Silent Hill 2

by noodles on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 21:14 - Comments: 0

I guess the best person to write a game about psychological horror is someone that has genuinely troubling psychological problems. At least I imagine that the gamedesigner Masashi Tsuboyama spends his days picking imaginary cockroaches in his hair while mumbling about how doctors are killing his pet turtles on odd weekends.

What I'm trying to say is that Silent Hill 2 is a sick and twisted game. I don't mean that as in disgusting, I mean it as in being a very disturbing game. It's filled with metaphors, psychological trials and plain out brainfucks. Nothing seems to be random, everything has a meaning and represents something and can be interpreted in some way or another, all connected to the story.

You take on the role of James Sunderland. You start out in a restroom just outside of the town called Silent Hill. You're here because you received a letter from your wife, asking you to come here and meet her at your special place. Thing is, she's been dead for quite a while. Hey, if my dead wife asked me in a letter to come see her, I'd probably be too curious to pass it up too. Either that or figure out when I have to surrender my credit card and pin-number. But unlike the character that I'm supposed to immerse myself into, I would probably have forgotten about the whole thing and turned around the first time that I was attacked by what can only be described as a human-being with a melded torso. I would at least not continued on my own when said creature spewed bile all over me.
Navigating your way through the town of Silent Hill, which has the worlds worst case of fog that just won't leave, you soon find a handful of people that you, for some odd reason, never find enough reason to stick with. I won't go too deep into what happens because the story and experience is really what the game is all about.

I must once again underline how easy I immerse myself into games and how I don't enjoy horror-games; I soon realized that I could not keep both my sanity and said lit path to imaginationland. To cope I had to avoid seeing myself as Mr. Sunderland and more focus on controlling a character, trying to keep the bastard alive. Even with this mindset I was really uneasy. This game has more atmosphere than any game I can mention and it's due to one specific medium: audio.
Every piece of music, ambient noise, sound-effect and shriek is designed to be as disturbing and terrifying as possible. And they're executed in the same perfected manner. A mechanic in the game makes a small radio in your pocket start picking up white noise whenever a foe is near enough, and I have never - I usually don't use the word "hate", because I feel that it's a strong word that shouldn't be taken lightly - hated a sound so much. Combined with whatever sound said enemy is making made me want to turn off the game and give up. But thankfully, my stubbornness is stronger than my fear of video games.

Grabbing the controller in this games felt pretty natural coming directly from Resident Evil. Semi-fixed camera and the up-is-forward joystick with somewhat logical buttons. That is, until fighting gets into the picture. I'm told that the combat-system was designed to work the way it does to simulate the fact that you're not playing a trained soldier, you're playing a non-athletic nutcase that seems to be interested in necrophilia in some way. There is no finesse to the way James swings his weapons, instead substituting technique with grip-it-and-rip-it(-over-the-monsters-head-until-it-stops-moving-and-your-radio-stops-sparking).

Survival horror is usually about managing your resources and using your bullets as efficiently you can. This game is really about surviving. You're not a military special forces just happening to be at the zombie place at the zombie time, you're an average guy trying to find your dead wife and not get killed by monsters.

I'm trying to figure out who I can recommend this game to and I'm somewhat stumped. The horror-fanatics is a given, but even they have to be divided into two categories. The ones that get off on psychological horror and the ones that classify Left 4 Dead as horror. This game is for the first group, the ones that find suspense, metaphors, visuals and straight up mindfucks interesting and entertaining.
Me? I want to exorcise and burn every copy ever made. If not for my dislike for how they make me feel, then to save future generations from living though the sick mind of a Japanese game-designer.
But what you do get is to experience one of the strangest and most twisted script in video game history. Kind of like if Fight Club had been a horror-flick.

tags: 2 silent hill