Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes
"6 Ways to Make Your Life Better"
"Why do I feel like this? I've never felt like this before."
The most recent entry into the "Just because your favorite YouTuber hates it, doesn't mean you have to" canon is - unsurprisingly - an honest, raw, mostly unflinching portrayal of modern sensibilities surrounding depression. This isn't easy at all for me to talk about, but I lost my mother very suddenly to the deadliest cancer in the world five months ago - and as of writing my elderly father has been fighting for his life in the hospital for over a month. My life has seldom ever been objectively in a lower point than it is right now - but even before all that I've had my struggles with depression, and this spoke to me on a level that I can't say many other pieces of media have in years. This isn't always as subtle as the glory days of SH (sure as shit beats Downpour there though), and the repeated suicide hotline screen is rather goofy; but as a series die-hard for over a decade I can safely say that this is an exciting return to form. The way Marvel fans cheer at cameos was me when Masahiro Ito and Akira Yamaoka's names showed up in the credits.
I've seen criticisms about how disjointed and blunt this feels - but honestly there's no real tidy, clean-cut way to talk about this stuff. It should be complicated, it should be messy, it should be difficult to take at times because this isn't an easy subject to reckon with at all - and denying that fact is more dangerous than any alleged misdeeds in this imo. I'm impressed by the sheer amount of bulletpoints this ticks (even if some are handled better than others) but one aspect in particular I found to be strong here is how it depicts the looming sense of inevitably which pervades depression - I feel good now but when will it come back? Oh fuck is it going to come back?? It innovates just enough to neither alienate the recognizable series framework nor just lazily rehash old formulas.
Ito's new monster is aces, Yamaoka's music rules, art design is off-the-chain, characters are memorable, graphics are great, and like any good Silent Hill its themes are complex and haunting. I have my gripes but after years of misfires and a presumed demise of this once-proud series, I couldn't be happier with how this tight and chilling fucker turned out. I've waited so long to be able to say the phrase "The new Silent Hill is good" again. If this didn't work for you, that's okay and no one can take that away from you - this is hardly an area that has universal solutions, mental health is a spectrum after all - but for me it was clear-eyed and excellent. Prefer a lot of this to Resident Evil 7.
"6 Ways to Make Your Life Better"
"Why do I feel like this? I've never felt like this before."
The most recent entry into the "Just because your favorite YouTuber hates it, doesn't mean you have to" canon is - unsurprisingly - an honest, raw, mostly unflinching portrayal of modern sensibilities surrounding depression. This isn't easy at all for me to talk about, but I lost my mother very suddenly to the deadliest cancer in the world five months ago - and as of writing my elderly father has been fighting for his life in the hospital for over a month. My life has seldom ever been objectively in a lower point than it is right now - but even before all that I've had my struggles with depression, and this spoke to me on a level that I can't say many other pieces of media have in years. This isn't always as subtle as the glory days of SH (sure as shit beats Downpour there though), and the repeated suicide hotline screen is rather goofy; but as a series die-hard for over a decade I can safely say that this is an exciting return to form. The way Marvel fans cheer at cameos was me when Masahiro Ito and Akira Yamaoka's names showed up in the credits.
I've seen criticisms about how disjointed and blunt this feels - but honestly there's no real tidy, clean-cut way to talk about this stuff. It should be complicated, it should be messy, it should be difficult to take at times because this isn't an easy subject to reckon with at all - and denying that fact is more dangerous than any alleged misdeeds in this imo. I'm impressed by the sheer amount of bulletpoints this ticks (even if some are handled better than others) but one aspect in particular I found to be strong here is how it depicts the looming sense of inevitably which pervades depression - I feel good now but when will it come back? Oh fuck is it going to come back?? It innovates just enough to neither alienate the recognizable series framework nor just lazily rehash old formulas.
Ito's new monster is aces, Yamaoka's music rules, art design is off-the-chain, characters are memorable, graphics are great, and like any good Silent Hill its themes are complex and haunting. I have my gripes but after years of misfires and a presumed demise of this once-proud series, I couldn't be happier with how this tight and chilling fucker turned out. I've waited so long to be able to say the phrase "The new Silent Hill is good" again. If this didn't work for you, that's okay and no one can take that away from you - this is hardly an area that has universal solutions, mental health is a spectrum after all - but for me it was clear-eyed and excellent. Prefer a lot of this to Resident Evil 7.