I love this game. I get it. I think the setting is so rich and really captures the odd sensation of being in a public place that shouldn't be empty, and I love the way Harry's straight-laced goofy dad personality comes out through his slightly weird line reads. It's interesting to compare this game to Resident Evil, because they're such contemporaries, but Silent Hill feels so much gunkier and grungier, bigger, darker.

There's a sense that you're stumbling through something that cannot be fully illuminated in Silent Hill. What happened to create these creatures? Why is there a big moth trying to kill me? Where is my child? These are the eternal questions.

At first, I was scared to play games like this, but after getting acquainted with this murky, segmented nightmare town, I hate to leave.

A really interesting little exercise in satire, and quite nicely done in terms of commentary on the games industry landscape and how it's changed in the past 30 odd years from both corporate, consumer, and developer perspectives.

The design is quite nice as well, it uses uses some existing screens from the first set of Pokémon games in a slightly more inventive way than most standard rom hacks. A little bit of thought goes a long way there.

The tomes that tell you some background on Tajiri's history are quite beautifully presented too. Cute, real, and a bit sad :'-)

I can't believe it. I finally played through this legendary game, and it is more than deserving of its status as a touching, gorgeous exploration of guilt, trauma, and wrongdoing.

I loved how the dialogue performances, while much better acted than the first game in the series, seem subtly self-aware of tropey and strange voice acting in games enough to lean into the oddness of the medium to emphasise erratic, nonsensical behaviour in all of its characters - but very, very effectively in James in particular.

Maria is also, while a sort of surface level, cringe female character, also a pretty interesting note on gender and how men see women. A hollow ghost of male visions of womanhood made alive, pathetic, desperate, and ultimately, discarded and disgusting to her own creator.

The Historical Society sequence is my favourite part of the game. It's unbelievably well-designed. A gorgeous, disorientating, hellish environment. The holes are iconic. And I would, most certainly, dive in.

I had a pretty good time playing through this game. The plot leaves a lot to be desired and the game feels aggressively linear, but the combat is pretty interesting and fun, and I particularly loved a lot of the enemy designs. The summons can become motorbikes and stuff. That's cool and good. I really love the way Orphan looks, and the goth gibberish it spouts before battle.

The missions feel kinda tacked on to me - do I like running around the Gran Pulse plains over and over? Not really. But it is nice to have ONE thing to do other than progress the story. I just wish, more than anything, that the crystarium wasn't locked off and you could just do as much of it as you wanted from the beginning. That alone would make the game ten times better.

My ultimate conclusion is: it's ok.