So, I suppose it's fitting with the genre, but I find myself having to use most healing items I find right when I get them. Silent Hill 2 (at least its remake, but I assume this is true of the original as well) doesn't have a traditional health bar. The screen goes red after you've been hit, and eventually a little medical cross appears when you're in dire straits. This was something you saw in this era of gaming with some of the original military shooters like Call of Duty (a series that I think has more or less been subsumed by its Modern Warfare sub-series). Here, I think it's meant to do two things: one is to reduce the UI clutter (most of the time we see nothing that isn't diagetic to the world around us) and two, to make you wonder if you really need to use that healing item or not. I do actually wonder if I'm being a little too liberal with them.
After the initial exploration of the streets and shots of the eponymous cursed burgh, you make your way into an apartment building. Once again, we have a kind of absurd puzzle-box, here not even trying to justify itself as a normal thing, where you have to find some coins with different symbols on them and fit them into slots. It's not terribly difficult once you have the coins, but that's the real trick: it prompts you to explore the building.
We get a new enemy type - these bizarre things that look like legs on both the top and bottom halves, but with its... er, arm-legs ending at flat caps just below the knee. They're actually a little easier to put down than the body-bag monsters, and don't have any projectile attacks, but they're fast, so you need to dodge around them.
Hints of other people in the town start to come here - early on, a creepy little girl bats a key out of reach behind a cage-like grate before vanishing, and toward the end of the level, we meet a panicking dude who is puking into a toilet, terrified. It's our character, James, who does his best to reassure the guy, but ultimately he leaves him behind, having to push farther.
The very fact that James isn't shitting himself with panic over what's happening here makes me wonder a lot about his personality. Through meta-knowledge, I know that he's sort of in a self-punishment phase of grief, and so I think the horrors that he witnesses are probably seen as kind of what he deserves.
After navigating the three accessible floors of the building (accessible only by solving the labyrinthine maze its locked doors make it into) we come into a room where James has his first encounter with the iconic Pyramid Head.
Strangely, this encounter ends with James trying, ineffectively, to shoot the monster, and the monster just... makes some weird gestures and leaves. There's a disturbingly sexual energy to Pyramid Head's introduction, seemingly copulating with one of the leg-monster creatures (in a manner that does not seem obviously consensual, though who the fuck knows with these things,) but also, in its interaction with James, almost this sense that its trying and failing to communicate something to him.
One thing I appreciate here is that the game is scary without being gory, at least so far. The monsters are off-putting, but in that psychologically "wrong" way rather than just disgusting. I don't mean to offend people who prefer their horror gory. In a lot of ways, I think it's just that I draw a line between the kind of horror I find entertaining and the kind I find merely upsetting. The design here is more up my alley, because it's all driving toward a mystery: what are these things? Why are these things? What is going on?
There are jump-scares when monsters appear around corners, but that feels in many ways more like a gameplay challenge than something just to spike my heart rate.
After meeting Pyramid Head, we step through a door and over a gap between the building and the next one, but as my achievements informed me, I've actually entered The Otherworld.
Somehow, despite the decay that has overtaken Silent Hill, the Otherworld pulls the level of decrepitude even farther into Fincherian filthiness. We're still in an apartment building of sorts, but rusty metal shows through the walls, and we actually knock holes in the wall to progress in some areas.
The enemies here are actually quite similar to the initial ones we encounter, though now they spew their bile in a radius when they die. We're now armed with a handgun, but it takes several shots to bring one of these down, so it's tempting to use the club to conserve ammo - just be quick with that dodge button.
(As it turns out, since starting this post, I've gotten past this "level.")
Once again, progression is tied to the completion of a puzzle: we need to find the hands for a grandfather clock and then set them each in the correct position. Certain rooms in this second apartment building will open once we've done so.
The Blue Creek Apartments have a few particularly memorable units: one appears to be perfectly clean and furnished when we first enter it - which actually sent a chill down my spine, as I anticipated some big twist to it. Shortly after we start moving around this part of the building, we return to this apartment to find it in full decay, and also with the door we came in now barred shut. Another room is a-flutter with moths - big moths provide keys to a puzzle to get through the room, but it's also just another moment of unease passing through here.
Also, while in here, we meet the young woman from the graveyard, Angela, who seems profoundly unstable and liable to hurt herself. James comes off as the most stable and sensible person compared with the various NPCs we've encountered, though the competition is light, and I really wonder what kind of storm is brewing in his own skull.
Ultimately, our journey through this otherworldly apartment building leads down to the central courtyard and our first genuine boss fight against Pyramid Head. I actually assumed he was fully invincible and tried to find a place to run initially, but then it became clear that there was no way out. Instead, we need to just put some damage on him while avoiding his quite nasty blade. Thanks to the iconic metallic helmet, you have to aim low, at his legs or lower torso (I suppose if you can get behind him, that works, though he's pretty relentless in coming toward you).
There are metal crates that you can use to gain some distance from him, and there are a couple ammo boxes with a generous nine rounds (at least on this standard difficulty). Ultimately it doesn't take that many shots to survive this fight, but you need to choose your moment to fire at him carefully. After he takes enough damage, Pyramid Head seems to get bored with you and opens up the door to exit the building. This actually lets us out into the daytime "real" world (assuming that the fog-drowned, abandoned version of Silent Hill is the real version in the first place).
Cheekily, I tried to turn back around and go back into the building, but there's only a locked alcove of what is presumably the non-Otherworld version of the building.
Moving forward, we go into a park and meet Maria, a woman who strongly resembles (I think) James' late wife. Maria's attitude feels far too blasé given the situation, but it's just on the fringe of being reasonable that I can't say I have a great read on her (though I think some pop culture osmosis has skewed by impression of her). Maria leads James a little further through the town, with a brief exploration of a motel.
It's actually here that something really interesting happens: save points in Silent Hill are these glowing red squares, usually found on walls (though in this case, on the trunk of a car). I hadn't really given them much thought, but when we're traveling with Maria, if you save the game, Maria asks James what's wrong: he kind of froze there for a second. Is saving your game diagetic to the game world? What the hell are these red squares, then, anyway?
We travel with Maria, and the fog in the town seems to get angry, sending tons of monsters into our paths (I took the hint that we should just run past them) and then Maria takes us into a strip club, where the weird femme fatale vibes get turned to eleven. Leaving the strip club, we pass into another park, and hear something about a local legend about a woman marooned on an island in the nearby lake, in a story that feels like it might be analogous to James and his wife.
Next door, at the movie theater, we hear a young girl, and as we make our way inside, we find that Eddie (the puking guy from Woodside Apartments) and the girl are there together, but Laura, the girl, runs away before we can talk to her, and Eddie... well, Eddie is weird, eating strawberry ice cream with his hands.
We go with Maria to follow the girl into the fog, and where I've now landed, we've come to a hospital, which I can only imagine is going to be our next major "level" or "dungeon" the way that the two apartment buildings were.
I find myself really curious to see how important the details of the locations and puzzles we encounter are to the underlying story. The clock puzzle, for example, gives names that start with H, M, and S, hinting at where the hour, minute, and second hand should go. But I don't know if the little rhyme that gives these hints is all that important.
More likely to be important, I think the locations we visit could be keys. We know that James and his late wife Mary had been in the town before, but I don't know if they lived there or just visited. I could imagine that perhaps they had an apartment in one of the buildings we explore (Blue Creek seems more likely, as its importance would be what pulled it into the Otherworld) and perhaps the hospital I've now gotten to is where she was being treated for her disease.
Anyway, I do love a good mystery: while the game is scary in the sense that it has monsters with really original, creepy designs, I love that the game isn't going for the obvious with excessive gore. I've always preferred the kind of horror that makes you question what the hell is going on more than the kind that makes you shriek in shock or cringe in visceral discomfort - I love The Shining, for example - and this is, much to my tastes, way more of that kind.
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