Wistful
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72 Reviews liked by Wistful
Hollow Knight
2017
This has to be my favorite game of all time. Hollow Knight has a world and lore like no other, and the world just feels so real. This deep story is beautifully displayed through the creative world design and the amazing artwork. The gameplay is super fun and extremely satisfying. The bosses are all very unique and interesting. Everything about this game is absolutely perfect. The easiest 5 star I've ever given.
Outer Wilds
2019
(Score: 10/10) A trascendental experience. A meditative reflection on our own mortality, the wonders and horrors of discovery, and what it truly means to belong in this universe. One of the few games to ever actually make me full on sob, and it happened in a seemingly random moment where the reality of what I was playing finally hit me and fully set in. This is a game I wish everyone would play, even non-gamers, and it should be one of the first examples people bring up in the "are video-games art?" debate instead of TLoU (not a diss on that game even though I find it really overrated, but there's simply something about the way Outer Wilds reveals its story to you that can only be achieved through an interactive medium like video-games, whereas TLoU's story could be told through many other different mediums). This game is the first massive leap in storytelling in videogames since Dark Souls and Undertale, and the story it tells is profoundly contemplative and life-changing. An unforgettable experience that I wish everyone could live the same way as I did. The only flaw this game has is that you can only play it for the first time once, but in a way that's also its biggest strength.
Signalis
2022
You writhe beneath my skin
Born of ailing flesh and love
My thoughts, consumed by your sorrow.
Waking nightmares plague me, endless
A slow rotting miracle plucked from time,
You are all that I love, everything I fear
And all the entanglement festering between
For want of fair chances,
I stared into your abyss
As I've done for many before
And in return, you tore out my heart,
Impaled my eyes with your scarlet terror
Invaded the privacy of solitude,
And plunged your iron claws into my very soul.
You interrupt my nights.
My days, occupied by you
You are inescapable, yet...
For all your malignance,
Burrowed under flesh
and boiling blood,
I refuse
to let
go
–
Signalis bores its hooks into my skull, carving grooves into my brain where my psychoses pool. There’s something to be said for its reliance on the narrative language of anime and survival horror, but whether it’s derivative or iterative is a moot point. These beats that ring familiar are sores that Signalis splits open with a sadist’s pleasure. I could sit here and rattle off references, the obvious calls that permeate the body of the work, but where does that get you? Where does that get any of us, other than a cognizant “if you know you know” stranglehold? The language of Signalis isn’t concerned with simply being “Space Resident Evil”, or “Utena by way of Evangelion”. Much like the doomed Penrose, the referential nature of Signalis is, in itself, a repetitious time loop. It is not a work of references, it is its references.
I bolt awake, and Signalis presses on the nerve center that kick started my love of horror. 2008, in front of a bombed-out Gamecube, Jill Valentine tinkers though a puzzle box called the Spenser mansion. 2022, I bumblefuck through the escape room that is Sierpinski S-23.
Another restless night, another stab into my brain. 2012, my first pangs of personalized gender misanthropy at the hands of Asuka Langley Sohryu and Rei Ayanami, the brilliant shine of sapphic love reflected by Utena and Anthy. A decade later, the hate has faded and its place remains remorse for the past, regret for the now as the signature flashes of light and text flicker, as LSTR-512 and Ariane waltz in their final moments.
Again, interrupted sleep prevails. October, last year, the clattering of keys clicked out a cacophonous rhythm as I parse out a write up for Illbleed, a game that set ablaze the dying candle that was my love for gaming, for horror as a whole. Now, after a global rotation, I return to Signalis in the same spot, a love for writing, for fear, for gaming, for love itself, rekindled after a seasonal stagnation.
To try to put definitive words to Signalis seems contradictory to the way the game is delivered, indirect and symbolic in a way anathemic to thematic deduction. In it, I saw the spark of life relight my passion, and I enacted swift death to the tyrant, critical analysis. I could brandish lofty terms, of this having flawless gameplay, immersive writing, a memorable soundtrack, or any other terms I would gladly throw around about games that I will forget in a week. It’s not perfect. I don’t want it to be perfect: It’s for me. I don’t need it to be anything more than what it means to me, and what it means is that I think I love games again.
I awaken once more from broken sleep.
It’s 2014. I’m sitting with someone who, at the time, was my closest friend. We’re huddled around a laptop deep into the night, burning through works that would come to reflect what matters to me in games.
It’s tonight. I’m on call with someone I love. I’m huddled over a keyboard, burning through a write-up of a work that redefines what matters to me in games.
Play Signalis. You probably won’t get what I got out of it. That’s a good thing; it means there’s going to be something else out there that gives you the same feelings that this gave me. For now, I can push you to try a game I view as my personal perfection.
Born of ailing flesh and love
My thoughts, consumed by your sorrow.
Waking nightmares plague me, endless
A slow rotting miracle plucked from time,
You are all that I love, everything I fear
And all the entanglement festering between
For want of fair chances,
I stared into your abyss
As I've done for many before
And in return, you tore out my heart,
Impaled my eyes with your scarlet terror
Invaded the privacy of solitude,
And plunged your iron claws into my very soul.
You interrupt my nights.
My days, occupied by you
You are inescapable, yet...
For all your malignance,
Burrowed under flesh
and boiling blood,
I refuse
to let
go
–
Signalis bores its hooks into my skull, carving grooves into my brain where my psychoses pool. There’s something to be said for its reliance on the narrative language of anime and survival horror, but whether it’s derivative or iterative is a moot point. These beats that ring familiar are sores that Signalis splits open with a sadist’s pleasure. I could sit here and rattle off references, the obvious calls that permeate the body of the work, but where does that get you? Where does that get any of us, other than a cognizant “if you know you know” stranglehold? The language of Signalis isn’t concerned with simply being “Space Resident Evil”, or “Utena by way of Evangelion”. Much like the doomed Penrose, the referential nature of Signalis is, in itself, a repetitious time loop. It is not a work of references, it is its references.
I bolt awake, and Signalis presses on the nerve center that kick started my love of horror. 2008, in front of a bombed-out Gamecube, Jill Valentine tinkers though a puzzle box called the Spenser mansion. 2022, I bumblefuck through the escape room that is Sierpinski S-23.
Another restless night, another stab into my brain. 2012, my first pangs of personalized gender misanthropy at the hands of Asuka Langley Sohryu and Rei Ayanami, the brilliant shine of sapphic love reflected by Utena and Anthy. A decade later, the hate has faded and its place remains remorse for the past, regret for the now as the signature flashes of light and text flicker, as LSTR-512 and Ariane waltz in their final moments.
Again, interrupted sleep prevails. October, last year, the clattering of keys clicked out a cacophonous rhythm as I parse out a write up for Illbleed, a game that set ablaze the dying candle that was my love for gaming, for horror as a whole. Now, after a global rotation, I return to Signalis in the same spot, a love for writing, for fear, for gaming, for love itself, rekindled after a seasonal stagnation.
To try to put definitive words to Signalis seems contradictory to the way the game is delivered, indirect and symbolic in a way anathemic to thematic deduction. In it, I saw the spark of life relight my passion, and I enacted swift death to the tyrant, critical analysis. I could brandish lofty terms, of this having flawless gameplay, immersive writing, a memorable soundtrack, or any other terms I would gladly throw around about games that I will forget in a week. It’s not perfect. I don’t want it to be perfect: It’s for me. I don’t need it to be anything more than what it means to me, and what it means is that I think I love games again.
I awaken once more from broken sleep.
It’s 2014. I’m sitting with someone who, at the time, was my closest friend. We’re huddled around a laptop deep into the night, burning through works that would come to reflect what matters to me in games.
It’s tonight. I’m on call with someone I love. I’m huddled over a keyboard, burning through a write-up of a work that redefines what matters to me in games.
Play Signalis. You probably won’t get what I got out of it. That’s a good thing; it means there’s going to be something else out there that gives you the same feelings that this gave me. For now, I can push you to try a game I view as my personal perfection.
Pokémon Scarlet
2022
Played with BertKnot.
With each new iteration of Pokémon comes another wagon of this train headed for indignity and turpitude. Year after year, one could point out the structural roots of this situation – the inability to scale up after the extraordinary operational profits made since 2016 or the need to constantly release games for the sake of cross-media –, but none of this makes the end result any more palatable. The result is an abysmal technical polish, which we're getting used to. As soon as the game was released, thousands of comments pointed out the horrible graphics and bugs, which are still not fixed to this day. I won't go into this at length, but it's worth bearing in mind. Pokémon Scarlet seems to be heading in the same experimental direction as Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022), whose goal was to make the world more dynamic and immersive. Critics were generally very positive about it, highlighting the attempt at innovation and forgiving its shortcomings – technical or game design-wise. This reception was matched by its sales, an exceptional start with 6.5 million copies sold in a fortnight. One might have feared that this situation would lead Game Freak to continue in this direction, brandishing their commercial successes and the totem of immunity that the community has so graciously granted them. But generally speaking, for corporate philosophy reasons, Game Freak is unlikely to make radical changes to their development process, especially as their cycles become shorter and shorter.
In this opus, the player explores the region of Paldea in the company of the legendary Koraidon, as part of a treasure hunt organised by the Naranja Academy. The great innovation is the non-linear aspect of the adventure, made possible by an open world and a division of the objectives into three different storylines. It is possible to follow Nemona to triumph over the classic arenas and the League, but the title also proposes to help Arven hunt Titans and find Mystic Herbs to give back strength to his Mabosstiff; or Cassiopeia to confront Team Star, responsible for bullying in the Academy. However, every one of these plots is a narrative failure.
The open world structure is mostly reminiscent of the Ubisoft formula, which the industry has started to turn away from in recent years, under the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). This throwback is staggering and breaks the pace of the adventure by sequencing it into an exploration that never manages to charm. The game's technical problems are paired with lacklustre environments. If Pokémon Scarlet is inspired by the Iberian Peninsula, it's only on paper. The layout of the biomes makes no sense and, like Pokémon Legends, the title fails to create realism in the Pokémon biodiversity. At best, the game forms a few groups of creatures, but they never interact with each other. In Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (2022), carnivores can be seen in packs hunting other animals: the absence of such elements in Pokémon Scarlet is surprising and very underwhelming.
On the other hand, the game never manages to create relationships between the protagonist and the different characters. All of their development is done in the last region, where their lives, families and dreams are discussed. It is unfortunate that this information is never present in the first twenty hours. It is only possible to appreciate their presence in the last hour of the game. Nemona, Arven or Penny never accompany the protagonist, which would be the best way to dynamise an open world, through dialogues interjected in the exploration. Such an approach would surely have worked to introduce the backgrounds of Nemona and Penny, who are completely independent from the main plot. Some may have said that the three narrative threads converge in the last act, but this is hardly true: it is purely and simply Arven's story and the presence of the other characters is artificial, even superfluous.
This narrative failure is saddening given that the game shows in its final section that it understood what could have worked. Unfortunately, the first twenty hours are riddled with aberrant flaws and poor design choices. The Team Star bases are a miserable piece of gameplay, sort of pseudo-Pokémon Warriors, that make Musou games look like Devil May Cry. The arena challenges never manage to energise the progression: for example, the auctions are reduced to their strict minimum and give a false impression of interactivity, whereas they only blow smoke. They are not even contextualised as a mini-game, as was the case in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002). The rest is equally forgettable and futile: the descent of the mountain only highlights Koraidon's poor controllability.
Sometimes it is the technical realisation that violently bruises these various quests. Before the duel against Larry, the restaurant changes completely, obviously murdering all the customers who were enjoying their meal. Some triggers don't work at all and it was necessary to restart the game several times to activate some essential cutscenes. The lack of clear markers or the impossibility to change the day and night cycle are other shortcomings that contribute to an unpleasant experience. This lack of attention to detail is both a testament to a development team under the pressure of an overly severe deadline and a general lack of concern for such matters: Game Freak understands that the game continues to break sales records anyway. So why put any effort into the details?
The most blatant evidence of this lack of respect is surely found in the cultural representation of the Iberian Peninsula. Pokémon Sword/Shield (2019) was already weak in this respect, but the duels in the stadiums operated in the spirit of English football matches. Here, the world is empty and incoherent. While the beginning of the game charms with a nice set-up – the short walk to Nemona's house is really lovely, with beautiful vegetation – the edifice quickly crumbles as the player approaches Mesagoza. The smooth textures contrast horribly with the city's gaudy mosaics, just giving the whole thing a muddled look. The buildings all appear similar and it's no longer possible to enter the houses. Instead, the game lines up a dozen or so similar restaurants, which offer the same menu. The player can choose to eat sandwiches or Chinese food, in a restaurant with a clichéd façade. Iberian Peninsula, mind you. The other cities follow the same approach and are sorely lacking in identity. The Pokémon themselves share this misrepresentation. Quaquaval is inspired by the Rio carnival, while Garganacl looks like a ziggurat or a pre-Columbian pyramid. These confusions show a particularly regrettable disregard from Game Freak. The cleaning lady in Nemona's mansion is another unfortunate example: she is a Black character – the first one to be seen – which is a particularly cruel and tasteless irony, regardless of whether it was intentional or not.
The gameplay remains largely unchanged. The main mechanic in this game is the Terastal Transformation, which is generally irrelevant. When it prevents the opposing Pokémon from using certain attacks, the mechanic becomes more interesting, but it doesn't go beyond being a simple end-of-battle expedient, growing more tiresome than anything else with the time it wastes. The title feels much easier than its predecessors, at least in terms of progression. Since the arenas and various objectives never scale with the player's level, adversity is non-existent, except for a few rare fights. The very artificial splitting of the areas does not help this. Even if the player fails, the fact that each objective is placed within a few meters of a Pokémon Center nullifies any dramatic tension. As a result, the game remains consistently flavorless in its gameplay phases. The Academy lessons are a good reflection of this fact: they are a sort of contextualised tutorial that drags on and teaches the player mechanics that they would have already seen for themselves. Besides, their non-ergonomic aspect never encourages the player to do them.
Despite these lengthy criticisms, the game is not without merit. Nemona carries the cast single-handedly: as a solid interpretation of the rival, after the era of antipathetic characters, she has a great chemistry with the protagonist – this is an observation I make with the girl protagonist; I think that with the boy counterpart, the result would be more of a very angsty heterosexual dynamic. Game Freak also gives a lot of space to non-binary characters, without insisting on their gender: this is very satisfying and is clearly a step in the right direction. Again, the last area and the discussions between the characters about their lives should have been the whole game. It shows that Game Freak is able to come up with good concepts, but it is infuriating that they never integrate them organically into the adventure, whose formula is, inevitably, always the same.
Pokémon Scarlet appears as this deceptively lighthearted adventure. The treasure hunt ends with the classic observation that the friends made along the way are what matters. Why not, this is a perfectly workable theme for children. But the hypocrisy lies in the fact that the protagonist never travels with their friends during the dozens of hours of gameplay, unlike the manga or anime. The other themes are treated with the same carelessness, while ignoring them in the core of the game design. This muddled feeling can be found everywhere, from the gameplay to the technical execution, from the music to the cultural representation. For a company that boasts hundreds of millions of dollars in operating profits, these failings are inexcusable. As much as one appreciates the franchise – and I admit I have no particular nostalgia or affection for it –, it seems to me that it is appropriate to be uncompromising about the quality of titles the community religiously buys every year. It is clear that this is still not the case: Game Freak and the Pokémon Company have no reason to change a development strategy that, for the worse, works.
With each new iteration of Pokémon comes another wagon of this train headed for indignity and turpitude. Year after year, one could point out the structural roots of this situation – the inability to scale up after the extraordinary operational profits made since 2016 or the need to constantly release games for the sake of cross-media –, but none of this makes the end result any more palatable. The result is an abysmal technical polish, which we're getting used to. As soon as the game was released, thousands of comments pointed out the horrible graphics and bugs, which are still not fixed to this day. I won't go into this at length, but it's worth bearing in mind. Pokémon Scarlet seems to be heading in the same experimental direction as Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022), whose goal was to make the world more dynamic and immersive. Critics were generally very positive about it, highlighting the attempt at innovation and forgiving its shortcomings – technical or game design-wise. This reception was matched by its sales, an exceptional start with 6.5 million copies sold in a fortnight. One might have feared that this situation would lead Game Freak to continue in this direction, brandishing their commercial successes and the totem of immunity that the community has so graciously granted them. But generally speaking, for corporate philosophy reasons, Game Freak is unlikely to make radical changes to their development process, especially as their cycles become shorter and shorter.
In this opus, the player explores the region of Paldea in the company of the legendary Koraidon, as part of a treasure hunt organised by the Naranja Academy. The great innovation is the non-linear aspect of the adventure, made possible by an open world and a division of the objectives into three different storylines. It is possible to follow Nemona to triumph over the classic arenas and the League, but the title also proposes to help Arven hunt Titans and find Mystic Herbs to give back strength to his Mabosstiff; or Cassiopeia to confront Team Star, responsible for bullying in the Academy. However, every one of these plots is a narrative failure.
The open world structure is mostly reminiscent of the Ubisoft formula, which the industry has started to turn away from in recent years, under the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). This throwback is staggering and breaks the pace of the adventure by sequencing it into an exploration that never manages to charm. The game's technical problems are paired with lacklustre environments. If Pokémon Scarlet is inspired by the Iberian Peninsula, it's only on paper. The layout of the biomes makes no sense and, like Pokémon Legends, the title fails to create realism in the Pokémon biodiversity. At best, the game forms a few groups of creatures, but they never interact with each other. In Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (2022), carnivores can be seen in packs hunting other animals: the absence of such elements in Pokémon Scarlet is surprising and very underwhelming.
On the other hand, the game never manages to create relationships between the protagonist and the different characters. All of their development is done in the last region, where their lives, families and dreams are discussed. It is unfortunate that this information is never present in the first twenty hours. It is only possible to appreciate their presence in the last hour of the game. Nemona, Arven or Penny never accompany the protagonist, which would be the best way to dynamise an open world, through dialogues interjected in the exploration. Such an approach would surely have worked to introduce the backgrounds of Nemona and Penny, who are completely independent from the main plot. Some may have said that the three narrative threads converge in the last act, but this is hardly true: it is purely and simply Arven's story and the presence of the other characters is artificial, even superfluous.
This narrative failure is saddening given that the game shows in its final section that it understood what could have worked. Unfortunately, the first twenty hours are riddled with aberrant flaws and poor design choices. The Team Star bases are a miserable piece of gameplay, sort of pseudo-Pokémon Warriors, that make Musou games look like Devil May Cry. The arena challenges never manage to energise the progression: for example, the auctions are reduced to their strict minimum and give a false impression of interactivity, whereas they only blow smoke. They are not even contextualised as a mini-game, as was the case in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002). The rest is equally forgettable and futile: the descent of the mountain only highlights Koraidon's poor controllability.
Sometimes it is the technical realisation that violently bruises these various quests. Before the duel against Larry, the restaurant changes completely, obviously murdering all the customers who were enjoying their meal. Some triggers don't work at all and it was necessary to restart the game several times to activate some essential cutscenes. The lack of clear markers or the impossibility to change the day and night cycle are other shortcomings that contribute to an unpleasant experience. This lack of attention to detail is both a testament to a development team under the pressure of an overly severe deadline and a general lack of concern for such matters: Game Freak understands that the game continues to break sales records anyway. So why put any effort into the details?
The most blatant evidence of this lack of respect is surely found in the cultural representation of the Iberian Peninsula. Pokémon Sword/Shield (2019) was already weak in this respect, but the duels in the stadiums operated in the spirit of English football matches. Here, the world is empty and incoherent. While the beginning of the game charms with a nice set-up – the short walk to Nemona's house is really lovely, with beautiful vegetation – the edifice quickly crumbles as the player approaches Mesagoza. The smooth textures contrast horribly with the city's gaudy mosaics, just giving the whole thing a muddled look. The buildings all appear similar and it's no longer possible to enter the houses. Instead, the game lines up a dozen or so similar restaurants, which offer the same menu. The player can choose to eat sandwiches or Chinese food, in a restaurant with a clichéd façade. Iberian Peninsula, mind you. The other cities follow the same approach and are sorely lacking in identity. The Pokémon themselves share this misrepresentation. Quaquaval is inspired by the Rio carnival, while Garganacl looks like a ziggurat or a pre-Columbian pyramid. These confusions show a particularly regrettable disregard from Game Freak. The cleaning lady in Nemona's mansion is another unfortunate example: she is a Black character – the first one to be seen – which is a particularly cruel and tasteless irony, regardless of whether it was intentional or not.
The gameplay remains largely unchanged. The main mechanic in this game is the Terastal Transformation, which is generally irrelevant. When it prevents the opposing Pokémon from using certain attacks, the mechanic becomes more interesting, but it doesn't go beyond being a simple end-of-battle expedient, growing more tiresome than anything else with the time it wastes. The title feels much easier than its predecessors, at least in terms of progression. Since the arenas and various objectives never scale with the player's level, adversity is non-existent, except for a few rare fights. The very artificial splitting of the areas does not help this. Even if the player fails, the fact that each objective is placed within a few meters of a Pokémon Center nullifies any dramatic tension. As a result, the game remains consistently flavorless in its gameplay phases. The Academy lessons are a good reflection of this fact: they are a sort of contextualised tutorial that drags on and teaches the player mechanics that they would have already seen for themselves. Besides, their non-ergonomic aspect never encourages the player to do them.
Despite these lengthy criticisms, the game is not without merit. Nemona carries the cast single-handedly: as a solid interpretation of the rival, after the era of antipathetic characters, she has a great chemistry with the protagonist – this is an observation I make with the girl protagonist; I think that with the boy counterpart, the result would be more of a very angsty heterosexual dynamic. Game Freak also gives a lot of space to non-binary characters, without insisting on their gender: this is very satisfying and is clearly a step in the right direction. Again, the last area and the discussions between the characters about their lives should have been the whole game. It shows that Game Freak is able to come up with good concepts, but it is infuriating that they never integrate them organically into the adventure, whose formula is, inevitably, always the same.
Pokémon Scarlet appears as this deceptively lighthearted adventure. The treasure hunt ends with the classic observation that the friends made along the way are what matters. Why not, this is a perfectly workable theme for children. But the hypocrisy lies in the fact that the protagonist never travels with their friends during the dozens of hours of gameplay, unlike the manga or anime. The other themes are treated with the same carelessness, while ignoring them in the core of the game design. This muddled feeling can be found everywhere, from the gameplay to the technical execution, from the music to the cultural representation. For a company that boasts hundreds of millions of dollars in operating profits, these failings are inexcusable. As much as one appreciates the franchise – and I admit I have no particular nostalgia or affection for it –, it seems to me that it is appropriate to be uncompromising about the quality of titles the community religiously buys every year. It is clear that this is still not the case: Game Freak and the Pokémon Company have no reason to change a development strategy that, for the worse, works.
Stray
2022
It is really a game ever made.
It's a cat game in a cyberpunk world. Do i need to say more?
The game itself is pretty simple, but not in a bad way. The graphics are real good, the puzzles are actually cool and the story is basic enough to not be bad.
If you have Plus, play it. It's short, about 3 hours long, and you will know what is like to be a cat, but that's all.
It's a cat game in a cyberpunk world. Do i need to say more?
The game itself is pretty simple, but not in a bad way. The graphics are real good, the puzzles are actually cool and the story is basic enough to not be bad.
If you have Plus, play it. It's short, about 3 hours long, and you will know what is like to be a cat, but that's all.
Good story almost completely ruined by the worst fucking backtracking I’ve ever seen in a video game.There’s absolutely nothing fun about repeatedly being set back and having to play the same story over and over again, going back through the same areas and doing the same things, and fighting the same bosses to actually progress. It’s especially not fun when that’s what most of the game consists of. Like I’ve even seen several diehard fans recommend that players just rush through the repeated routes as fast as they can, not doing any of the optional content and skipping most of the cutscenes and dialogue. That is a sign of a poorly designed game if you ask me.
Speaking of poor design choices, the game is littered with so many of them that somehow manage to needlessly pad out the game even more, several of which made me seriously consider dropping the game entirely. Route C requires you to gather all the weapons in the game (for literally no reason, might I add) in addition to it being almost the exact same story you just saw twice. This includes grinding for money (weapons are not cheap at all) and doing several mundane side quests, some of which require you to farm rare drops from enemies, or reload the same area over and over again until the weather changes. You better hope you get lucky, because there’s a chance that you’ll be killing the same enemies and/or reloading the same area over and over again for hours on end.
Also using a guide on route C is basically required if you want to get through it at a reasonable pace. The game gives you no indication at all on which side quests reward you with weapons, not to mention the side quests themselves have no markers/trackers on your map so you know where to go. Also, there’s a weapon that you need to buy from the Aerie, an area that becomes unaccessible at a later point, so you’re just out of luck if you slip up and happen to forget. And to top that all off, it’s best for you to make a separate save file in addition to the one you already have before the final dungeon to get ending D, and by extension ending E. Because if you don’t, and you save over the one file you’ve been using for most of the game… you have to play through everything, all over again, for the FOURTH TIME. The game does not tell you that, and they didn’t think to add in a chapter select like in Automata.
All of this just so you can continue with the story. I wish I was making this up, I swear.
The little bits of new cutscenes that you do get in between just do not make the rest of the repetition worth it in the slightest imo. Most of route C adds nothing, the beginning of route E adds nothing… I got so used to skipping through the same cutscenes that the game had already shown me a million times that when the time came for actual new cutscenes, I almost skipped those too on accident. And even with the added context of the story bosses, the boss fights themselves get more and more boring with every time you have to fight them again, since you’ll be massively overleveled in comparison and they’ll go down in just a couple of hits.
The game gets two stars because I still like the characters, and that soundtrack is godlike but I absolutely despise the way the story is presented, especially a shame for such a story driven game. It completely broke the immersion for me.
Speaking of poor design choices, the game is littered with so many of them that somehow manage to needlessly pad out the game even more, several of which made me seriously consider dropping the game entirely. Route C requires you to gather all the weapons in the game (for literally no reason, might I add) in addition to it being almost the exact same story you just saw twice. This includes grinding for money (weapons are not cheap at all) and doing several mundane side quests, some of which require you to farm rare drops from enemies, or reload the same area over and over again until the weather changes. You better hope you get lucky, because there’s a chance that you’ll be killing the same enemies and/or reloading the same area over and over again for hours on end.
Also using a guide on route C is basically required if you want to get through it at a reasonable pace. The game gives you no indication at all on which side quests reward you with weapons, not to mention the side quests themselves have no markers/trackers on your map so you know where to go. Also, there’s a weapon that you need to buy from the Aerie, an area that becomes unaccessible at a later point, so you’re just out of luck if you slip up and happen to forget. And to top that all off, it’s best for you to make a separate save file in addition to the one you already have before the final dungeon to get ending D, and by extension ending E. Because if you don’t, and you save over the one file you’ve been using for most of the game… you have to play through everything, all over again, for the FOURTH TIME. The game does not tell you that, and they didn’t think to add in a chapter select like in Automata.
All of this just so you can continue with the story. I wish I was making this up, I swear.
The little bits of new cutscenes that you do get in between just do not make the rest of the repetition worth it in the slightest imo. Most of route C adds nothing, the beginning of route E adds nothing… I got so used to skipping through the same cutscenes that the game had already shown me a million times that when the time came for actual new cutscenes, I almost skipped those too on accident. And even with the added context of the story bosses, the boss fights themselves get more and more boring with every time you have to fight them again, since you’ll be massively overleveled in comparison and they’ll go down in just a couple of hits.
The game gets two stars because I still like the characters, and that soundtrack is godlike but I absolutely despise the way the story is presented, especially a shame for such a story driven game. It completely broke the immersion for me.
Silent Hill 3
2003
The most terrifying, oppressive, claustrophobic experience I've had in the medium is no surprise a stalking disturbing message of an encroaching patriarchal faith. Heather wants nothing to do with it, and neither will I. Monsters of repressed memories and physical/sexual trauma stalk the corridors, but catharsis is found in making them all Burn. Aborting god is probably the rawest turn on killing god tbh. I personally got lost in the woods of the threads near the end but I think on just initial reflection that there's a large point in there about an incomprehensibly massive societal issue that makes it difficult to form into something tangible (e.g. male gaze and abuse). It's also like a crystalized end to everything the series culminated in before, tying everything back together. Genuinely super well crafted, and a crazy good final message. That cycle of disparaging hatred is still overturned by the real spark of sympathy, we just want love.
Silent Hill 3
2003
was talking it over with a friend and we agreed that one of the smartest things this game does is to entirely elide questions of depiction and gratuitousness re: sexual assault and abuse by unfolding the violence almost entirely through threat, metaphor, and implication. the looming possibility is signalled by the very first interaction even, the encounter of our favorite skinny, vulnerable teenage girl Heather Mason with a bulking, growly strange man stalking her. the eventual unraveling of the "God" plotline obviously also scans as about sexual trauma, the violative experience of unwanted procreation without the explicit need for an assaulting figure (which of course ties into the parody of the Virgin Birth, again, not subtle but appreciated), and the central dynamic between Heather and men is defined by distrust, fear, and manipulation (the memo you read where even her benevolent father and blankfaced video game Good Dad Harry Mason confesses to wanting to murder Heather as a child is heartbreaking), while her relationship to the only other woman in the cast is defined by outright hostility engendered by their equally understandable if slightly manichean responses to unbelievable pain and suffering at the hands of a patriarchal and matriarchal figure, respectively. to really hammer it home the game pens you in to dark, cramped, filthy spaces right from the start, barely ever giving you an overworld to interact with: Heather Mason is not her father or James Sunderland, she's a 17 year old girl, railroaded through the terrifying world that the men of the series navigate more freely (this is also reflected in the games lack of traditional Silent Hill branching endings, at least on a first playthrough). maybe there's nothing interesting or new left to say about these games but i loved this so much i wanted to at least put something here to commemorate it
Silent Hill 3
2003
Now that the franchise is plagued with a bunch of Silent Hill 2 imitators, it's striking and quaint to see how quickly its direct sequel distanced itself from many of SH2's touted hallmarks that seemed like the success formula to exploit from then on. Silent Hill 3 doesn't waste much time with preambles, knowing already what you came here to see, and presents itself as the most predatory entry in the series, with highly aggressive and pursuing enemies, unlike the more passive and slow moving foes of SH1 and SH2, a very limited item and ammo count that forces you into a constant fight-or-flight response state that wasn't present in the series before, and more expansive and disorienting spaces to trudge through that more often than not have you staring into deep darkness as you scramble for a way out with monsters bitting at your heels.
Silent Hill 3 takes the unrelenting nature of the Historical Society stretch in SH2 and extends it into a full game. The Otherworld is ramped up even further as one of the most nightmarish settings every produced in videogames, filling it with bloody and rusty metal, grotesque disfigured monsters, dream-like disturbing visions, and disquieting noises that constantly make you feel like something is about to come out of the walls. The soundscape of SH3 might be Yamaoka's best work in the series, shifting the indiferent and somber tone of the previous entries into a much more hostile and invanding presence that assaults your ears constantly. Of the trilogy, SH3 is without a doubt the deliberately scariest one of the bunch, and bluntly makes its case as to not be fucked around it.
Which is why it's fascinating how much the main protagonist undercuts that vicious horror with her disinterested personality and musings on the whole ordeal. Beyond having a natural knack for making every interaction with the antagonists feel like a sitcom during cutscenes, Heather's charismatic remarks and quips during exploration create a certain detachment between her and the player's control, that wasn't as present in Harry's passive voyeurism or Jame's ambivalent resignation. SH3 puts tremendous effort in its oppression of the player, and yet Heather ain't having none of that shit. It's easy to understand why SH3 doesn't enjoy the same prestige and adoration that its prequel does, and I can't really blame people for that. SH2 interweaves both text and subtext so seamlessly that interpretation becomes highly accessible for anyone who experiences it, unlike SH3's more metatextual concepts that can easily be ignored if you just take the plot at face value.
But if your take away after playing the whole game, and witnessing Heather abort a God inside a church at the end, is that Silent Hill 3 disappointingly doesn't contain psychological horror and is just another devil cult story with little substance, then I'm afraid you missed the forest for the trees. There's an ever present underlying theme that permeates most of SH3 of imposed expectations of young women, that extends beyond its devil cult plot and impregnates with meaning the institutionalized settings of the game and its towering and stalking monsters that constantly harrass Heather. And having such an ubiquitous character push back the assaulting nature of SH3, mocking and making light of its villains, and in the process the Silent Hill concept itself, makes for a very refreshing and compelling subversion of what came before it.
We will never know what Silent Hill 3 could have been if it had gone the same route as Silent Hill 2. Hell, we will never know what it could have been if it had been a rail shooter, like intended. But this is the Silent Hill 3 we got, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Silent Hill 3 takes the unrelenting nature of the Historical Society stretch in SH2 and extends it into a full game. The Otherworld is ramped up even further as one of the most nightmarish settings every produced in videogames, filling it with bloody and rusty metal, grotesque disfigured monsters, dream-like disturbing visions, and disquieting noises that constantly make you feel like something is about to come out of the walls. The soundscape of SH3 might be Yamaoka's best work in the series, shifting the indiferent and somber tone of the previous entries into a much more hostile and invanding presence that assaults your ears constantly. Of the trilogy, SH3 is without a doubt the deliberately scariest one of the bunch, and bluntly makes its case as to not be fucked around it.
Which is why it's fascinating how much the main protagonist undercuts that vicious horror with her disinterested personality and musings on the whole ordeal. Beyond having a natural knack for making every interaction with the antagonists feel like a sitcom during cutscenes, Heather's charismatic remarks and quips during exploration create a certain detachment between her and the player's control, that wasn't as present in Harry's passive voyeurism or Jame's ambivalent resignation. SH3 puts tremendous effort in its oppression of the player, and yet Heather ain't having none of that shit. It's easy to understand why SH3 doesn't enjoy the same prestige and adoration that its prequel does, and I can't really blame people for that. SH2 interweaves both text and subtext so seamlessly that interpretation becomes highly accessible for anyone who experiences it, unlike SH3's more metatextual concepts that can easily be ignored if you just take the plot at face value.
But if your take away after playing the whole game, and witnessing Heather abort a God inside a church at the end, is that Silent Hill 3 disappointingly doesn't contain psychological horror and is just another devil cult story with little substance, then I'm afraid you missed the forest for the trees. There's an ever present underlying theme that permeates most of SH3 of imposed expectations of young women, that extends beyond its devil cult plot and impregnates with meaning the institutionalized settings of the game and its towering and stalking monsters that constantly harrass Heather. And having such an ubiquitous character push back the assaulting nature of SH3, mocking and making light of its villains, and in the process the Silent Hill concept itself, makes for a very refreshing and compelling subversion of what came before it.
We will never know what Silent Hill 3 could have been if it had gone the same route as Silent Hill 2. Hell, we will never know what it could have been if it had been a rail shooter, like intended. But this is the Silent Hill 3 we got, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Silent Hill 3
2003
Silent Hill 3 finds itself in the deeply unenviable position of being the first Silent Hill game to not really have an identity of its own. When you’re following a game as titanic as Silent Hill 2 I think it would be easy to be destroyed by the question of what the fuck you do next and I’m extremely glad that Team Silent had the good sense to make the answer “not that again.” Conceptually I think there’s something interesting in the idea of returning to a lot of the aesthetics and narrative ideas of the original game, as the unbelievable technical mastery over the PS2 that’s on display here definitely affords them a little bit of victory lapping that warrants such a thing. Still though, I’m glad that this game manages to firmly stake its own atmospheric identity even if I think ultimately it doesn’t all come together quite as well as its predecessors.
A big part of that is the overarching narrative of the game. At first I was kind of put off by the structure. Where previous Silent Hills stuck to the same formula of dropping your character in the titular town and making those foggy streets the hub world of sorts between the “dungeon” locations of municipal buildings and hospitals and stuff, 3 is a very linear game that shuttles you from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon with very little narrative tissue as Heather Mason just tries to go from the mall back to her apartment with very little understanding of what the fuck is happening to her.
And that’s kind of all you get! For a long while! Initially I was fatigued by this gauntlet of what in previous games would be considered set piece dungeon areas back to back to back to back but I came around. Partly this is because all of these areas are just good – Silent Hill 3 really is all killer no filler. Partly, though, it’s because I don’t find the actual narrative of the game particularly interesting. There is a renewed focus on the cult from Silent Hill 1 and they’re back to their old hijinks some seventeen years later. There are seeds of good shit here – conflicts between three emergent factions with differing philosophies about the purpose of their dark god and how best to weaponize it against the world, implications of what the lives of surviving characters from the original game (and at least one who didn’t) looked like in the intervening time – but none of that stuff is really given any time to be developed into anything more than cool seasoning sprinkled over something that feels disappointingly seen-before for this series. I’m conflicted about it though, right, because the REASON this stuff is so underbaked is because almost all of it is squished into the back half of the game to make room for The World’s Most Stressful Walk Home, which is sick! Also, I’m about to get into MORE shit that is very cool in this game, and that stuff persists into that second half as well along with these things that don’t work as well, it just sucks that the thing that was sacrificed here is, ostensibly, the primary narrative of the game haha.
Who even CARES though because the TRUE focus of the game is Heather Mason, perhaps the best video game protagonist of all time? She’s a delight, an absolute pleasure to inhabit and spend time with. She faces a gauntlet of intensely physical and increasingly targeted psychological horror and meets almost every challenge with annoyance and fury. Eye rolls and ughs and a brandished katana rather than fear. Even in her relationship with the game’s one other overtly cool character (something this series has never REALLY had and it’s nice! I really like Douglas – SH1 contrived a lot of situations to keep Cybil and Harry off the same page) who is a fifty-something year old man she is the clear leader, and she never lets any of the villains get in her head. She’s goofy, she’s angry, and always ready to fuck up some asshole cultists who don’t understand who they’re dealing with. A Queen.
And fitting this protagonist who is much more self-assured and much less susceptible to bullshit than the ones we’ve previously seen in the series, the game’s atmospheric dials have been adjusted accordingly. Of course the heavy symbolism and psychologically specific nature of the monsters and locations is still there, but it’s less intense than in either game, and it does seem to roll off Heather’s back a bit, like water off a duck’s. She’s not a scared, traumatized kid and she’s not committed any great sins; she’s not in a place where this stuff is gonna just work on her automatically. To compensate, everything else is dialed up. The fidelity offered by the PS2 is taken full advantage of in a different direction than it was in Silent Hill 2, and only two years later Team Silent is squeezing every polygon out of the machine. It’s a technical marvel, maybe the most photoreal game on the console, and every nasty, gritty detail is dialed to eleven here. Things are grimier, rustier, flakier, bloodier than they’ve ever been, a real sicko grungefest. Monsters are more varied and more aggressive, but Heather is more mobile and has better tools for dealing with them at her disposal than her forebears. The sound design is at a series high, leaning harder than ever into the industrial crunches and whines and pounding clanks. The appearance of any enemy is not just a threat to Heather’s health but now a jarring assault on the senses in a much more visceral way than ever before.
There’s also the introduction of a lot more General Horror stuff in a way that I think really works for the game. Each Silent Hill game has progressively flirted more and more with the idea that the town and the otherworld are just kind of Normal Haunted, by, like, ghosts and shit, and 3 takes this and runs with it, leaning into Haunted House Bullshit in a way that I could never get enough of. Be it a ghost pushing me onto the train tracks, getting scary messages in the hospital, or the literal haunted house sequence you run through in the amusement park late in the game, it was ALWAYS scary and ALWAYS fun. The game’s sense of humor is a lot more overtly goofy than Silent Hill 1’s but it works completely, never kills the vibe, and always contributes to a scare even as it’s making me smile. It’s a hard thing to balance but Silent Hill 3 makes it look easy.
I feel like this review has bounced around a lot, like I’m describing a lot of disparate things that maybe sound weird on paper and that’s because Silent Hill 3 feels like that, a bit. A mish mash of a lot of really different elements that I wouldn’t have expected to work as well together as they did, and in fact it did take a couple hours to start winning me over. But despite what I personally found to be a somewhat unsatisfying main plot (that is, admittedly, buoyed by its focus on a character who has quickly become one of my personal favorites in any game), everything here just kind of clicks. It’s just fun. A Silent Hill game that’s not as focused and cohesive is, it turns out, still a game made by a team of master craftsmen at the absolute top of their game, at least at this point in time. It really seems like they can’t go wrong!
A big part of that is the overarching narrative of the game. At first I was kind of put off by the structure. Where previous Silent Hills stuck to the same formula of dropping your character in the titular town and making those foggy streets the hub world of sorts between the “dungeon” locations of municipal buildings and hospitals and stuff, 3 is a very linear game that shuttles you from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon with very little narrative tissue as Heather Mason just tries to go from the mall back to her apartment with very little understanding of what the fuck is happening to her.
And that’s kind of all you get! For a long while! Initially I was fatigued by this gauntlet of what in previous games would be considered set piece dungeon areas back to back to back to back but I came around. Partly this is because all of these areas are just good – Silent Hill 3 really is all killer no filler. Partly, though, it’s because I don’t find the actual narrative of the game particularly interesting. There is a renewed focus on the cult from Silent Hill 1 and they’re back to their old hijinks some seventeen years later. There are seeds of good shit here – conflicts between three emergent factions with differing philosophies about the purpose of their dark god and how best to weaponize it against the world, implications of what the lives of surviving characters from the original game (and at least one who didn’t) looked like in the intervening time – but none of that stuff is really given any time to be developed into anything more than cool seasoning sprinkled over something that feels disappointingly seen-before for this series. I’m conflicted about it though, right, because the REASON this stuff is so underbaked is because almost all of it is squished into the back half of the game to make room for The World’s Most Stressful Walk Home, which is sick! Also, I’m about to get into MORE shit that is very cool in this game, and that stuff persists into that second half as well along with these things that don’t work as well, it just sucks that the thing that was sacrificed here is, ostensibly, the primary narrative of the game haha.
Who even CARES though because the TRUE focus of the game is Heather Mason, perhaps the best video game protagonist of all time? She’s a delight, an absolute pleasure to inhabit and spend time with. She faces a gauntlet of intensely physical and increasingly targeted psychological horror and meets almost every challenge with annoyance and fury. Eye rolls and ughs and a brandished katana rather than fear. Even in her relationship with the game’s one other overtly cool character (something this series has never REALLY had and it’s nice! I really like Douglas – SH1 contrived a lot of situations to keep Cybil and Harry off the same page) who is a fifty-something year old man she is the clear leader, and she never lets any of the villains get in her head. She’s goofy, she’s angry, and always ready to fuck up some asshole cultists who don’t understand who they’re dealing with. A Queen.
And fitting this protagonist who is much more self-assured and much less susceptible to bullshit than the ones we’ve previously seen in the series, the game’s atmospheric dials have been adjusted accordingly. Of course the heavy symbolism and psychologically specific nature of the monsters and locations is still there, but it’s less intense than in either game, and it does seem to roll off Heather’s back a bit, like water off a duck’s. She’s not a scared, traumatized kid and she’s not committed any great sins; she’s not in a place where this stuff is gonna just work on her automatically. To compensate, everything else is dialed up. The fidelity offered by the PS2 is taken full advantage of in a different direction than it was in Silent Hill 2, and only two years later Team Silent is squeezing every polygon out of the machine. It’s a technical marvel, maybe the most photoreal game on the console, and every nasty, gritty detail is dialed to eleven here. Things are grimier, rustier, flakier, bloodier than they’ve ever been, a real sicko grungefest. Monsters are more varied and more aggressive, but Heather is more mobile and has better tools for dealing with them at her disposal than her forebears. The sound design is at a series high, leaning harder than ever into the industrial crunches and whines and pounding clanks. The appearance of any enemy is not just a threat to Heather’s health but now a jarring assault on the senses in a much more visceral way than ever before.
There’s also the introduction of a lot more General Horror stuff in a way that I think really works for the game. Each Silent Hill game has progressively flirted more and more with the idea that the town and the otherworld are just kind of Normal Haunted, by, like, ghosts and shit, and 3 takes this and runs with it, leaning into Haunted House Bullshit in a way that I could never get enough of. Be it a ghost pushing me onto the train tracks, getting scary messages in the hospital, or the literal haunted house sequence you run through in the amusement park late in the game, it was ALWAYS scary and ALWAYS fun. The game’s sense of humor is a lot more overtly goofy than Silent Hill 1’s but it works completely, never kills the vibe, and always contributes to a scare even as it’s making me smile. It’s a hard thing to balance but Silent Hill 3 makes it look easy.
I feel like this review has bounced around a lot, like I’m describing a lot of disparate things that maybe sound weird on paper and that’s because Silent Hill 3 feels like that, a bit. A mish mash of a lot of really different elements that I wouldn’t have expected to work as well together as they did, and in fact it did take a couple hours to start winning me over. But despite what I personally found to be a somewhat unsatisfying main plot (that is, admittedly, buoyed by its focus on a character who has quickly become one of my personal favorites in any game), everything here just kind of clicks. It’s just fun. A Silent Hill game that’s not as focused and cohesive is, it turns out, still a game made by a team of master craftsmen at the absolute top of their game, at least at this point in time. It really seems like they can’t go wrong!
Content warning for non-explicit discussion of real life death, expulsion of bodily waste and fluids, pregnancy, childbirth, needle use in a medical context
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I am a woman. My experience as a woman is one of the less common ones, statistically, because I didn’t have it in me to assert that I was one until a good quarter century after most women are informed that this is what they are. That there are rules to this, and ways to perform womanhood, and perhaps most importantly for a lot of people, certain baseline genetic requirements that separate women from non-women. That last part is the sticky one for me, and because of this there are a lot of people out in the world who hate me, who want me to simply not be. Many of these people are powerful and they make decisions every day about my privilege to exist, but many many more of them are regular people out in the world. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who they are by the looks they give, the things they say; sometimes it’s not so immediately obvious. It is stressful to go outside, often, and occasionally it is outright difficult. Nevertheless, I am a woman.
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Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French writer who has been prolific in many fields over her six decades of writing, but I often find myself thinking of her most famous work, one of her earliest publications - 1980’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, because it is the only thing by her that I’ve read. It’s a 200-ish page book that builds heavily on old Freudian theory to, among other things, consider the ways people use powerfully negative experiences to define and value the self.
Kristeva defines abjection like this: “The human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” Abjection, in a way, forces us to choose our identity; we define ourselves via rejection, by how we think of ourselves in opposition to things that disgust or harm us. It preys upon this idea of selfhood, of the boundaries we construct and maintain to create identity. It preys upon the divisions we create when we erect these boundaries. One example of this that Kristeva uses is things we naturally expel from our bodies, stuff like blood from a wound, teeth that fall out, semen, piss, shit, vomit. One second these things are subject – they’re part of you – and the next they’re object – separate from you entirely. This may not seem like much but this intrinsic mental separation from what was a part of you as soon as it leaves your body highlights how fragile these boundaries actually are.
I am, because I am not.
Kristeva thinks it’s a thin line.
She most often frames abjection in terms of violence, revulsion, disgust, and trauma. And it’s true that we tend to use the word “abject” as a maximalist adjective to highlight negative things. Abject terror. Abject misery. Abject poverty. But for Kristeva it’s not actually a bad thing in the grand view; on the contrary it’s an essential part of making us who we are as a collective and as individuals. She talks a lot about childbirth as the first moment of abjection. Birth being as much a kid fighting to live, to create a self, a sense of being, even as they tear away from the safety of their mother’s womb. It’s an inherently violent act and it’s the only way to become. It’s an ongoing process throughout life; kids have values imposed on them - language, culture, law - all things contrary to totally natural impulses but also things that most of us agree are necessary for them to grow into society as we know it. This is a process that repeats constantly throughout life to varying degrees. It can be painful, horrible, and disgusting, but it’s necessary. These experiences sharpen our sense of who we are, in our sense of opposition to the things that cause us pain, horror, and disgust.
I am not, so I am.
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Silent Hill 4: The Room has, if I’m remembering all My Gaming from last year correctly, the largest cast of characters of any Team Silent game, but it is almost entirely concerned with the thematic opposition of its player character, Henry Townshend, and its central figure and villain, Walter Sullivan. Henry is cursed, you see, trapped inside of his apartment by supernatural forces, unable to be seen or heard by anyone on the outside even as he becomes increasingly aware of a deadly, ghostly threat haunting the complex and its inhabitants. Walter uh, IS that threat, the ghost of a serial killer returned partially from the grave to finish his cruel sacrament with the six-ish murders he had to leave off in life (all according to his grand plan, of course). His ultimate goal, it’s eventually revealed, is to get permanent access to Henry’s apartment, which he sees as the vessel for his own mother, whose spirit he believes will awaken when he completes his twenty-one ritual murders.
Walter has a tragic past, raised within an evil cult, abused constantly by his caretakers, turned out onto uncaring streets with only his brainwashing and occult dogma to motivate him to go on. He’s a man who experiences moments of abjection and rejects them, becoming singularly focused on rescinding his identity. He is in constant pursuit of a mother he doesn’t remember, his mission to return permanently to the safety of her womb, where he can exist eternally, unburdened and unfettered by both his trauma and his self.
In all of the early Silent Hill games, aspects of the world take on attributes specific to the psyches of particular characters central to the story, and in The Room that person is Walter himself, whose fears and hates dictate the worlds that Henry and his neighbors are dragged into throughout the game. Walter’s fears are decidedly more mundane than previous Silent Hill fear generators, with environments like normal forests and subway stations, urban blocks and apartment complexes. Walter is afraid of, generally speaking, the Out There. He wants to retreat. Enemies are other people. They squish, they slurp, they burp grotesquely (bodily expulsion is a hallmark of abject experience, remember). Ghosts pursue you doggedly, without pause, and the worst thing they can do is just be present, their very auras radiating sinister energy that hurts Henry without action.
Henry himself is a mirror to Walter, trapped seemingly eternally in the thematic womb, his only escape the long long tunnel that forms in his bathroom wall, one that spawns him into these frightening outside worlds, often in the fetal position (I know writers who use subtlety and they’re all cowards, etc). While he does face trauma in these worlds and after every moment of abjection retreats back to his apartment for nourishment and healing, Henry does, ultimately, want to get the fuck outta there bro. He’s desperate for human connection too (and connection beyond murder – his moments of abjection always come via Walter doing something fucked up to one of his neighbors), desperate enough to peep on his direct next door neighbor Eileen through a hole that a previous tenant left in their shared wall. Tellingly, Henry can’t even begin to have a real connection to Eileen, or anyone, until he symbolically begins to separate himself from the room; once they meet for real and succeed in evading Walter’s attacks for the first time, the room stops healing Henry, and becomes open to hauntings that actively harm him.
The titular room is Henry’s place of refuge and comfort, at first, but it’s also his ultimate enemy. This is true the entire game, not just after Walter’s influence begins to infect the space. He’ll die if he stays here. He has precious little food, and during gameplay he gives away his last bottle of chocolate milk (milk being one of Kristeva’s confessed personal objects of great disgust, in a moment of fun serendipity). He has no one to interact with, and even though it’s stated in game that he was not a social guy before he was cursed, once you’re down to zero everything seems like a lifeline. Eventually, of course, he’ll be literally killed by the curses that infect the room. He can’t stay. He needs to be born, and he knows it. It’s a false security, and it intrinsically can’t last.
Walter and Henry aren’t the only figures central to the game, though. There is, of course, a third pillar here: you. Er, me. Y’know, The Player. There is essentially nothing to Henry – this is part of why he exists primarily as a thematic contrast to Walter, and part of why it’s hard to ascribe much character to his actions. You’re Henry in large part. When he’s in the apartment you even control him in first person. You are the ultimate voyeur, in the same way that Henry is to Eileen and Walter is to Henry. And this is part of why Walter’s worlds and the creatures that populate them are on the surface so much more generic than the places and monsters of past games: applicability.
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I have this uncle who died in his apartment. I didn’t know him, really. From stuff I’ve been told he wasn’t a good guy. I was a kid, and we lived states away. I only met him a handful of times at big family parties. The only reason I ever think about him at all probably is because he died in his apartment, and even then I’ve only started thinking about him so much recently, in the last couple of years, because we’ve all been spending a lot more time in our apartments. It’s covid, bay bee. The reason I think about him so much is because when he died in his apartment, nobody knew. Nobody cared to check in. They only found him, weeks later, because his landlord went into his place because they had assumed he had run out on it because he hadn’t paid rent or responded to any communication, for weeks, because he was dead.
So I think about that a lot the last couple years.
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I mentioned that Walter’s hellscapes are mundane places and his monsters are other people and I do think this is a reflection of where the developers thought maybe a lot of their presumed audience was at when Silent Hill 4 came out. Which is pretty funny. But it’s real, too, for me. There’s not a lot that’s scarier for me as a trans person than An Only Vaguely Familiar Public Place With An Off Vibe. That’s alarm bell central. It’s hard out there, man. Rarely do I feel outright unsafe but often do I feel eyes. It’s difficult to tell a lot of the time if the eyes are real or if I’m inventing them, and that doubt can make it even harder to feel confident in my place in perfectly normal spaces. Just yesterday I was actively frightened waiting in line for the bathroom in an inexplicably crowded gas station in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. You just never know when it’s going to be a problem. I was never the most confident person, but this low level thrum of unease colors every moment of public life. In talking about abjection in an academic sense and especially when talking about fiction it’s easy to forget that part of it is that it is upsetting by nature. But in life it sharpens me. I know who I am.
It’s a harsh dichotomy – every day I am more visibly transgender in more irreversible physical ways. Every day I become more obviously Neither Male Nor Female and while I love this about myself and I am truly happy with these changes they are the same changes that make me less safe and more vulnerable in ways that become harder and harder to cover up with clothes and masks. It would be easy to retreat to my womb, metaphorically. I want to, sometimes. I work remotely on a permanent basis. I live literally across the street from the grocery store. My girlfriend is here, my cats are here, my friends are online.
But I am transforming. Every week I stab myself with a needle. I force through this needle the fluid that makes my body into what I want it to be. A violent transmogrification. I feel the most beautiful in these moments. They are moments of clarity, of self expression, of definition by rejection. I am not a man. I am a woman. This needle in my leg is my signature. Living in fear of living in fear can’t be the way.
I am not who I was. I oppose that. I am becoming. Every week I am new. I need to tear away.
I want to be born.
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I am a woman. My experience as a woman is one of the less common ones, statistically, because I didn’t have it in me to assert that I was one until a good quarter century after most women are informed that this is what they are. That there are rules to this, and ways to perform womanhood, and perhaps most importantly for a lot of people, certain baseline genetic requirements that separate women from non-women. That last part is the sticky one for me, and because of this there are a lot of people out in the world who hate me, who want me to simply not be. Many of these people are powerful and they make decisions every day about my privilege to exist, but many many more of them are regular people out in the world. Sometimes it’s easy to tell who they are by the looks they give, the things they say; sometimes it’s not so immediately obvious. It is stressful to go outside, often, and occasionally it is outright difficult. Nevertheless, I am a woman.
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Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French writer who has been prolific in many fields over her six decades of writing, but I often find myself thinking of her most famous work, one of her earliest publications - 1980’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, because it is the only thing by her that I’ve read. It’s a 200-ish page book that builds heavily on old Freudian theory to, among other things, consider the ways people use powerfully negative experiences to define and value the self.
Kristeva defines abjection like this: “The human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” Abjection, in a way, forces us to choose our identity; we define ourselves via rejection, by how we think of ourselves in opposition to things that disgust or harm us. It preys upon this idea of selfhood, of the boundaries we construct and maintain to create identity. It preys upon the divisions we create when we erect these boundaries. One example of this that Kristeva uses is things we naturally expel from our bodies, stuff like blood from a wound, teeth that fall out, semen, piss, shit, vomit. One second these things are subject – they’re part of you – and the next they’re object – separate from you entirely. This may not seem like much but this intrinsic mental separation from what was a part of you as soon as it leaves your body highlights how fragile these boundaries actually are.
I am, because I am not.
Kristeva thinks it’s a thin line.
She most often frames abjection in terms of violence, revulsion, disgust, and trauma. And it’s true that we tend to use the word “abject” as a maximalist adjective to highlight negative things. Abject terror. Abject misery. Abject poverty. But for Kristeva it’s not actually a bad thing in the grand view; on the contrary it’s an essential part of making us who we are as a collective and as individuals. She talks a lot about childbirth as the first moment of abjection. Birth being as much a kid fighting to live, to create a self, a sense of being, even as they tear away from the safety of their mother’s womb. It’s an inherently violent act and it’s the only way to become. It’s an ongoing process throughout life; kids have values imposed on them - language, culture, law - all things contrary to totally natural impulses but also things that most of us agree are necessary for them to grow into society as we know it. This is a process that repeats constantly throughout life to varying degrees. It can be painful, horrible, and disgusting, but it’s necessary. These experiences sharpen our sense of who we are, in our sense of opposition to the things that cause us pain, horror, and disgust.
I am not, so I am.
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Silent Hill 4: The Room has, if I’m remembering all My Gaming from last year correctly, the largest cast of characters of any Team Silent game, but it is almost entirely concerned with the thematic opposition of its player character, Henry Townshend, and its central figure and villain, Walter Sullivan. Henry is cursed, you see, trapped inside of his apartment by supernatural forces, unable to be seen or heard by anyone on the outside even as he becomes increasingly aware of a deadly, ghostly threat haunting the complex and its inhabitants. Walter uh, IS that threat, the ghost of a serial killer returned partially from the grave to finish his cruel sacrament with the six-ish murders he had to leave off in life (all according to his grand plan, of course). His ultimate goal, it’s eventually revealed, is to get permanent access to Henry’s apartment, which he sees as the vessel for his own mother, whose spirit he believes will awaken when he completes his twenty-one ritual murders.
Walter has a tragic past, raised within an evil cult, abused constantly by his caretakers, turned out onto uncaring streets with only his brainwashing and occult dogma to motivate him to go on. He’s a man who experiences moments of abjection and rejects them, becoming singularly focused on rescinding his identity. He is in constant pursuit of a mother he doesn’t remember, his mission to return permanently to the safety of her womb, where he can exist eternally, unburdened and unfettered by both his trauma and his self.
In all of the early Silent Hill games, aspects of the world take on attributes specific to the psyches of particular characters central to the story, and in The Room that person is Walter himself, whose fears and hates dictate the worlds that Henry and his neighbors are dragged into throughout the game. Walter’s fears are decidedly more mundane than previous Silent Hill fear generators, with environments like normal forests and subway stations, urban blocks and apartment complexes. Walter is afraid of, generally speaking, the Out There. He wants to retreat. Enemies are other people. They squish, they slurp, they burp grotesquely (bodily expulsion is a hallmark of abject experience, remember). Ghosts pursue you doggedly, without pause, and the worst thing they can do is just be present, their very auras radiating sinister energy that hurts Henry without action.
Henry himself is a mirror to Walter, trapped seemingly eternally in the thematic womb, his only escape the long long tunnel that forms in his bathroom wall, one that spawns him into these frightening outside worlds, often in the fetal position (I know writers who use subtlety and they’re all cowards, etc). While he does face trauma in these worlds and after every moment of abjection retreats back to his apartment for nourishment and healing, Henry does, ultimately, want to get the fuck outta there bro. He’s desperate for human connection too (and connection beyond murder – his moments of abjection always come via Walter doing something fucked up to one of his neighbors), desperate enough to peep on his direct next door neighbor Eileen through a hole that a previous tenant left in their shared wall. Tellingly, Henry can’t even begin to have a real connection to Eileen, or anyone, until he symbolically begins to separate himself from the room; once they meet for real and succeed in evading Walter’s attacks for the first time, the room stops healing Henry, and becomes open to hauntings that actively harm him.
The titular room is Henry’s place of refuge and comfort, at first, but it’s also his ultimate enemy. This is true the entire game, not just after Walter’s influence begins to infect the space. He’ll die if he stays here. He has precious little food, and during gameplay he gives away his last bottle of chocolate milk (milk being one of Kristeva’s confessed personal objects of great disgust, in a moment of fun serendipity). He has no one to interact with, and even though it’s stated in game that he was not a social guy before he was cursed, once you’re down to zero everything seems like a lifeline. Eventually, of course, he’ll be literally killed by the curses that infect the room. He can’t stay. He needs to be born, and he knows it. It’s a false security, and it intrinsically can’t last.
Walter and Henry aren’t the only figures central to the game, though. There is, of course, a third pillar here: you. Er, me. Y’know, The Player. There is essentially nothing to Henry – this is part of why he exists primarily as a thematic contrast to Walter, and part of why it’s hard to ascribe much character to his actions. You’re Henry in large part. When he’s in the apartment you even control him in first person. You are the ultimate voyeur, in the same way that Henry is to Eileen and Walter is to Henry. And this is part of why Walter’s worlds and the creatures that populate them are on the surface so much more generic than the places and monsters of past games: applicability.
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I have this uncle who died in his apartment. I didn’t know him, really. From stuff I’ve been told he wasn’t a good guy. I was a kid, and we lived states away. I only met him a handful of times at big family parties. The only reason I ever think about him at all probably is because he died in his apartment, and even then I’ve only started thinking about him so much recently, in the last couple of years, because we’ve all been spending a lot more time in our apartments. It’s covid, bay bee. The reason I think about him so much is because when he died in his apartment, nobody knew. Nobody cared to check in. They only found him, weeks later, because his landlord went into his place because they had assumed he had run out on it because he hadn’t paid rent or responded to any communication, for weeks, because he was dead.
So I think about that a lot the last couple years.
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I mentioned that Walter’s hellscapes are mundane places and his monsters are other people and I do think this is a reflection of where the developers thought maybe a lot of their presumed audience was at when Silent Hill 4 came out. Which is pretty funny. But it’s real, too, for me. There’s not a lot that’s scarier for me as a trans person than An Only Vaguely Familiar Public Place With An Off Vibe. That’s alarm bell central. It’s hard out there, man. Rarely do I feel outright unsafe but often do I feel eyes. It’s difficult to tell a lot of the time if the eyes are real or if I’m inventing them, and that doubt can make it even harder to feel confident in my place in perfectly normal spaces. Just yesterday I was actively frightened waiting in line for the bathroom in an inexplicably crowded gas station in the middle of nowhere in Iowa. You just never know when it’s going to be a problem. I was never the most confident person, but this low level thrum of unease colors every moment of public life. In talking about abjection in an academic sense and especially when talking about fiction it’s easy to forget that part of it is that it is upsetting by nature. But in life it sharpens me. I know who I am.
It’s a harsh dichotomy – every day I am more visibly transgender in more irreversible physical ways. Every day I become more obviously Neither Male Nor Female and while I love this about myself and I am truly happy with these changes they are the same changes that make me less safe and more vulnerable in ways that become harder and harder to cover up with clothes and masks. It would be easy to retreat to my womb, metaphorically. I want to, sometimes. I work remotely on a permanent basis. I live literally across the street from the grocery store. My girlfriend is here, my cats are here, my friends are online.
But I am transforming. Every week I stab myself with a needle. I force through this needle the fluid that makes my body into what I want it to be. A violent transmogrification. I feel the most beautiful in these moments. They are moments of clarity, of self expression, of definition by rejection. I am not a man. I am a woman. This needle in my leg is my signature. Living in fear of living in fear can’t be the way.
I am not who I was. I oppose that. I am becoming. Every week I am new. I need to tear away.
I want to be born.
Silent Hill 2
2001
Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness
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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.
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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.
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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.
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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.
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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.
Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.
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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.
I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.
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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.
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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.
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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.
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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.
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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.
Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.
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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.
I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.
Silent Hill
1999
I apparently got the “Bad” ending and there’s a bunch of stuff I missed. Despite the weird controls on console and the unreliable camera, this still holds up as one of the best survival horror games. That being said, the only way I beat the boss was by exploiting an ammo glitch the devs put in themselves.
Kirby Star Allies
2018
To some people it might be perfectly fine but I hold this era of mainline Kirby to a very high standard that this doesn't come close to living up to design-wise or aesthetically
Live A Live
2022
My game of 2022. A brilliant game that is a heartwarming tribute to life itself. The game is insanely charming with lovable characters, a fun battle system, and a Story that can only be told through the medium of video games. My favorite characters are Akira and Oersted, The soundtrack is also brilliant with one of the best boss themes in video games. Also the voice acting in the remake really does make the scenes more emotional and engaging.