Actually a pretty amazing game, and can only assume it's hard-to-describe distance from the first four is why it's rated so much lower. There are aspects here I believe to be straight-up more effective than any other Silent Hill, then there are things that are entirely absent, like the horror and combat. I think this is the first time I wished that this wasn't a video game or didn't have to be a Silent Hill, for the enhanced freedom to drink up the environment made the exploration segments feel like watching a Lynch film. Having an American team, to me, made the environment genuinely feel American. I've been to places that look exactly like these locales! I can fill in their smells and see the phantoms of where people would be. The decay and desolation felt more real to me, more effectively liminal. Other than the shitty reveal, this may also be the best-written Silent Hill (dialogue and character-wise, the semiotics were weak). I spent the whole game speculating Harry's role, thinking he abandoned his daughter and ultimately destroyed both of them. I thought for a bit that Dahlia was Cheryl at her absolute lowest, hooking up with her father without either realizing it. Shit left a lot of room for speculation, and I really wish they didn't lay all their cards out. All these broken women coming in and out of Harry's life, all of which you get to choose if you be creepy towards or respect certain boundaries, I felt was building towards a greater reveal. The ice-otherworld sequences I could've done without. By the second time, it had already become confusing and unmemorable. Luckily they don't take up that much of the game. The atmosphere really is such a boon to making the experience feel terrific. There were a few points where I just stared at the side of a building, letting Best Game Composer work his magic on me. I read every sign the PS2 gave a decent resolution to and got disappointed every time I accidentally progressed before getting to check every single corner for details. What else... Michelle and Dahlia had killer fits, and apparently they change off your behaviour? Really cool. Also a little disappointing that all the therapy mini-games just led to a pretty general ending and a meaningless astrology reading, but I don't know how much was reasonable to expect. They were engaging, which is the best I can ask for. I'd heard it did a lot more with it's psychology mechanics, and was expecting it to, than it actually felt like it did. The ways it does utilize them, however, I found very fun. By no means a masterpiece, definitely worth playing, at least to hang out in.

[post-note: in the vein of the game, this "review" is a deeply personal and voyeuristic look into myself. it's alright, you can come in. after all, half of the five people that might see this have already looked away with this foreword, and no one consequential in my life will ever find this.]

I sobbed through pretty much every second of this. Brief respites of laughter cut the raw resonance of emotion I brought upon myself. But it's not art, is it? It's a voyeuristic journal entry, a thing not to be anything, a mere piece of appreciation that likely picked up traction accidentally through wearing the skin of a fan-game. It's a self-evaluation tucked away in the infinite somewhere of the wired world. Yet, it's identically the exact experience I seek from any piece of media: to be profoundly overcome by a contextualization or re-formatting of the self. My suffering is a tangible existence both in what goes said and unsaid within this space. It rears it's head, it fucks with me, it doubts me, it tells me exactly what I want to hear, it tells me what I left behind, what I wish I had. It speaks to me in all the ways I speak to myself. I haven't experienced art. I've experienced another human being. I looked through her past, her personas, her friends and her dreams, and yet selfishly in her, I only saw myself. I think a lot of the untenable, uncrossable bridge, the endless space that exists between our minds. I'm so scared to talk sometimes, though I know I have so much to say. I can't translate myself except through my words, yet civil standards, self-doubt and floating judgements cut my tongue and halt my pen. I want to transcribe my bridge. I want people to see beyond the body, the voice, the hobbies, the opinions, even the words, to express the rawest form of self, of the magical thing of self that I love and no one else can feel, and to still be loved as that thing, to nullify this whole social game we oppress ourselves with. Madotsuki's Closet was perhaps the closest I've ever felt to standing on someone else's bridge. Even with my closest friends, their physicality and our shared history of things other than the self makes me incapable of willing myself to cleanly pierce through them. I don't mean to imply some odd parasocial bond I have with the creator, for as I said, I stared into it's abyss and only saw myself. It's part of why I sobbed. Her introduction to transness through Yume Nikki with a "there are worse ways" became my exposure through anti-SJW YouTube content making disgusting one who could be so presumptuous and fetishistic to dare challenge the institution of gender. Her jokes and irony became my own mask for online engagement that I renew time and time again to appease the people who use this space as a playground for pleasure. Her messages with her friends became my own hollowness of a lifetime of cowering in fear of my true self, then finally overcoming it all to be met with "oh, cool". The young girl on the bench (and oh GOD did she crush me) became my own wishes to simply have been born different. She became my desire not to be trans or trying to be female, but just to have been born it with the privilege of not having to question. She became my unalterable skeleton oppressing me from the deepest recesses of my flesh. She became, at once, all from my childhood I was while also being all the hundreds of little signs I missed and didn't have the language to will or question. She became who I dressed up as or roleplayed under the covers or in my literal closet. She became my opting into silence to not hear my own voice, my tantrums after haircuts, my rejection of masculine hobbies, my starving myself to be shorter and more frail, my fiction writing to create worlds and characters to escape into, my longing for death as my body turned itself more and more uninhabitable with the loss of that childhood androgyny. She became the childhood and happiness and optimism and celebrated, babied, blissful ignorance that everyone seemed entitled to up until their teens, but that I felt I had been born without. I appropriated Bagenzo's literal dreams, and I feel dirty for it. I took them and imposed myself on them. I overwrote her, and I can replay her, share her, discuss her like a thing to be chewed, swallowed and shat out. Yet, in overriding her, I filled in the holes of myself. I paved the narrative of pursuit of traditional femininity that underlied my whole childhood. I bridged the gap between the art I enjoy and their reflections on the person I am. Much like Yume Nikki, much like the thousands of fan theories on it, I took someone elses dreams and projected myself on them, not until they made sense, but until I did. This was perfect, exemplary of the very things I want from life and art. Yet, what was it that I am considering exemplary? Is the game a perfect product, is Bagenzo a perfect writer, or is what I have taken in a perfect addition to my self? I think rankings disgust me now, as do all the arguing I've done to uphold opinions and all the art I've experienced for other people. I'm not going to bother answering... the void has listened long enough. Perhaps I've let one of you onto my bridge, or perhaps not. Perhaps I appear insane, self-indulgent, pretentious. That's all right, as long as my bridge exists for now in this magical somewhere. As for me, don't worry, I've made peace with most of this stuff. But something tells me you might not have seen "me" here, right? You saw whatever could be morphed into you. If art is to be defined as anything, perhaps it's that.