This review contains spoilers
Silent Hill 4 is a story about many things.
It's a story about abuse, as all the first four Silent Hill games are. It's a story about trauma, as all the first four Silent Hill games are. It's a story about the human psyche, as all the first four Silent Hill games are.
It is also, though, a story about observation.
How do we perceive those around us? What emotions do we feel from their situations? Silent Hill 4 directly confronts these ideas, with the player taking the role of Henry Townshend - a man trapped within his own apartment, a mere captive audience to the world around him. He observes his neighbor and her struggles, he observes the people on the street going back and forth, and he observes his landlord coming to check in on him.
Even in the otherworld, where he is free from the confines of his apartment, he still isn't able to be much more than an observer. The people he meets throughout these dreamlike sequences are killed before his eyes by a ghostly and unstoppable figure, the enigmatic Walter Sullivan who seems beyond human conventions. Or is he enigmatic?
Henry learns, in an almost parasocial fashion, the entirety of Walter Sullivan's life story through a series of notes over the course of the game. We learn the source of his acute agoraphobia, his conditioning by The Order (the cult that runs Silent Hill), and his almost deific obsession with his mother - who he perceives to be the apartment that Henry lives in. In a way, it's similar to how one who consumes true crime might view the subjects of those stories, in an uncomfortably fictionalized fashion.
Extrapolated further, Silent Hill is a similar case. All four of these games feature you exploring the lives of people you aren't (though, thankfully, at the end of the day they are wholly fictional.) You are deriving enjoyment from experiences that you can't have. You're trapped in your own apartment, watching helplessly.
And it goes beyond just the games themselves, to even discussion about the games.
As we went through these beautiful games, you weren't just trapped in an apartment watching our protagonists. You were watching me. From the very beginning, Silent Hill brought something out in me that very few games have managed to do, and was able to get me to open my heart out to everyone here. The observer becomes the observed. Thank you all for supporting me through everything. Through the tears, through the paranoia, through the trauma. Perhaps someday someone might see my bravery in opening up here and open up themselves.
Maybe they'll finally leave the safety of Room 302.
It's a story about abuse, as all the first four Silent Hill games are. It's a story about trauma, as all the first four Silent Hill games are. It's a story about the human psyche, as all the first four Silent Hill games are.
It is also, though, a story about observation.
How do we perceive those around us? What emotions do we feel from their situations? Silent Hill 4 directly confronts these ideas, with the player taking the role of Henry Townshend - a man trapped within his own apartment, a mere captive audience to the world around him. He observes his neighbor and her struggles, he observes the people on the street going back and forth, and he observes his landlord coming to check in on him.
Even in the otherworld, where he is free from the confines of his apartment, he still isn't able to be much more than an observer. The people he meets throughout these dreamlike sequences are killed before his eyes by a ghostly and unstoppable figure, the enigmatic Walter Sullivan who seems beyond human conventions. Or is he enigmatic?
Henry learns, in an almost parasocial fashion, the entirety of Walter Sullivan's life story through a series of notes over the course of the game. We learn the source of his acute agoraphobia, his conditioning by The Order (the cult that runs Silent Hill), and his almost deific obsession with his mother - who he perceives to be the apartment that Henry lives in. In a way, it's similar to how one who consumes true crime might view the subjects of those stories, in an uncomfortably fictionalized fashion.
Extrapolated further, Silent Hill is a similar case. All four of these games feature you exploring the lives of people you aren't (though, thankfully, at the end of the day they are wholly fictional.) You are deriving enjoyment from experiences that you can't have. You're trapped in your own apartment, watching helplessly.
And it goes beyond just the games themselves, to even discussion about the games.
As we went through these beautiful games, you weren't just trapped in an apartment watching our protagonists. You were watching me. From the very beginning, Silent Hill brought something out in me that very few games have managed to do, and was able to get me to open my heart out to everyone here. The observer becomes the observed. Thank you all for supporting me through everything. Through the tears, through the paranoia, through the trauma. Perhaps someday someone might see my bravery in opening up here and open up themselves.
Maybe they'll finally leave the safety of Room 302.
Deathix
1 year ago