Leaving Silent Hill

 Well, I beat Silent Hill 2 (the 2024 remake).

It actually turns out that I was far closer to the end than I had thought. But the final part of the game involves two difficult boss fights - I died once against the penultimate fight and, like, three or four times against the final fight.

I'm given to understand that various choices and activities will lead to different endings, which can even change the identity of the final boss, though I think both are similar in form and mechanics.

Again, I sometimes feel a little ambivalent about how careful I want to be with spoilers, given that this is, after all, a 24-year-old game. But just for safety:

Spoilers Ahead

The Lakeview Hotel (and I wonder if its name had any influence on Remedy's Oceanview Motel and Casino/Hotel/Hotel and Spa) is the game's last extensive "dungeon," but unlike the hospital, our trip into the Otherworld version of the hotel is actually primarily a processional/victory lap before we face down the final bosses. (EDIT: actually, there's a theory that the intact hotel that we first enter is, in fact, the otherworld one. As we explore it, it grows more decrepit, but when we receive the dark revelation in room 312, we're actually taken to the real one, which is burned out and destroyed).

Reaching room 312, James discovers the truth he's been denying to himself: that he was responsible for Mary's death, smothering her with a pillow in the middle of the night.

His motivations aren't really clear until we get to the final cutscene after the last boss, but essentially, it's like this:

Mary had a terminal prognosis from whatever disease she had - some kind of flesh-eating thing that left her disfigured and in pain. Released from the hospital, not because she was getting better, but because she wouldn't be well enough to travel home again, she came back to their house and James killed her.

Mary's spirit (we assume - not going to go full conspiracy corkboard, but emotionally it feels like we're talking to her at the end of the game) forgives James - she didn't want the pain anymore, and it sounds as if she was actually grateful to him for euthanizing her. But James confesses that his motives weren't so pure - it wasn't about relieving her of the pain, but because he wanted his own life back, to move on from this terrible period and no longer be trapped in the ongoing grief and suffering.

Whatever your thoughts on the ethics and morals of euthanasia (personally I'm deeply uncomfortable with it, but I also haven't ever had a very painful terminal disease, so I don't judge those who seek it out) James certainly didn't get explicit consent, and by his own admission, it wasn't really about her. He is a murderer, even if we can sympathize with his motives and understand the degree to which he feels a need to atone.

Indeed, it seems that all of the horror and pain he experiences in Silent Hill is, in fact, a kind of supernatural extension of his own guilt and need to feel punished.

Notably, the penultimate boss is our second round with Pyramid Head - but it's not just one, it's two.

On its surface, this might be really hard to understand: were there always multiple Pyramid Heads going around, and we just assumed he was unique? The interpretation I've seen online is that each of these represents the guilt he feels over taking a human life. And after his fight with Eddie, he's now killed two people, the first with understandable but at best debatable justification, the second being a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense. In other words, until the Eddie fight, it's the same Pyramid Head we find in the apartment buildings, the hospital, and the Labyrinth.

Upon dealing enough damage to them (thankfully they seem to share health, so you can get damage on both of them. Unlike in Blue Creek Apartments, the arena is a big empty space, so you actually need to use one Pyramid Head to block the other, though I don't think they ever damage one another,) the Pyramid Heads march forward and then lift their helmets up just high enough to fit the tip of their spears beneath them and then impale themselves on their own heads. It seems that James has proven that he no longer needs this subconscious symbol of his guilt to process it, and their purpose is fulfilled. (I'm given to understand Pyramid Head shows up in future games, which some have said is a weird kind of violation of the principle that the monsters are specific to their protagonists).

Shortly thereafter, we traverse a bit more of the Otherworld until we eventually climb to a massive room with a single bed and Mary waiting there. Here, I suspect there might be some differences depending on the ending you get, but James swiftly realizes that Mary here is not Mary at all, but Maria, and he refuses to stay with her. Yes, Maria was killed by the two Pyramid Heads before their fight, but that's, what, the third time they've killed her?

It's clear at this point that Maria is the town's most insidious monster - we even start to get some hints that perhaps all the swarming insect-monsters we've seen have actually been part of her or generated by her.

The design here is less gruesome than I expected it to be, but it is striking: she is suspended in a walking bed-frame, hanging upside-down (much as she was on the rack before the Pyramid Head fight) and periodically sending out swarms of insects. The fight has three phases (I died at least once on each, but the game treats each phase as a checkpoint,) the first being in that room with the bed, the second being in flooded, dark tunnels (similar to the Flesh Lip fight, she spends most of that phase stalking around the grated ceiling above us and then dropping down,) and the last phase is once again in a brightly-lit arena in the rubble-filled foundations of the building, most of what is above us having collapsed.

It's an endurance fight - careful dodging seems to be the most important thing.

Anyway, in the ending I got, the "Leave" ending, which seems to be probably the most straightforward one but also probably the "best" one, after ending Maria, he has that last meeting with Mary's spirit, receiving both her forgiveness and the letter meant for Laura.

So, despite my earlier impressions, yeah, it seems Laura is just a kid. How did Mary know her? No freaking clue. Again, my conspiracy-theory brain almost wonders if she's not actually real, but some kind of spirit of the town, perhaps a more innocent aspect of it, or, in a darker interpretation, a seed to plant more of this dark horror elsewhere. But again, I think the straightforward reading is just that she's an innocent kid, and James takers her out of the town in the end.

We do get one last scene with Angela, prior to the Pyramid Heads fight. At first, she mistakes us for her "Mama," but then realizes it's James. She asks for the knife back, but he refuses to give it to her. The world around her is on fire, and James comments on it. She is surprised he can see it, but says that, apparently, that's what things look like for her all the time.

It's a darkly unsatisfying conclusion to her arc. Unlike Eddie, who was overtaken and turned into a monster by his haunting, Angela seems unlikely to become a threat to anyone else, but there's very little sense of hope that she's going to escape the torment she's suffering (I'm assuming she killed her abusive dad, and maybe her mother couldn't forgive her). But again, we really just don't know.

Funnily enough, the game ends, after the credits, with some statistics. How many times you died, how many bullets you fired, what your favored weapon was (Steel Pipe for me - I guess I was conserving ammo a lot?) There's a NG+ mode, though I think I'm content to leave the game behind for now.

Within the Otherworld version of the Hotel, we actually do encounter a few monsters, but they aren't really a threat to us - I think that, because the cause of James' guilt is no longer subconscious and repressed, but out in the open, the monsters don't really have any power anymore.

It's kind of fascinating: in Jungian psychology, one of the most powerful ideas is that of the Shadow (something I've written about a lot here talking about Alan Wake). The entire game is, in a bizarre way, almost like therapy for James - he's in denial about what he did to his wife, and the process of going through this nightmare finally brings him into this confrontation with the truth. The Shadow, in the Jungian sense, is the truths about ourselves that we don't believe, often relating to desires and drives. James, I think, probably didn't think that he was capable of killing his wife. He didn't think that he would crave the release from the stress and pain of caring for a dying loved one so much that he would take such a drastic step.

The achievement you get for beating the double Pyramid Heads is "Obsolete," and I think this implies that the purpose they'd had all this time was to confront us with that shadow-truth. While it's filtered through the video-gamey medium of "shooting them with a bunch of bullets," the fight against them can be seen as James demonstrating that he's internalized and incorporated that shadow into his consciousness. Previously, this part of himself had been externalized as Pyramid Head, but now that he has incorporated it into his sense of self, the helmeted monster is no longer necessary.

Jung had proposed that working with our shadows, bringing them out of the subconscious and into consciousness, lets us be a truer version of ourselves, and lets us gain some control over how that shadow expresses itself, potentially guiding it to something more constructive and aligned with our moral/ethical outlook.

Thus, we might see Pyramid Head as an opposing force to the other monsters in Silent Hill - indeed, this actually gives us some context to the visions of Pyramid Head leaving a trail of monster corpses in their wake, and their many times attacking Maria. Maria offers James, in myriad ways, a tempting offer to find comfort in staying with her and just settling down and abandoning the mission of finding this truth. I'm given to understand that some endings of the game lead to this. Maria represents denial, giving in to the repression of memory. She's seductive (and I think there are many papers to be written about the Male Gaze and this game) but I think the truly seductive aspect of her is the absolution of guilt found in forgetting.

It's an irony - that something so appealing on the surface is the evil thing, while something as monstrous and terrifying as Pyramid Head is, like, the good guy in all of this. That's of course just one interpretation.

I did also read online that the "Strange Photos" you can find throughout the game actually make up a code that says "You've been here for twenty years," implying that James is actually stuck traversing the horrors of Silent Hill in a loop, and that this remake is technically a sequel.

Of course, my other experience with Survival Horror (though I realized that Bioshock might also count, so Alan Wake II might not be my first) made this idea of time loops absolutely central to it. Alan Wake II's timeline is deeply disorienting, with narrative choices that very explicitly discredit an interpretation that it's just being portrayed in anachronic order, and show that Alan's genuine experience of things is out of order.

James' experience is certainly purgatorial in nature. He will go forward with the understanding of what he has done, but perhaps now that it's conscious and not suppressed in his subconsciousness, he'll be able to process it and perhaps do what he needs to atone. I think his taking Laura out of the town is perhaps the start of this, but it's left very much up to interpretation and speculation where things go from here.

The final shot has the two of them disappearing into the fog as they leave the cemetery near the rest stop where we started the game. One hopes that they return to a world that makes some degree of sense (to the degree that our world makes any sense, of course. Kind of fascinating to me that this was originally made in and presumably takes place in 2001, which, at least for people of my generation, felt like the last days of "normalcy" before September 11th started the cascade into the deteriorating world that we find ourselves in now - so often I wonder what might have happened if we had had Al Gore fighting a War on Climate Change instead of Bush's War on Terror, and what world we might live in now had that been the case).