you will believe an undead serial killer thinks an apartment is his mom!
not really an unfairly maligned or forgotten masterpiece, but probably something more interesting than that, a brilliant and marred text. fully convinced this is one of the smartest games about our responsibilities to each other as people, and how that ties into the nature of urban living where caring about others seems to entail some element of seedy voyeurism and you are faced with the immediate proximity of violence that you are powerless to stop and yet somehow obligated to ameliorate (yet less convinced that the fine-tuning and balance issues that make this a little more abrasive than it had to be wouldn't have benefited from, y'know, not being developed while they were also developing sh3). don't get me wrong, most of the time it's being abrasive for a reason, and, more importantly, for a precise, expressive reason: giving you the womblike comfort of your healing apartment only to strip it away and fill it with inexplicable, damaging horrors (walter's childhood redux, wisdom received), forcing you to backtrack through the settings of your past failure to protect others as their vengeful ghosts try to prevent you from protecting the only one you can save, the deliberately gross and goofy sound design which speaks to the inassimilable strangeness of, for the first time in the series, exploring the oneiric recesses of a psychology wholly unrelated to yours. it's not really -cool- and it's not really scary, it's sad and disgusting and frustrating above all, but it builds confidently off the previous games in fleshing out what we owe kids, as a society around them, and how we displace our pain and fear and anger and need for control onto them. the final boss dies wrapped in umbilical cord and impaled with fragments of his mother, made human again in the inextricable frailty of his lifelong search for a maternal figure in an abusive lie. it's a great sendoff to the series even if what comes before it feels gratingly half-baked at times. rip team silent rip to the REAL silent hill 5 please take a moment to pour one out for the greatest to ever do it
not really an unfairly maligned or forgotten masterpiece, but probably something more interesting than that, a brilliant and marred text. fully convinced this is one of the smartest games about our responsibilities to each other as people, and how that ties into the nature of urban living where caring about others seems to entail some element of seedy voyeurism and you are faced with the immediate proximity of violence that you are powerless to stop and yet somehow obligated to ameliorate (yet less convinced that the fine-tuning and balance issues that make this a little more abrasive than it had to be wouldn't have benefited from, y'know, not being developed while they were also developing sh3). don't get me wrong, most of the time it's being abrasive for a reason, and, more importantly, for a precise, expressive reason: giving you the womblike comfort of your healing apartment only to strip it away and fill it with inexplicable, damaging horrors (walter's childhood redux, wisdom received), forcing you to backtrack through the settings of your past failure to protect others as their vengeful ghosts try to prevent you from protecting the only one you can save, the deliberately gross and goofy sound design which speaks to the inassimilable strangeness of, for the first time in the series, exploring the oneiric recesses of a psychology wholly unrelated to yours. it's not really -cool- and it's not really scary, it's sad and disgusting and frustrating above all, but it builds confidently off the previous games in fleshing out what we owe kids, as a society around them, and how we displace our pain and fear and anger and need for control onto them. the final boss dies wrapped in umbilical cord and impaled with fragments of his mother, made human again in the inextricable frailty of his lifelong search for a maternal figure in an abusive lie. it's a great sendoff to the series even if what comes before it feels gratingly half-baked at times. rip team silent rip to the REAL silent hill 5 please take a moment to pour one out for the greatest to ever do it