After exiting the hospital, things remain nightmarish: we're still in the rust-covered Otherworld as we follow after Laura and... process what's happened.
Silent Hill is a psychological horror story, of course: the monsters are grotesque, but they're clearly some kind of reflection of what is going on inside of James Sunderland's head. The question I find myself really asking, though, is to what extent the version of events that we're witnessing in game is in any way objective.
So far, since the beginning of the game, we've encountered four ostensibly real people, who at least seem plausibly real compared with the inhuman monsters we've encountered (strangely, Pyramid Head is the only monster we've met that in theory could just be a normal guy under that giant helmet, though he'd have to be very strong to wear such a massive piece of metal and wield such a giant weapon).
But if we assume that they are real (and if you ask me, jury's still out on Maria at least, but that invites us to wonder about the others) I also feel like they're reacting to things in a way that might suggest that their experience of the town is not the same as James'.
I also don't freaking trust any of them.
Currently, I've made it to what I think of as the third "dungeon" in the game. We started off in the two apartment buildings, then we had the hospital, and now, well, things are getting a bit more surreal. I'm always a little ambivalent about how careful to be about spoilers for a 24-year-old game (even if the version of it I'm playing only came out last year). But just for the sake of the spoiler-conscious, I'll put in a cut:
The outdoor section following the hospital is interesting: we go down the streets of the town, where there are monsters to come out and attack us, but mostly in wide-open spaces. In retrospect, I felt I was maybe foolish in doing some thorough exploring, because there were some monsters I might have skipped, and instead expended ammunition on them. I did also find ammo, so it might have been a wash.
Truthfully, I'm actually heading into the third dungeon (which we'll get to) with more resources than I've had since I started the game - I think I have over 50 handgun rounds and five of both kinds of healing item.
I do think that at some point while traversing the town, I transitioned back into the real/fog world - possibly while passing through a tunnel in which I had to walk over a grate with some new kind of monster climbing along the bottom (or maybe it was just some non-boss Flesh Lips?) I didn't bother fighting them - I ran past, taking I think one hit, but figuring it would be a waste to fight them unless they could get up on the upper side of the grate.
After exiting that tunnel, I went back through the park where I met Maria, and actually did a fair amount of backtracking through familiar territory. While I'd done some of that pre-tunnel in what was unquestionably "rust world," and found writing on the wall of the bar with the jukebox that was addressed specifically to James, once I transitioned back to the real/fog world, I didn't find any more monsters. It was tense, but I also started to get the sense that this was a necessary interlude. A horror game needs moments of quiet and safety to reset our adrenaline. Much of this path is where we went with Maria, which is given some poignancy given her death in the hosptial.
I... I think I have some vague sense from pop culture osmosis that Maria is some kind of deception by the hellish power of this place, but I do think that the cruelty of her death would really push my meter toward the "maybe she's actually just an innocent person" meter.
However, the other NPCs have not been doing anything effective to earn my trust: Laura has always been a cruel little brat, and while her youth makes James' insistence on trying to look catch up with her and keep her safe admirable, I really think she's giving off serious "demon child" vibes, especially after she locked us up with Flesh Lip. Again, though, that being said, I wonder whether she's seeing James the way we see him: his protective instinct might come off as being just another monster coming after her.
I'm reminded of a quest in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where you go to a town and fight off a bunch of daedra (kinda-sorta-demons, but it's more complicated) only to later discover that you had been dosed with magical hallucinogenic drugs, and that you had actually unwittingly massacred a bunch of innocent villagers.
Psychological horror is often predicated on the notion that we're seeing things from a particular character's perspective, and that that perspective is flawed and inaccurate. What James actually did remains unrevealed by the game so far. He seems to have inhuman calm and patience when dealing with other people, but is that just how he sees himself?
Let's talk about the other NPCs:
We actually meet Angela the second time in the rust-world, in the Blue Creek Apartments. Maria will also find us again in the rust version of the hospital, so it's clear that this isn't an exclusive realm to James. Our third encounter with her is in the park: an area that has actually been free on monsters both times we've visited it so far. She's still deeply disturbed, and winds up running off when James tries to calm her down.
We meet Eddie for a third time in the entrance to the prison (that third dungeon I've just started). And every time we've seen him, he's given creepier and creepier vibes. A body lies face-down on a table, and unlike the body in the fridge when we first meet Eddie, this time he admits that he killed the guy - initially claiming that it was self-defense, that the guy had "come at him" (though given that the guy is seated on a bench at the table makes that seem unlikely) and then changing his story to merely seeing murderous intent within the guy's eyes.
Eddie is basically confirmed a murderer, but when James gently tries to confront Eddie with this fact, Eddie turns the gun on James, only to then laugh it off as if this was a joke - which does leave the question of the dead guy super open.
I will note, I've become kind of a "red yarn on a corkboard" nut for alchemical imagery in games (and other media,) and there have been references to a dichotomy of red and white here (one motif in alchemy,) and I can't help but notice that we have four NPCs here. Alchemy of course has its four elements, but those elements also have corresponding humors, and those humors are often used to describe personality types (you often see popular fictional group protagonists sorted this way, like the Ninja Turtles or the four leads in Sex in the City).
I wonder if the four James meets might correspond with the humors. Angela sure seems melancholic, seeming depressed, fearful, and indolent. The others are a little less obvious. Maria could be sanguine - she's all smiles and jokes, and while her color is more purple than red, if you ignore all the "she's a weird doppelganger of Mary and weirdly flirty for a nightmare-horror-scenario" she's the warmest and most likable NPCs we encounter. Also, the last time we see her, her blood splatters out from Pyramid Head's blade. So, fun.
The other two I admit don't fit quite as easily. Choleric can be associated with aggression, short-temperedness, and irrationality, which could potentially fit with Laura, though it's also often associated with anger, and Laura might fuck us over multiple times, but anger doesn't seem to be the primary emotion so much as a childish lack of empathy, as if this is all just a game.
Phlegmatic can describe being reserved, low-spirited, forgetful, etc. I guess we could imagine Eddie might fit this description: while our first encounter with him has him in a full panic, the time we see him in the movie theater, he's near-catatonic. In the prison, he's actually looking and talking as if he's about to blow his brains out, but then does this weird routine claiming that he killed that dude in self defense, and walks away feeling less like a danger to himself and more like a danger to James.
Ah, yes, so let's talk about the prison:
When we meet Angela in the park, we can dig up a key to the Silent Hill Historical Society. Going into the small town museum, we come across a bizarre stairway: leading down into the bedrock, we descend for what feels like a huge distance (I think I remember seeing something about this in Jacob Geller's video about games that don't "fake" long distances.) James then has to throw himself into not one but two seemingly-bottomless pits, and then winds up somehow in a prison opened initially as a POW camp for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War (Silent Hill is in Maine).
Spatially, I have no idea how this makes sense. We're far below ground level, and I think even below the lake. While the apartments and the hospital made some sense (though it's noted that it's unusual to have a psychiatric hospital right in the middle of town,) this feels like we've truly slipped into oneiric logic.
Our gradual entrance into the prison does imply that some really horrifying things happened here: a picture has a caption that suggests that prisoners could choose to be executed via strangling or skewering as a kind of last taste of freedom (meaning that choice). I'm not saying that there's any ethical form of capital punishment, but I don't think either of those methods have ever been considered legally acceptable in the United States (though given how things are going these days, who knows?) Indeed, if someone was hanged and they strangled, that was considered a botched execution, as the method's supposed to snap their neck (and in theory kill them faster to not draw out the pain, though... it's all fucked, you know).
It's interesting, actually: there's all this stuff in the game alluding to some supernatural element that has always been active in the town. I actually think that the game doesn't need this to tell a compelling story, but it doesn't hurt it either. I don't think James actually cares about the deeper lore of the setting.
Anyway, while I was able to stock up quite a bit before getting to the prison, if it's anything like my experience in the hospital, I assume I'll be sucking on fumes by the time I get out.
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