gentlemen, believe me when i tell you this is one of the most overhyped games i have ever had the misfortune of playing in my entire life. i am a souls game freak; i love this shit, but i will take on anyone who says otherwise in hand-to-hand combat. please let me save you $60 by telling you the entire experience that is lords of the fallen.

after playing for 30 hours i can say i've never been baited this hard by a game before in my entire life. i waited months for this game after i first heard about it, and after beating it i wish i'd never known of it's existence. the only good thing about this game is that is pretty as fuck, except half of that credit goes to unreal engine itself. the world does look stunning, but that is literally the only positive thing i have to say about this game (the judge cleric fight was good too).

for starters, i have an extremely good pc and this game still ran like dogshit at times despite constantly tweaking the settings. this alone will filter out a ton of players who can barely run the game. one second your fps is locked to your refresh rate, then you turn around and the game turns into a stop motion picture for a few seconds. apparently they're fixing it, but the few patches they've shipped since the start have made negligible differences. i hope it gets better for others.

a dev replied to me on steam after i left a negative review, and instead of acknowledging that, he instead decided to suck himself off boasting about the 194 weapons and shields, 339 armor pieces, and the 3 different endings to the game. oh you mean the 194 weapons that have no combat arts or anything uniquely special about them? the weapons that take their class animations (spear, dagger, greatsword, etc) and copy/paste them over and over again for almost every weapon that has that type, effectively making them all the same? the armor pieces that despite having different stats seem to have almost no defensive impact at all? this game is R1 simulator for what the dev claims is 35-40 hours of gameplay, but is it REALLY that much gameplay?

no.

the game takes forever to get through for a lot of reasons. first off being the absolute disgusting amount of enemies for what is basically no reason. this game takes add spam to an entirely new level, and it makes the game so fucking boring. for over 80% of the game, you'll be fighting the same 3 enemies: a dog, a guy with two axes, and a weird snake thing with a crossbow. i am not even exaggerating, you will find these enemies within the first 2-3 hours of gameplay and you'll be killing them for the next 25+ hours, just with hp and damage scaling added on top. they will occasionally sprinkle in some other enemies, but within the first few hours of the game, you'll have seen probably 80% of the enemies you will for the rest of the game.

you will find a new area, kill a bunch of the same enemies over and over, die, then run past them to get back to where you were before because killing them all again would waste another 15 minutes of your life. obviously it’s normal in any souls-like game to run through a place you’ve already been because you know where you’re going, but you’ll end up doing this with new places because it gets so fucking monotonous to kill the same mobs in every new area. mountain area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. fire area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. snow area? how about a dog, a guy with two axes, and an archer. i truly wish i was exaggerating, but i am not.

the game fakes difficulty simply through the idea of, “fuck it spawn a ton of enemies.” it's not even meticulously thought out in an effort to be challenging, it's just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. every single enemy in this game is easy to kill 1v1, so they counteract this by spawning in hordes of enemies to prevent you from focusing on one at a time. if the game had good combat, okay sure, but it just doesn’t. not only is it clunky, but it’s too simple to allow you to do anything “flashy” and kill off a bunch of enemies at once. at some point if you’re being chased by too many people, it is borderline impossible to fight them because if you engage you will just manage to get stuck on one of the 7 billion different tiny artifacts that for some reason lock your character on seemingly nothing at all. i have never gotten “stuck” in a game as much as i did in lotf. there will be massive gaps that you think you can run through, only to get stuck on fucking air and die. if you don’t get stuck, be ready for the camera to decide to lock onto the guy hanging on a tree 40 feet away instead of the clusterfuck of enemies right in front of you. don’t worry though, once you die you get about 10 seconds to reflect on your mistakes before the equivalent of the “you died” text comes on screen, only to then have you wait another 10 seconds before respawning.

every encounter in this game feels like it takes place in the most cramped area imaginable. you will have so many encounters with mini-bosses on a bridge, a staircase, a hallway, or some other tiny ass area that is just so frustratingly small to fight in. you’ll end up focusing more on trying to leave yourself some room to maneuver through than actually fighting the enemy/boss itself. once you beat this “boss,” you can expect to just see them casually walking around the world as a new enemy to fight, except you won’t be actually fighting them because they’re meatshields and you’ll be too busy fucking running past everything anyway looking for the next vestige.

finding a vestige in this game was the most enjoyable part of it because of how fucking rare they are. i swear i would go over an hour in between finding them at times. there’s these flower beds where you can create your own checkpoint/bonfires which seems like a good idea, but you only get seeds from killing bosses or spending 5,000 vigor to buy them (which is a lot for the majority of the game). these seeds are a fucking precious commodity, but the flower beds are often placed in the shittiest spots and sometimes you just have to gamble whether or not you’re going to come up on a vestige soon and realize you wasted the seed. they aren’t even permanent either, so you might just place one down only to realize you don’t even need to be in that area anymore. just ran through a new area and have no heals left? luckily there’s a flower bed here to save… oh wait i don’t have a seed. let me die, go farm low level enemies, go buy a seed, then sprint past a bunch of enemies again to get back to where i was.

then there’s the bosses. honestly, most of them aren’t even that difficult which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a souls-like game. one thing most of them have in common is that they just have an assload of health and you, despite having an upgraded weapon, still always seem to do almost no damage. the fights turn into an endurance battle as opposed to being a genuine challenge. instead of “holy fucking shit this is intense” it’s just “jesus christ this is taking forever.” it’s usually the environment around you that is the hardest part to deal with, either through you getting stuck on a pebble on the ground or not being able to roll through the sedan sized gap beside the boss who for some reason always manages to back themselves into a corner of the arena.

my biggest complaint, and this is a big one, is that two of the coolest looking bosses in the entire game are fucking full on gimmick fights (not even mentioning the minor gimmicks in a lot of other fights). you just spent an hour running past enemies to find the boss? well luckily for you, this entire boss is just spawning the same enemies you’ve been fighting the entire game! to partially spoil the ending i got, the final boss of the fucking game is this insane looking god-like creature and the fight was fantastic… just kidding it’s a gimmick fight where you kill a couple glowing enemies and then the game ends and you don’t even get to fight the boss itself. i was fucking shocked when that happened. imagine deacons of the deep from ds3 or phase 1 renalla from elden ring as a final boss of a game. that’s what i experienced.

this is where the nerds show up and say, “ahem ackshully you didn’t get the full expewience of all fwee endings.” you know what? you’re right, let’s talk about that.

one of the other endings doesn’t even have a fucking final boss, it’s just the boss before the actual final boss i got, how is this any better? the “true ending” boss kind of just takes a handful of attacks from random encounters throughout the game and puts them in one boss with some new additions thrown in, so sure, there was some kind of effort there. at least you actually get to fight this one.

“oh so why didn’t you go for the true ending boss?”

you know i really would have loved to, but the best part is that i got hard locked out of the other two endings just a few hours into the game. killing a main boss opens up a beacon to be cleansed, basically the red pillars in the sky. if you cleanse even one of them, you are immediately locked out of one of the endings (inferno for sure, but some people think this locks you out umbral too). if you progress too far into the game without starting various npc questlines or miss even one of the 21 steps (not even joking), you get locked out of the other ending (umbral), forcing you into the most boring conclusion to a video game i’ve ever experienced (radiance).

oh that’s okay, i’ll just go into ng+ and get the other ending i wanted! well… remember the lack of vestiges? welp, there are no vestiges in ng+. none. no fast traveling to parts of the map other than your own custom checkpoints. i don’t even have any words for this, it’s genuinely just a fucking stupid decision. this is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what souls-like games require.

i cannot believe i even wrote all of this out of pure frustration. i genuinely could keep going and i might edit this to add more but i am just tired of giving this game space in my head. despite how angry souls games make me, i actually love them, but lotf misses the mark so many times it makes you wonder if they even knew what they were aiming for.

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.