under the guise of privatization. it jabs right at the heart of what is so unworkable about hypercapitalism that posits itself as "anti status quo"...it is still creating and enabling and Requiring all of the same behaviors that lead to statism or "corporatism" or whatever the boogeyman is. this is also potentially resonant with the big cheeky flashy metacommentary on lack of player agency in games...the unquestioned illusion of freedom , but entirely within man-made confines. whether this parallel is exactly Meaningful i dont rly know, but its at least a resonance

this does all, of course, run up against the games actual desire to get lost in the illusion, to have freedom and player choice as earnest back-of-the-box features. its debatable whether it succeeds, but it is an intended directive...i suppose that also brings up the fact that u are playing thru a cartoonishly anarchic rapture, where the actual hypercapitalist moment of everything being authoritatively controlled by those who can afford to control it has relatively passed and now everyone is Running Loose and Killing Eachother and Taking The Crazy Drugs That Make U Crazy Wooooo Spooky!!! as someone Fond Of Anarchism i have my own objections to this, but i guess it drives home how in its basest elements, bioshock cant quite achieve full aesthetic unity, at least in my eyes. youre supposed to be helplessly strung along by higher powers without ur knowledge, but also play in a freeform way that is unique to you. ur supposed to be horrified at the sins of rapture, but also bask in the looting and shooting and consequence-free chaos its ruins allow. ur supposed to rescue all the little sisters to demonstrate ur selflessness, but it ends up better for you personally in the long run. ur supposed to think about faults in our current society, but also critique rapture exclusively in relation to our current society, as ryan's foolish hubris leads him to believe he could escape the world

i love a good contradiction, the resulting sparks of the clash can be rly vivid to me. but theres not rly a mystery here or any questions to ponder deeply. the gameplay is incoherent because its at the behest of what a AAA game in 2007 was expected to do to sell, and the politics are incoherent because for ken levine imagining a world unlike our own is a strictly fictional exercise, one to warn us about extremism in any direction (a thread in all of his shock games). rapture matters as nothing more then it matters as a Cool Place To Shoot Things In. the illusion of freedom, of choice, of critique, is more comforting and sellable to a mainstream audience then any truth of those things. i suppose all that matters is that the self-deception is a conscious choice by the individual. andrew ryan would approve.

got me thinking, among other things, about the various priorities the 3d platformer can take on...been playing this a bit in tandem with what is shaping up to be my first full playthru of mario 64 (and with sephonie as the most recent 3d platformer ive returned to) and i feel like they all illustrate some kind of imaginary rubric that u can place most of not all 3d platformers on. mario 64 here represents games that prioritize the Player Character above all else, famously slaved over for total perfection before a single real level was ever made...i'd say games like Demon Turf and Pseudoregalia pick up this torch the most. sephonie is for me the undisputed peak of the focus being the world itself, in a physical geometrical way...every move in ur toolkit is about interacting with specifically the space, u cant accomplish nearly as much in an empty room as u can with games in that first category. cavern of dreams then is a herald for games that mainly prioritize the world, but as Context rather then Shapes. its super super refreshing tbh...the spaces are about as far from abstraction as u can get despite how surreal and impossible they are. thinking about places and objects as Themselves are essential for solving the puzzles, which are the main focus here and an absolute delight...so many moments of realization were paired with a joyful smile. also super adorable and crittery, and vaguely disquieting but not in a way where it feels like its secretly threatening...all the colors are right there to be appreciated, its just strange to walk thru such expressionist worlds. an incredibly worthy successor to rareware platformers, which in retro terms were the kings of this kind of context-heavy approach (and in a slightly different way, story-driven adventure games like psychonauts). many of these indie 3d platformers take from the rareware lineage, corn kidz 64 also gave me a lot of banjo vibes, but all the games turn out so different! wonderful stuff, and extremely comforting game...v little high stakes platforming, just vibes and exploration and cool puzzles. also even tho this was a fairly easy 100%, its one of my favorites ive probably ever done...half of it gives u one of the coolest rewards EVER, the other half contains one of the coolest puzzles in the game...which ended up being the final card i needed, so it rly went out on a high note. and ofc, the whole game Expertly makes u feel like a Little Guy

an absolute Plague upon my brain since i first started playing, and ive written so much thru various livemessages that trying to gather All my thoughts together into a semi-coherent piece of writing is intimidating. the most succinct summary i came up with before now is "i definitely would have loved this when i was 14, and im somehow genuinely kinda 50/50 on whether the fact that i didnt get the chance to Experience it back then is a blessing or not", so ig ill just start trying to unpack that and the various larger emotions it reduces to shorthand

so on one paw, considering that my first few hours in this game were filled with such absolute bewilderment as to how literally anyone even the wasteland of Gamers In 2010 took this seriously or praised it, i ended up Seeing The Vision several times by the end, and on the whole, even tho my bewilderment was justified, i do Get how the various tricks it pulls off earned it such a sizable initial reputation. even tho it's also Far too long, that does mean it gets into a rly good Spread of various pulpy paperback appeals that are not lost on me even as i care infinitely more about some then others...because for the most part, i do think it comes across that cage really likes All Of Them even as he leaves some undercooked. the world famous Norman Jaden and his Stupid Fucking Glasses are probably the biggest example...his plot utility is very little, interest in him as a human is Zilch past drug problems and being the relative "good cop", but his Stupid Fucking Glasses and emphasis on investigative process come across as sincere indulgences for cage..."indulgence" absolutely not meant as a criticism here, because whenever he's not being Wildly Misogynist And/Or Racist, cage is absolutely at his most endearing when he's attempting to show you something he thinks is really cool and will really impress you. he might not pull it off, but as much as i hate the Stupid Fucking Glasses im glad at least Someone was excited about them and how Neat they are. its easier for me to process in the show-off moments that are more directly in my wheelhouse...the killer's silly jigsaw games, especially the first three, were massive highlights for me, with the third in particular giving this brief glimpse into The Saw Game I Always Wanted. overenthusiastic film student flourishes like the various split-screen sections or that shot of jason's balloon flying off into the sky grew more and more likable the more i sat with them. it often has an amateurish energy that can be Unsettling given the clearly huge amount of money gone into this! but even tho the most fun you can have with heavy rain is probably just imagining a better version of its occasionally provocative concepts, theres a mind-consuming charm that kept it compelling thru the driest and most uneventful chapters. it ticks many many boxes of my personal proclivities...melodrama, high concept thriller shit, death games, big pulpy plot twists, formal experimentation, goddamn Water Symbolism...theres a lot im an easy sell for, and sometimes it lined up in my head just right

on the other paw! this is a 2000 page first draft, a "cinematic" experience with next to no faith in its imagery beyond blunt metaphor and uncanny hollywood pastiche (so many scenes and beats are constructed entirely out of two or three or four Big Movie Shorthands for Sadness), messily married to a genuinely garish use of the video game medium that intersperses every weighty dramatic moment with comical klutziness. cage seems to care about video games entirely in that they allow him to explore his fixation on Narrative Choice , which mostly ends up allowing him to deny the responsibility of having to make his Big Ideas and potential thematic threads Go Anywhere...if ethan is meant to have a coherent arc about realizing that nothing was his fault, it has to take for granted that he's Still Alive and Waggles The Stick Fast Enough to get his catharsis,,,and as the most dramatically coherent character in the game, u can imagine how the others make out. every madision chapter somehow managed to shock me with new flavors of Badly Written Woman, scott gets a really fun flashy twist that nevertheless feels deeply unreconciled on a human level, and norman is a prop to hang his Stupid Fucking Glasses and Prestige Cop Show Antics on. its so hard to meaningfully build to anything, or give impactful takeaways...i cant rly emphasize enough how much looking into the other endings lowered my opinion of the game, even considering the super mega happy ending i got wasnt entirely coherent or satisfying. instead the only coherency to be found is in the overall creative lens of the game, which is deeply emotionally unimaginative, self-obsessed, and insecure...cage's sad dad neurosis ceasing to be even theoretically sympathetic the moment he wields it against his Bitch Wife and his Inexplicably Devoted Trophy Gf. even putting aside the Larger Oopsies that happened at quantic dream, there is just such a scummy underbelly to this thing...big Provocative Questions:tm: explored in entirely self-justifying ways, an anti-arc where u realize u did nothing wrong and were actually an awesome epic dad the whole time. for all its occasionally endearing, mindlessly compelling qualities, it feels like i have at least a moderately moral duty to be mean to this