A Look at Silent Hill: Townfall

 Having recently been introduced to the Silent Hill series, the more psychological/Lynchian horror series compared Resident Evil's action-horror theatrics, via the SH2 remake, I've been curious about the series and other entries within it.

While Silent Hill f released only a... few months ago, I think, they already have the next game in the series announced an apparently coming out this year. Townfall, like f, takes place in a different town, this time a place called St. Amelia, which is a remote fishing town on the east coast of Scotland (there was a little documentary about the studio, Screen Burn, which is based in Glasgow, going out on road trips to real towns to base St. Amelia on, including a shot in-game that perfectly replicates one harbor-side street in a real town).

In the trailer, we're given some obscure hints at the plot: Simon Ordell is told by a woman that he can't stay in "that room" forever, and he resolves to return to St. Amelia to "set things right." He seems to wake up in the water, climbing onto a pier in the town. One thing that's particularly notable about Simon (while the game is from a first-person perspective, we'll evidently see him in cutscenes) is that he has an IV tube in his left hand, a needle sticking into the veins, and a hospital bracelet.

If I may do so, I know this series is all about its big plot twists, and my immediate thought was that Simon might be in a coma - that the exhortation for him to not "stay in this room forever" might have referred to a hospital room. Is he kind of astrally projecting to St. Amelia, then? Just putting this here in case I'm proven right.

The game makes a few changes to the formula: the action is in first person, as mentioned before. There's also a curious change to the classic Silent Hill radio. In this case, you actually have a portable television (for those kids who don't remember life before smart phones, there was a time when you could have a really crappy little TV that you could walk around with that had a tiny screen). One of the game mechanics is that you can tune the CRTV, as they're calling it, and at certain frequencies, you'll be able to detect monsters.

Among the monsters you encounter, we've seen a weird axe-headed creature wandering around. I couldn't tell if it was simply because of the perspective, but this might have been an enemy we see Simon fighting off with a thick bit of wood, though the creature looked mostly like a Lying Figure from SH2 to me (I think it might just be that if the axe-head were straight on it would be hard to see in the brief shots of it). Another monster of some sorts seems to pull its chest open, to reveal a snaking medical tube and needle, the kind used to draw blood (or, you know, to put an IV in).

From the dialogue, Simon sounded American to me, but that might have just been from a small sample size. The other character we hear is definitely British (though English, I think, rather than Scottish).

Anyway, it seems pretty cool.

An Appreciation of Silent Hill 2's Combat Mechanics

 In my writing about Silent Hill 2 Remake, I've mostly focused on story. I don't think much is drastically changed from the 2001 original, but it's relatively new to me (though its biggest plot reveal is also something I've known about through pop culture osmosis for a long time).

However, I wanted to talk about something that I really appreciate regarding its gameplay mechanics.

In her (sponsored) video about Silent Hill f (lowercase intentional,) YouTuber Miss Chalice (whose videos on Elden Ring brought her to my attention) talked about the way that this new game uses weapon degradation, and how she liked it more as a gameplay mechanic than she does in most games. Her reasoning: in most games, you have ammunition to conserve, but given that f is set in Japan, you don't get any firearms or ranged weapons of any kind, so the weapon durability is, effectively, your ammo.

This is an interesting take, and one that I think does a good job justifying a hoary gameplay mechanic.

But it's great that 2 Remake doesn't have anything like that.

Broadly speaking, I think game designers should probably consider making more mechanically simple games. Going back to video gaming's roots, a game like Super Mario Bros. only had a small handful of inputs - you could move left and right, push down to go into a pipe, press one button to jump and one to run or shoot off fireballs if you had the Fire Flower.

Now, games' growing complexity is part of the way that the medium has matured, to be sure. But I think technical limitations have more or less vanished when it comes to game complexity. Logistical complications are, of course, still a factor.

In 2023, after playing Control, I got Alan Wake's remastered release, anticipating the sequel that was due later that year. Playing the 2010 game, I was struck by how simple it was - there were no skill trees to upgrade, and each chapter just reset things, so that there wasn't really any inventory management to consider. You were just sent out to get through the story of that chapter.

Again, I haven't played the original version of Silent Hill 2, but I appreciated that in its remake, there were relatively few gameplay systems to learn. You get three guns over the course of the game, each of which comes with its own type of ammo, and you get two kinds of healing items, one of which heals for far more, but is rarer.

And you get a melee weapon.

Here's what I find so perfect about the melee weapon. And yes, I'll once again invoke the Boss Baby meme and compare this with Alan Wake II.

In AWII, if you run out of ammo and if you run out of batteries for your flashlight, you basically can't kill your enemies. There is a melee strike, but it's so pitiful in damage that it's primarily there to just give you an opening to run away from a foe, or potentially to knock them back to get a cleaner shot if you do have ammo for your guns.

Now, I've seen a lot of people talking about how they made it through the remake with tons of ammo left over and never dying, and let me tell you: that was not me. In particular, I remember a stretch of the Otherworld Hospital where I was at super-low health with zero ammo and zero healing items and just having to be very, very careful.

But I had a steel pipe. And that meant that as bad as things got, I still had something to defend myself with.

In AWII, at least on the normal and easier difficulties, if you're really low on ammo and healing items, Taken and Restless Shadows will start dropping items. But, of course, if you don't have the means to kill your foes in the first place, you're not going to get those. Primarily, I think the recommended strategy is to run from your foes if you don't have what it takes to kill them. (The fact that turning off your flashlight makes them less likely to notice you really helps.)

But SH2R does two major things that I think allows them to avoid such contrivances (I do think that items are more likely to spawn if you're low, though I can't remember if that's only in boss arenas. Either way, I think these spawning items are less obvious because they're still in the drawers and lockers that you'd find the guaranteed items anyway).

The first is that the melee weapon is pretty effective. I think something like 4 hits with the pipe will take down a Mannequin, which is only one more hit than the handgun takes (on standard difficulty). The only reason not to just rely on your melee weapon is that you run the risk of getting hit by the thing you're fighting. While Lying Figures can spit bile at you, the other monsters generally don't have ranged attacks (I guess you could count the Mandarins' tongues as one as well, but I didn't actually even realize you could kill the non-boss ones and just ran past them). That means that you still might prefer to shoot them and burn that ammunition because you might be able to kill them before they get close enough to hurt you. Nurses in particular are quite tough, but have a head for you to shoot that takes extra damage (I don't know if the other monsters have such weak points).

The other thing that makes this work is that James' dodge is very effective. I believe it has invincibility frames, meaning that it's all about timing, and if you can read the monsters' tells right, you'll avoid damage from their attacks.

While games like Expedition 33 or Souls-likes compensate for the ability to avoid all incoming damage by making tells very hard to read and making a hit landing do staggeringly enormous amounts of damage, SH2R can get away with being very stingy with healing items.

Every time you fight a monster, you have the tools to avoid taking any damage. Indeed, the low diversity of enemy types even makes it easier to learn their moves and how to dodge them.

The survival horror genre, I think, builds its tension more on the slow draining of resources than some sudden catastrophic instant-death. By giving you all the tools to avoid incoming damage, it makes it that much scarier when you flub a dodge and wind up taking a Mannequin leg to the face. Even if that only takes out a 10th of your hidden HP pool, those errors add up.

I think about how I struggle sometimes when running D&D games to give my players a challenging but fair adventure. The existence of a reliable-if-you-have-the-skill dodge and a reasonably-effective-and-unexhaustible melee weapon mean that the game never has to worry about putting you in a state where you just cannot continue.

And I think that's good design.

What if Silent Hill 2's "Leave" Ending is Just as Bad?

 So, while perhaps mentioning that there is such an ending counts as a spoiler, I don't think it would surprise anyone to learn that Silent Hill 2's "good" ending (among many bad and a few very silly endings) is called Leave. I mean, the game starts with James arriving in this cursed-as-fuck town, and naturally a lot of horror stories end with an escape from the realm of terror. Wendy and Danny Torrance get away from the Overlook Hotel, Jonathan Harker gets out of Castle Dracula (though admittedly that's just one portion of the story - his own little mini-horror movie experience at the start of the novel). Ripley makes it into the escape pod and leaves the Nostromo (again, there's a subversion because the monster follows her, but once it's kicked off, she's ok until the sequel).

Hm. Guess that's several other spoilers, but surely all of these are well past the statute of limitations, right? And one could argue that Silent Hill 2 is old enough to also be in that category.

But I wanted to just put some thoughts out there about this ending to the game, which certainly seems, tonally and emotionally, to be the game's happiest ending. What if it's not?

Let's do a spoiler cut.

The Fellow Visitors to Silent Hill in SH2

 Silent Hill 2 is a game that has lingered with me since I beat it a couple weeks ago. I know that players of the original version have talked about it for over two decades now, and so there's a degree to which I know that my contributions to the discourse are kind of late. Even the remake is now about a year old, so I'm somewhat of a latecomer to it as well.

But I think there's a good reason why a story like this merited a remake, and one that has received broad acclaim.

There's a ton to discuss about the player character, James, and especially how the game's big act three reveal forces us to reassess him as a person. But I wanted to set that aside to look instead at two other characters who travel to Silent Hill around the same time as James, Angela and Eddie.

To discuss any of this will naturally involve spoilers, so here's a spoiler cut.

The Red Squares in Silent HIll 2

 There's a moment that thrilled me when playing through Silent Hill 2, perhaps not sending a chill up my spine or causing me to exclaim in shock, but one that really got the juices flowing, got me thinking "wow, I did not expect that."

In Silent Hill 2 (no idea if this is true in the other games,) when you first begin, walking down a path from the rest stop where the game opens (and where we're introduced to James staring at himself in the mirror in a profoundly dingy public bathroom) we pass by an old well along a forest path. The forest seems ominous and spooky because it's a horror game, but if we were to look at Silent Hill as just an ordinary New England town, it's really not that bad: just a little nature path for people to walk along that goes by the lake. I grew up in New England - a suburb of Boston rather than a resort town in Maine, but I'm familiar with the vibes - and when I go visit home, my dad and I often take walks by a lake about half a mile from his house that is, admittedly, in a more densely residential part of town, but still not too dissimilar from Toluca Lake (I don't know if the developers realized that Toluca Lake is actually a neighborhood in Los Angeles, where I live now). There are nature trails that go through a little forested park/nature preserve in the middle of town (attached to a number of playgrounds where I used to play soccer and baseball) that very much match this little path.

Anyway, as you pass this well, you notice an ominous red glow emanating from it. It's truly the first genuinely unusual, off-putting thing you see in the game. Naturally, I went to investigate (as the developers were sure I would,) and discovered that the glowing red square in the well was, in fact, our first save point.

These red squares are the game's save points, and you'll encounter dozens if not a hundred of them over the course of the game. When you engage with them, you see a reflection of James staring with a kind of blank expression behind the UI for selecting which file to save your progress in.

That's fine, a bit weird, but sure.

Far later, after we finish our first "dungeon" in the Woodside and then Blue Creek apartments (apparently in the original game, there was just one apartment building and we don't actually go to the Otherworld until the hospital) and meet Maria, who leads us to the strip club, Heaven's Night, we pass through a motel, and the motel's save point is, unlike most of them (which are typically just on a wall somewhere) sitting on the trunk of a car parked in the lot there.

If we save the game there (and I was pretty diligent about saving my progress whenever possible,) Maria comments on it - asking why James has suddenly gone dead-eyed, staring blankly, as if in a fugue state.

I never actually ran into this is a problem, but apparently these save points don't actually pause the game. They, and your map, don't prevent monsters from attacking you. But given the start-stop action of a survival horror game, where fights are moments of sheer panic followed by a lot of stillness and quiet, I was never in a position to be attacked while saving - I'd be sure to clear any nearby monsters, and in nearly all cases, as I recall, save points tended to be in rooms or areas where you wouldn't be bothered by any monsters anyway.

Now, sure, Maria's commentary on this might have just been something a bit cheeky from the developers, a scripted moment. And maybe there's not that much of a need to read into them.

But what the hell are those red squares?

From all my lore-digging about the game online, comparing it with its 2001 original version, I don't think I've seen anything that actually explores what the red squares genuinely are. Red is a color we associate with Pyramid Head - he's first introduced to us surrounded by a red glow of light (which might fool us into thinking that there's a save point nearby) and of course, his rusted helmet and butcher's apron stained with blood have a natural association with that color. There's also the subtle nods to esoteric alchemy, with its duality of red and white (constant readers will know that Stephen King's Dark Tower series was a huge influence on me, and I remember as a teenager wondering why his order-versus-chaos forces were described as the White and the Red, but perhaps he was thinking of the same things). The Red King and the White Queen combine to form the Rebis, the completed ideal form of humanity, so Red being associated with masculinity would certainly fit with its association with Pyramid Head. Perhaps the squares are reflections of James?

At the end of the game (if memory serves, right before the dual-pyramid head fight,) you arrive at an array of nine of these save points - any of them will work to save your game. The most direct reading of why there are these nine is to just emphasize that you really should save because you're going into two pretty serious boss fights.

I didn't notice this when playing, but apparently when you save your game here, James actually doesn't look directly into the "camera," averting his gaze. The general interpretation here is that he can't actually bear to look at himself now that he knows what he did.

This array of nine is actually foreshadowed, though, far, far earlier in the game. In Woodside Apartments, the game's first "dungeon," (or half-dungeon if we consider Woodside and Blue Creek to be collectively a single dungeon) you'll find yourself trapped in a room where all the walls, ceilings, and floors (and windows) are painted black (weirdly reminding me of a black box theater) and there's a safe in the middle of the room, along with strange writing on all the surfaces in white paint. The puzzle here requires you to find the painted messages that only appear in the light of your flashlight (which you got fairly recently) to get the combination to the safe. But among the cryptic writing and symbols, on the door whose key is kept in the safe is an array of nine white squares. These look like they could be the outlines of window panels in the door, of course, but I do find it odd, especially because, if memory serves, the actual structure of the door doesn't have those nine panels.

On a certain level, of course, a game of this sort needs save points. While the game does auto-save, even doing so mid-boss fight (my fight against the final boss saw me dying I think at least once on each phase, maybe not the second one, and I'm honestly fairly grateful I didn't have to start over from the start every time,) the save points give you a little flexibility. Did you totally screw up some room with a few monsters in it and use up all your ammo and healing items? Well, you can always revert to an earlier save and try it again and do better. I didn't actually do this (maybe like once).

Still, it does make me really wonder about what, if anything, the game's creators were trying to say with these save points.

I know at least in early Resident Evil games, you saved at typewriters, with a kind of in-universe justification of being that saving was, effectively, writing the record of what you had done since your previous save as a journal - and in a weird way, almost saying that anything that you didn't save wasn't truly part of the story. Chris, Jill, Leon, Claire, etc., don't canonically get eaten by zombies no matter how many times you see it happen to you when you die in the game.

Plenty of games don't really bother with an in-universe justification for saving the game - the game as a narrative is a work of artifice, and just as James doesn't have a little set of numbers floating next to him whenever he downs a "Health Drink" or injects himself with a Syringe, we're allowed to just chalk it up to a willing suspension of disbelief.

And yet...

There is something so mysterious and intriguing about these weird little red squares. Why are some of them neatly aligned on vertical surfaces, but sometimes they're laid out haphazardly on a horizontal surface, as if they were a piece of paper tossed there? Why does Maria notice that James has gone nigh-catatonic when staring into the red square at the motel? Maria sees all the monsters that James sees, unlike the other characters (for reasons that are quite clear,) but does she not see these squares? She doesn't comment on them or ask what they are, but she does notice the effect they have on James.

Given his aversion to looking directly at them at the end of the game, are we to interpret these as mirrors? That seems the most likely - that saving is something like "self reflection," and in his delusional state through most of the game, James believes he has no difficulties looking at himself because he's a good guy, right? But when his dark truth, the memory that he's repressed, is exposed, now the shame of his own appearance is too much for him.

Alternatively, if we wanted to get even more meta: What if it's not a mirror, but a window? What if it's a window into that true otherworld - the one in which a stranger is holding a video game controller and guiding him through this ordeal. We've taken him on, helped him survive this journey, because we reasonably believed that he was a hero. But now, just as he does, we now know the dark thing that he did. Is it himself he cannot bear to look in the eye, or is it us?

The red squares are likely to remain a mystery. If they were treated more simply, we might be able to dismiss them as a video game contrivance, not truly part of the world itself. And I think the inconsistency of them - that the vast majority of them are perfectly aligned, their edges parallel to the walls and floors, while a small few are so haphazard - is just one of many details in the game that are just off-putting enough to register our human pattern-recognition alarms. We get a weird, uneasy feeling when things that are normally consistent are not so, and psychological horror in particular really thrives in this subtle undercurrent of discomfort. Perhaps that's all there is to it - just something weirdly off.

Or perhaps it's a little crack in the surface of the world that hints at the eldritch depths beyond.

Sympathy for the Doppelgänger: Doubles and Darkness in Alan Wake and Silent HIll

 Having beaten Silent Hill 2, and having enjoyed the game (enjoy seems like an upbeat way to describe a game like that, but oh well,) I've found myself in my usual internet deep-dive, looking it up on TV Tropes and YouTube, scratching away at the game's mysteries and interpretation.

The remake came out actually the year after Alan Wake II, and both adopted similar gameplay developments, moving toward a 3rd-person-shooter style popularized in the Survival Horror genre by Resident Evil 4 (Alan Wake's first game is also, arguably, a 3rd person shooter, but in a manner I feel is looser and more action-oriented, which makes sense as that game was more of a horror-themed action game than survival horror).

While RE4 inspired a lot of AWII's gameplay, I think it's pretty clear that Silent Hill's more psychological/surreal horror were a bigger inspiration for Alan Wake's story (though I think in both cases, works like Twin Peaks played a big role, though SH2's debts to the movie Jacob's Ladder are certainly front-and-center.)

While conceptualizing a potential Ravenloft campaign (one that's honestly probably many years away given that I want to return to my homebrew setting after running a Ravnica-set campaign for over five years) I hit upon the idea of doppelgangers.

I think the doppelganger is one of the most potent tropes in horror, especially in psychological horror (a genre that, itself, melds well with both Gothic and Cosmic horror, as well as surreal horror).

Jung's idea of the Shadow lingers over much of the horror genre - even outside of psychological horror, the primal fear inspired by monsters harkens back to a pre-civilization version of the human mind, in which we're always threatened by animal predators. The very act of engaging with fear as an emotion, something that we try to avoid in most contexts, is, I think, something that Jung's theory of psychology would find healthy: a confrontation with parts of ourselves we usually keep hidden.

Indeed, the very idea of drama often has some related element to horror: think about how potent the classical tragedy was - we witness characters like Oedipus discover utterly shocking and revolting truths about himself. We, as a form of entertainment (and also worship of Dionysus, which was how Greek theater was treated back then,) imagine a story in which the protagonist is tormented and destroyed by terrors (in Oedipus' case, the terror of realizing what he had done in his ignorance). Even in heroic tales, our great heroes fight monsters - from Pericles to Superman, we yearn to see a confrontation with terror and death. Genre dictates mainly what the outcome is, though there's plenty of horror in which our heroes do succeed and survive, and one is left to ask what, on a fundamental level, is so different between a horror story with a happy ending and a rollicking adventure.

The answer, I think, is mainly tone.

But lest I go spiraling off in a discussion about drama itself, let me bring things back to the doppelganger.

Gothic horror is funny, because I think I'd argue that it's defined more by aesthetics than dramatic mechanics. Born out of the 19th Century Romantic movement, it's rare that we see examples that stray out of an 18th/19th century time period (perhaps sometimes in the very early 20th Century). Classic monsters like vampires, werewolves, and ghosts are the great staples of the genre (reanimated corpse-constructs are also a staple, but the trope codifier there is so iconic that it's hard to escape Frankenstein's shadow.)

But I think that another key element to Gothic Horror, and here I mean beyond its aesthetics, is the idea of the monster within - again, one thing that unites vampires, werewolves, and ghosts is that all of them were once people. These are not dragons or trolls. These were once people like us. And that means that within their very existence is the proof that something could push us to become a monster just like them. Vampires and werewolves in particular are notable for their infectiousness, and I think a lot of ghost stories are also predicated on this idea in a certain way: the ghosts in a haunted house might kill people (or at least drive them to their deaths) and thus make restless spirits of their victims, adding to the power of the haunting, just as a vampire's brood or a werewolf's pack could grow with each victim.

The victim is a potential villain: as we see with Lucy Westenra, this innocent young woman who is preyed upon by Dracula, and in the heroes' failure to protect her, she becomes a monster herself, preying upon children she abducts. Lucy begins as a sympathetic figure, but you could imagine that, if not put down by her former suitors (not going to get into the sexual politics of that novel right now, other to say boy,) she might have become her own legendary monster and figure of terror if left to her vampiric devices (I'm honestly kind of shocked that I've never heard of a horror story with her as the primary monster.)

Humans are, you know, complex beings. We have admirable traits, traits that have allowed us to thrive as a species, like altruism, cooperation, love, and empathy, but we also have inverse impulses as well: selfishness, factionalism, hatred, and contempt. Most of us, I'd hope, would favor that first group of traits, but even if we do, there's an awareness of the presence of those other traits, whether conscious or not.

Again, though, I'm not here to talk about Gothic horror. I'm here to talk about psychological horror and the presence of the doppelganger.

See, the doppelganger, unlike the vampire or werewolf, whose beastliness, whose monstrousness, is self-evident in their form - claws, sharp teeth, animal-like fur (in Dracula's case, though the modern image of the vampire goes almost in the opposite direction by making them typically very smooth-shaven and pale, as if they're inhuman by means of not being animal-like enough,) the doppelganger naturally poses a question: Which of these is the real one, and which is the monster?

Psychological horror is built on the fallibility of perception. And perhaps no perception is more important to us than our sense of self.

Now, I will say, while Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 both deal with doppelgangers (fitting that these are both "2s" in their franchises - something I'm certain was intentional in the case of AWII but not so sure about with SH2,) they do so in very different ways, and from different perspectives.

Let's go to the spoiler cut, with spoilers for both games as well as the movie Jacob's Ladder.

Thinking About the Rhythms of Survival Horror, (and Thoughts on D&D Monsters)

 Having beaten the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 the other day, I've been giving some thought to the way that the game, and the genre, treats its monsters.

Not long before I played it, the previous game I had played on my PS5 was Diablo IV, and it's actually kind of hilarious how each game treats its monsters in almost precisely the opposite way.

Diablo, the series of isometric action-RPGs from Blizzard, is all about mowing down waves upon waves of monsters. While individual creatures take a few seconds to defeat in the early levels, very quickly the game has you churning through dozens if not hundreds of them, the classes built to allow you to have many stacking and overlapping buffs that make it likely that you won't spend more than half a second with any given monster. The challenge, thus, becomes less about overcoming monsters and more about increasing your monster-churning efficiency, with only seriously powerful boss monsters getting instant-kill effects that you have to dodge.

It's a totally different genre of game, of course.

In stark contrast, Survival Horror makes each monster a challenge. And it does so in a way that I think is interesting: monsters don't actually hit very hard. Even if a boss like Pyramid Head slashes into you, you're probably going to be fine as long as you aren't already at death's door.

The challenge is one of lengthy attrition. Silent Hill 2, as well as Alan Wake II, are games in which there's no "reset" in which you heal up to full health or get a bunch of ammunition. Your performance in the early part of the game can have an impact on the later part of the game. Or at least, I believe that's true in Silent Hill 2. Alan Wake II, and I think others of this genre (even going as early as the FPS/Survival Horror classic Bioshock) have behind-the-scenes difficulty moderation that grants more healing items and other resources if you're struggling.

I don't actually know if there's any such thing in the Silent Hill 2 remake, but I suspect there isn't. And I think they can get away with that because there's a FromSoft-level "tough but fair" approach to its combat. You have a melee weapon that is pretty effective, and every monster's attacks can be dodged if you read the telegraphs right and dodge at the right time. Thus, if you find yourself in a situation where you're out of ammo and low on health, you can still proceed - you just need to be extra careful (this was how I found myself in the last part of the Otherworld Hospital).

It does make me curious, though, if you're someone who has truly mastered Silent Hill 2, if you might reach the hotel with hundreds of bullets and dozens of healing items.

The approach to monsters, as well, is interesting. Within SH2, I think the worst situations I ever got into were when I had, like, 3 monsters attacking me. There were segments with more, like the shower room in the prison, but the clear intent there was for you to run rather than fight them all, with several low barriers to hop over and open up some distance with.

Every fight feels pretty intense, even if you're not terribly worried that you'll survive this fight with a Mannequin or Lying Figure. The intensity come from the fact that if you fail to dodge them once or twice, that's less health to survive the next fight.

I remember when I first played Alan Wake II, I struggled a fair amount with the Nightingale boss fight because I walked into the fight with only a few bullets - far less than what I needed to actually defeat him. The helpful reset at the start of the boss fight after I died only meant that every attempt put me back into this running-on-fumes position. Much of the fight was spent scrounging for ammunition.

Having remembered that experience when I went into the Final Draft NG+ mode, I came in far better-prepared. I also realized, on that second playthrough, that there were actually only a total of three enemies to fight prior to that first boss, the initial taken cultist and then two guys just by the Witch's Ladle. Perhaps I was far more efficient in fighting them, and that allowed me to have an easier time on the boss.

It's a funny thing: I adore Alan Wake II, but I do think that the Silent Hill 2 remake's gameplay felt a little more refined. There were, I think, no moments in which I called BS on the game if I died. By contrast, there were times in AWII, like my first playthrough's fight against Cynthia Weaver, in which there seemed to be some kind of lag that kept me from moving properly - in a fight where you have a lot of things to dodge. That was the weekend the game had come out, and I don't think I had as much of a problem on my Final Draft run, so this might have been some optimization thing that was fixed in a patch.

More to the point, though, SH2 is very efficient with its monsters. There are only really three types of rank-and-file monsters, though there are variants of them that show up later, or four if you count the grate-walking Mandarins (which I treated more like an environmental hazard, except in the fight where you have to kill one, which feels more like a boss). But as a player, I found that the lack of enemy variety wasn't really a problem: if anything, it was a comfort. I knew more or less how to deal with them.

I'd be curious to see if anyone has a full count of how many of each monster appear in the game. While there are some that spawn at scripted events even in places you've already cleared, I think generally there's a finite number of them. One of the satisfying parts of the gameplay loop is when you get to stop worrying about an area and just run through the rooms because you know you've already killed all the monsters there.

One of the things that I don't love about Diablo is how its "hordes of hell" take on its monsters makes even some of the big ones that feel like they should have a big impact kind of disintegrate in seconds. Likewise, if you do die in that game, it's often from something that happens so quickly that you barely had time to react to it.

I don't know that the Survival Horror "every battle is dire" is necessarily my sweet spot, but I do kind of like the idea that a monster ought to feel like a serious thing to overcome.

This post didn't start off being about D&D, but it got me thinking a little about TTRPG monster design. I've been poring over the Draw Steel rules books, and I'm really fascinated by the Werewolf, its level 1 solo monster. The thing has 200 Stamina, which seems like a ton, but I need to see how much damage a party of 1st level characters can put out before I can know truly how long a fight that should be.

It did occur to me, though, that one of the issues of balance in a game like D&D, especially at low levels, is the degree to which player characters can go down very quickly, and thus, monsters need to be able to go down very quickly so that the players can survive against them.

It made me think about how the issue might be with damage output.

I've been mulling over some ideas about how to make a more exciting monster in D&D, particularly a solo monster. As mentioned here, in a game like Silent Hill 2, the monsters are often fought on their own, but they still feel like a threat.

If I have something cool to share, I'll post it.

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

Things Get More Abstract and a Little Less Specific as We Descend Deeper in Silent Hill

 For the first two major "dungeons" of Silent Hill 2, we're given a sense that the town itself is where we're going to spend this game. While the journey into the Otherworld version of Blue Creek Apartments is, well, otherworldly, and when we do a second trip through the hospital, only this time in the rusty netherworld, they still seem to kind of occupy the same physical space.

As readers of this blog are surely aware, I'm a big fan of D&D. Dungeons & Dragons has, as part of its "meta-setting," a multiverse of different planes. While most settings are on the "Prime Material Plane," and are essentially just planets in a rough analogue of how we understand the world (with several asterisks,) there are also several other planes.

Among the relatively recent additions to the cosmos, debuting in 2009 with 4th Edition, were the Feywild and the Shadowfell. Both are about as close as you can get to the Prime Material Plane without being part of it, and function as mirror-worlds. For example, you might have the bustling city of Neverwinter on the Prime Material Plane, but in the Shadowfell, it's the dark and undead-filled city of Evernight.

That's largely how the first part of Silent Hill 2 works - when we step across the gap into Blue Creek Apartments, we also step into this shadowy otherworld. It's more striking, though, when we go through the hospital a second time, seeing its dark reflection, and then upon exiting, spend a fair amount of time making our way back through streets we'd already been to in the real world (though I suspect the "real" world is itself some other alternate dimension).

Things take a turn, though, after the descent into the Silent Hill Historical Society, which takes us down into the prison.

While I assume that the prison is supposed to have been real at some point, it's not clear where, spatially, it's related to the rest of the town. If anything, we seem to be below the lake. We dive down into multiple deep dark holes, making it feel (in a move I'm sure is intentional) that we're going deeper and deeper into hell. (I do wonder if the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was one of the inspirations for this story: when Eurydice dies, her husband Orpheus descends into the underworld and bargains with Hades to let her come back to the land of the living. Hades agrees, only as long as Orpheus never looks at her until they emerge. Tragically, Orpheus has a moment of doubt at the end of their journey, fearing that Hades has used illusions of his lover's voice to make a fool of him, only for him to glimpse her and thus condemn her to remain in the land of the dead).

Interestingly, we don't really get a boss to the prison like we had at the end of the apartment buildings or halfway through the hospital. But we do get a boss after a kind of mini-dungeon that follows. Here, I suspect we're kind of going through the personal torment of Angela. Her own trauma seems to be on full display here: while the game isn't explicit about what happened to her, the lurching "Abstract Daddy" boss that we have to fight several times while navigating a maze of hallways and rooms that look like a residential home surely points to, well, among the most monstrous things you can imagine a father doing to his daughter. Angela's reaction to James, assuming that his patience and attempts to calm her are merely a ploy to sexually assault her, make it pretty clear what happened to her.

Abstract Daddy has a truly disturbing design: initially I thought that it was like a painting come to life, but I think instead what it is is a vaguely humanoid form that is reaching through a door - like an abusive father breaking into a locked bedroom door. We fight it off a few times before we finally have our last confrontation with it, where the facade of the domestic house-labyrinth we've been running around collapses away to show walls of flesh, pulsing with a heartbeat. It's a potent metaphor for domestic abuse: periodically we fight it off and get it to go away, but it's waiting there - we're still stuck inside its lair.

While it's probably dead by the time she does, Angela gets a cathartic moment where she smashes it on the head with a TV set. Truly, of the people we've met here in Silent Hill, she's the one I find most sympathetic, though I really doubt we're getting any real happy endings for any of these people.

The next section is the one that I feel the most mixed on: while the previous area was already called "The Labyrinth," this label extends to the area we visit next. Here, the specificity of the environmental design gets a bit... weird.

Spoilers, I guess:

Down into the Hole in Silent Hill

 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:

James Sunderland Has Rocketed Up the List of "Video Game Characters I Do Not Want to Be"

 Spoilers are coming for this 24-year-old game, so, uh, be wary (I'll put a cut before we get to it).

I was thinking about the survival horror genre. I'd thought that Alan Wake II was my first foray into it (the first game is horror-themed, but really ultimately more of an action game, most notably in that you get to heal up to full whenever you find a light and you don't need to worry about ammo and batteries between chapters). But I suppose Bioshock might actually have been my first - you spend a lot of that game scrounging for ammo, eve, and money to use at vending machines.

The presence of a melee weapon in Silent Hill 2, first our "board with nails" and then our heavier big pipe (which I think does hit harder) is kind of a necessity, because I think the game mostly wants us to fight the monsters.

While the first "major level" of the game takes place in two separate apartment buildings, one in the rusty Otherworld while the other is in what passes for the real world (I may have gotten something spoiled for me, but I think it's possible that the "fog world" is actually no more our own mundane reality than the "world of rust" as I'm coming to think of it,) the second major level, the hospital, has us actually just go through the same building again, though this time there are bottomless chasms and fully different routes we have to take through it.

The rusty hospital is the first time in the game where I've truly felt out of resources. There was a good stretch there where I had literally no ammo and no healing items, and I was low enough on health that I had the little medical cross in the corner of the screen. It was rough. I only died I think once during that state, but I think it wasn't until I'd fully completed the area and gotten out that I found some healing items (ammo was a bit more abundant once I got into the basement).

The rusty version of the hospital is built around a complex puzzle box, which is truthfully three separate puzzles to find combinations and a key for its three locks. The imagery in these puzzles is unnerving: we have to simulate a lobotomy on a mannequin (including breaking one of its arms to get access to its eye) and deploy electric chocks on an upright gurney.

It's all well and good, though I think this was the one area where I started to feel like the game was playing for time slightly - I think it was very clever to have us clear Woodside Apartments first in the real world and then go to a different apartment building, Blue Creek, in the rust world, but here go through all the same rooms, so that feeling of having opened up, explored, and fully understood a place just feels kind of ripped away from you, like you have to do that level all over again, but with a more monochromatic color palette.

The Nurse enemies are a new enemy type. I actually managed to take down the first two I saw with peak efficiency - three handgun rounds to the head will put them down, though you need to be precise in your aim. I don't know if this happens with any method against them, but they always seem to rise up after falling the first time - something that hasn't been much of an issue for me because I've always half-RP'd James as beating the crap out of any monster he's killed in a panic and rage anyway, so this need to "double tap" them was already what I was doing anyway.

The nurses are scary, and I particularly like the Jacob's Ladder-style ultra-fast-head-twitch they sometimes start doing mid-fight (which also, conveniently, gives you some time to get in a cheap shot or open up some distance. In terms of actual monster design, though, I suppose I lament that they're a little more human than the body-bag foes or the mannequins. (Evidently the body-bag foes are called Lying Figures - which is a fun play on words if intentional.) These guys will do multi-strike attacks on you, so it's a little riskier to take them on in melee. A shotgun blast will take them down (minus the double-tap) but of course, James' aim is pretty wavering, and especially as they close in on you, you risk panic-firing without proper aim. At my best, I can take them down in three shots if I have time to line up my shots and enough distance that I can get the three off before they reach me, but it's tricky.

The radio, which I think I've commented on before, is kind of brilliant (and on a PS5, it plays through your controller, making it physically the closest source of sound in the game). It will let you know when monsters are near - except for Mannequins that are hiding. Sometimes, you'll shine your flashlight into a room and actually glimpse one, perfectly still and waiting to jump out at you. Attacking it will alert it, but you can get a free shot off if you're lucky. Generally, unless I'm being swarmed by lots of enemies, I will melee these down because you can start to learn their attack patterns and kind of Dark Souls them, dodging as they strike and punishing them.

Light is interesting: you can turn off your flashlight, but I don't know if there's any good reason to do so. In Alan Wake II, extinguishing your flashlight can be a way to sneak past monsters, and sometimes is the best option to avoid the drain on resources. Indeed, I tried going dark in the rust hospital only to find that I was unable to see anything in my environment. And in better-lit areas, I didn't seem to draw any less attention from monsters. So, for now, light stays on.

Ok, let's get more spoilery: (Also, spoilers for the movie Jacob's Ladder)

Oh Boy, and It Gets Worse: Entering the Otherworld in Silent Hill 2

 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.

Into the Fog of Silent Hill

 I've stepped into the recent remake of Silent Hill 2. I've known about the series for a long time - Pyramid Head is one of gaming's most iconic monsters - but I've never tended toward the survival horror genre. However, after my roommate downloaded the game, and after I'd hit a point in Diablo IV where I was just going to be grinding out marginal upgrades, I decided to try it out.

It's kind of fascinating to see this PS2-era level and even artistic design in this day and age. While the remake's graphics are fully modern and up-do-date, the overall aesthetic feels very much of that period - the time when 3D graphics were just starting to hint toward realism, even if I think the following generation was when things started to look truly "good." Funnily enough, the game has a setting that allows you to wash out the color in the manner that was so popular in the 2000s, though I've chosen to go with basically all the defaults.

My only real experience with survival horror is Alan Wake II, a game that I absolutely adore, but haven't really felt compelled to go back and play again (though it's a game that I can watch countless YouTube video essays about, even watching them again). AWII obviously owes a lot to both Resident Evil and Silent Hill, and I'd hazard to guess more the latter than the former.

Our opening shot (iconic in gaming) is of protagonist James looking at himself in the mirror of a profoundly shitty public restroom just outside of town. The message is clear: this is about the inner life and suffering of our protagonist. The mood here is somber. There are details about the plot I'm aware of via pop cultural osmosis that haven't yet come to light: for now, all the game tells us is that James is there to find Mary, his wife, despite that being seemingly impossible for... some reason.

And it's not, apparently, his first time in town: he and Mary shared some past here in Silent Hill. This is a return.

Aside from one woman he meets in the graveyard he passes through to get into the town (in a lengthy sequence dedicated just to establishing the mood and tone with no fighting) the place is utterly abandoned. Fog chokes the town, making it hard to see more than a few doors down any given street - evidently a technical limitation in the original that enhanced the horror, and which has been carried forward here.

The town map you find upon arriving is marked with different locations, and James evidently makes notes on it, so we get a sense of what areas we've completed. Our first puzzle challenge is to play a record on the jukebox in a bar - we need to retrieve the other half of a snapped record and glue the pieces together, then find the missing button to call up that record, and retrieve a token to get the thing to play. This actually just gets us a key to let us through the back of the bar and progress us further.

It's not the most complex puzzle, but I don't mind that so much: the main thing it does is force us to read notes we find and follow the clues toward various locations on the map, during which we encounter our first monsters: these strange figures who look like they're zipped into some kind of body bag or straight-jacket (I actually think the former is the more likely explanation).

Actually, I think I was wrong: I think we do learn of Mary's fate right at the start, at least in broad terms: she's dead, taken by what James refers to as "that damned disease." Could be anything, but cancer feels like the most likely candidate.

Cancer is horrifyingly common - I believe it's the second most common killer after heart disease. My mom died of cancer eight years ago. It's a very strange thing, because it's such a common thing, but in my mind, her case was unique, its own special cruelty with no precedent.

While I don't want to get into specifics for the sake of my mother's dignity, the thing about it is that it's easy to imagine cancer as weirdly clean: it's just cells that continue to duplicate when they should stop. But the thing is that the human body is a complex machine of fluids and flesh, and that means that the disruptions to the natural functioning order that occurs when cancer spreads lead to byproducts that inspire a natural feeling of revulsion. Especially cruel is the way that chemotherapy, our pathetically most-effective treatment, also provokes these disturbing bodily processes. Vomiting, for example, is common among chemo patients because it's literally pumping poison into the body, hoping that the cancer will die before the patient does.

The body-bag enemies attack us in two ways: first by merely slamming themselves into us, and second by ejecting a dark fountain of bile. Thankfully, the PS5 doesn't have a smell generator, because I can only imagine it would be the most nauseating scent - the kind that inspires you to vomit as well.

There's zero indication that James is anything other than a normal dude. And so, we don't start with any kind of weapon. At my fairly early stage of the game, we have nothing but a plank of wood with some nails in it, torn from a boarded-up window upon the first arrival of this type of monster.

Early on, we find a radio, and the nearer we get to the monsters, the louder the static on the radio plays. This is a source of comfort, actually, as we know that when it's silent, we're able to focus merely on exploration and puzzle-solving. I strongly suspect that this is going to be subverted brutally at some point.

Most of the town's buildings are inaccessible: which is fine, because that would be a ton of building interiors to design, and might bog us down. But there are some buildings whose windows we can smash to gain access, which I found particularly useful when I was being chased by a monster from the street - as it tried to follow me over the window sill, I was able to get a few free swings at it, so that by the time it was inside with me, I could put it down quickly.

At least with these monsters, getting them on the ground makes them less dangerous, and shows you're almost done taking them down. A stomp with James' boot seems to signal that the fight is over (another thing I suspect will be subverted down the line).

One moment of horror that was so over-the-top I had to imagine it was a joke was when you have to reach into a hole in a wall. The game pauses as James reaches his arm in, first wrist-deep, then elbow-deep, and then shoulder-deep, his expression one of greater fear and disgust as he's clearly fishing around in something wet and gross. But ultimately, there's no danger: you get one of the items you need to solve a puzzle.

Does this puzzle make sense? Not really: I don't know why playing a song on the jukebox causes a key to appear. The record, mended with super-glue, shatters after playing, and I guess that reveals the key somehow? Maybe I missed something.

But I think puzzles are a staple of the survival horror genre because of what they do for pacing and mission objectives. In an action game, you go from fight to fight, even looking forward to finding some monsters to take down. In survival horror, a part of you is always hoping that the room you go into will be empty of any monsters, that you can just focus on getting that thing you need.

In that sense, it's much more relatable: if you found yourself in one of these situations, you'd try to avoid contact with any and all monsters.

One thing that's kind of funny is that the game feels like it could be very open and non-linear, but upon arriving in the town, you swiftly discover streets fully blocked off, and there are a lot of one-way passages. The PS2 era of gaming was, if I remember from my late teens and early 20s, much more linear than what we tend to find nowadays. Early on, before getting into the town proper, you pass through a ranch, and I thought "oh boy, I bet this is going to be a big set-piece location later on," and that might still be the case, but I also wonder if that whole intro area is something we'll never really come back to, pushing further and further into the town.

One last note: the town of Silent Hill feels truly depressing, and I think that that's partially informed by the way that America's small towns have been in decline for decades. I don't know if that was a theme they were looking to explore back in 2001, and even if that economic phenomenon had even hits its full swing yet at that point. Silent Hill feels abandoned, but while the supernatural fog and monsters are the obvious culprits, there's also this kind of specter of economic stagnation.

It's a funny thing: I didn't grow up in a small town. I grew up in a fairly prosperous suburb of Boston that remains quite beautiful and bustling today. I've never really lived in a truly remote, small town. But growing up in New England (and Silent Hill is set in Maine - I'd initially guessed it might be the Pacific Northwest, but I guess Maine and Washington/Oregon do share a bit in terms of vibes,) the towns there are old, and thus often have a preserved small town center of some sort. There's an old-fashioned-ness about Silent Hill's layout, with a feeling of local institutions that have been there for decades. But now it's all rusty and boarded up and decrepit - a feeling like the cruelties of time have washed over it.

One last note: barring the entrance tunnel to the town, which forces us to divert through the path to the graveyard, there's a sign that clearly once said "Welcome," but the L and second E have fallen. It might be a clearer thing if only the L had fallen, but I wonder if it's meant to be read as "We come."